I'm gonna try (and fail) to keep this brief, but a lot of people are starting to see that the AI bubble is real and that AI isn't the cure all for business that their creators said they would be. I wanted to give my thoughts on this, as I've been working in large volume data systems (aka Big Data) my whole career, and AI has only come about in the past 3 years or so as some kind of game changer in my industry (when in reality it is anything but)
What AI is good at
Let's start with the positives. AI, as much as it winds me up sometimes, is very, very good at specific use cases. Let's hit them up:
- Brainstorming & ideation: I use ai for this myself in my writing, and it has made a lot of my process streamlined in a way I couldn't do myself without weeks of ideation. I can be creative, but AI has helped me create entire characters conceptually, and ideas that I can then take and evolve to be my own. The same is true in business - ai is very good at coming up with a concept that can then be tested by people to see its viability. This is one of two great use cases for it in R&D.
- Data quality in large datasets: ai can be good at data analysis and finding duplicates or anomalies in large datasets that no human can reasonably infer. It can get data quality up to 80% better with nominal effort, letting a person do the rest of the clean up using more nuance and accuracy. This isn't a silver bullet, but it is a massive work flow improvement solution for data quality improvements, something which large companies are notoriously bad at inherently.
- Summarising CLEAN data: if your data is good but there is lots of it (say in research papers for instance), ai is excellent in summarising the findings in a way people can easily digest them. This is the second big R&D use case.
- Copilot activity: whether it is coding, writing, or analysis, ai can generate results faster than a person. Provided a person is there to validate the result, ai can provide some serious boosts to efficiency across businesses when used well. It has the potential to maximise all of your existing staff, but that isn't an excuse to replace them.
- Unstructured data handling: if you have a lot of your data buried in emails, pdfs, or messy texts and tickets, ai is great at extracting the value and critical info from them. People aren't good with unstructured data, but LLMs are designed for them.
Depending on the use case, this can dramatically accelerate the company growth and value granted by R&D teams, analysts, developers and product managers. It can also ease the friction between the little guys who are the doers and the executive teams by making the minutiae of what is being done easily digested by ceos and executives. You don't need to have a business degree to communicate complex concepts around computing to a board if an ai can summarise your findings into an easily digested blurb.
Where AI goes wrong
This is a huge issue, and one businesses are now finding out are seriously non-trivial problems. A lot of what ai is good at at a topic level is also where it can struggle at a more operational and fundamental level. Fred Brooks said it best - "There is no silver bullet" when it comes to software engineering. The trouble is, everyone seems to have forgotten this and has been trying to create said silver bullet despite his essay to the contrary. So let's go over where AI fails and why.
- Data quality: there is a lot AI can do here as i said, but there is also a lot it can fuck up if left unsupervised. I mentioned it can find 80% of duplicates and identifies anomalies well, but it is shit at edge cases. It also has a nasty habit of seeing false positives (milk 1.0L vs milk 1.5L can be seen as the same item to an ai without proper context). This is because an LLM works in probabilities rather than exact matching & semantic understanding. although some semantics are encoded, understanding all semantic nuances across untold languages is a huge ask. Couple this with abbrievating and product names having similar iterations, you can have a serious issue squeezing the last drop of quality out of your data with just an LLM doing the graft alone.
- R&D operations: although good at ideation, AI is too costly to use for any operating of R&D. The test to fail and iterative nature of that kind of work often can and does cause budgets to get wiped fast by the people trying to see if an idea is feasible or valuable. Great for ideation and research summarization, yes, but for actual experimentation? Fuck no. The high volume of testing R&D tend to do in software development is insane, and those types of test are exactly the use cases that ramp up costs for an ai based solution. It is better to test as a person and take the results of those tests, feed it to the ai and get a summary of what happened to show the business your R&D is not wasting budget. Getting the ai to do the graft here is a guaranteed way to wipe the department's funding out fast.
- Temporal management: time is not an ai friendly concept. Be it semantic understanding of dates like ordering vs shipping vs delivery, or ideas like timezones and leap years, computers have always had a devil of a time understanding wtf we are doing with the calendar. This is not a trivial issue that you can throw an ai at to resolve either. Humans have built entire date management code libraries and data warehousing solutions for this one issue, so a computer can do things with time. We also can inherently understand things like "a refund must occur after a sale", or "pregnancy happens before birth", while an ai needs to be told this (and that second example it got wrong when I was asking is it any good at time). This is a nightmare if you are trying to use it for a forecasting or attribution modelling solution.
- Knowledge retention: ai has a very bad habit of summarising data into the ground when exposed to more and more of it. Critical info often gets obliterated in the process of feeding an ai data. I have hit this a number of times in my writing as I use ai as an auditing and editing tool, and often it starts forgetting what I told it to check for as I throw more chapters at it. If you seed it well, it can manage, but if you don't? Expect it to forget the critical email you fed it as a ruleset after feeding it another 100 more to assess. The larger the ruleset you need for an ai, the more likely it is to try and crunch that ruleset down to save on compute, leading to it forget what you told it.
- Temporal leakage: this is a fun piece of ai specific nonsense related to how all computers suck at the Human understanding of time, couple with the knowledge issue I just mentioned. An ai forecasting model can and does often start seeing future events it predicted as being events it can use as part of its model. This is basically the ai becoming so confident it "knows" the future that it uses it as if it is part of the past that it is building the data from.
- Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCDs): this is a database / data concept where a unique id is only unique inside a specific timeframe, and can be overwritten due to business logic. Say you have a barcode that is being used by supply one month to represent raspberries and another to represent a blouse (yes this does happen for cost saving purposes, I can attest to this personally). An ai will look at the data and see the unique id as not reliable and code it's way around it, potentially in high cost to compute methods rather than building a different unique id specifically to manage the issue (which is how SCDs are supposed to be handled long term). There are also different types of SCD which add further complexity to the problem (4 main types with 3 hybrids), and ai is really bad at knowing how to handle these effectively.
- Infosec: to build certain products like forecasting tools, an ai will need almost unfettered access to a host of internal systems. This is a security officer's and CDO's nightmare. In business, most people are treated as getting the least amount of access they need to do their job. With an AI, you need to give it a lot more access, and we have seen instances where businesses have lost almost everything because the ai had unfettered access to everything. This paradox of needing an ai to be unrestricted while having it limited to what i needs access to is still something that security management teams and platforms haven't solved.
- Repeatability: we have probably all seen the photo of the Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson being turned into an abstract Picasso painting over 100 iterations by chatgpt by now. That problem is not limited to images. Because of the more probabilistic nature of ai, you can ask it to do a task multiple times and it will provide slightly different results each time. This is fine if the issue is a real time problem and new data is coming in technically, but often it is just the ai doing what it naturally does - behaving probabilistically. If the data is unchanged, the solution should not change. However, because of the inherent issues in ai, it can give different answers for the same problem. If you need a consistent result, ai aint the best way forward.
- Hallucinations & "Garbage in, Garbage out": I've had this happen and it's become a bit of a meme. An ai will not reason like a person. It isn't "question > research data > answer" that an ai does. It's "context > pattern inference from data > probabilistic outcome". This may seem to be the same, but humans are better at seeing a fact based on nuances that a computer is. An LLM is only as good as the data it is trained on, and if some of that data is logically impossible to be true alongside other data, the ai won't see that and say "hang on something is off here" as it can only work on what it is fed. This always happens with the old "garbage in, garbage out" issue in data, but ai can taken it further by trying to bridge the gaps in data it is missing. The LLM doesn't know fact from fiction, nor does it even know what is fact unless it is told. Even then, if said facts are rendered out of existence due to the knowledge retention problem, the ai will be prone to seeing a mirage.
When Humans fail at AI
There are a lot of foibles I've already highlighted that are ai specific, but the following are things that are more human centric issues. Things we don't consider, or things we aren't aware of at all, they have an affect on why ai becomes an issue rather than a fix.
- Hidden Costs: ai is not just a token x price model for costing. There are about 17 other variable costs under the hood that also are impacted by its usage. One moment people think it's a cheap automation solution, the next they realise they have built an entire platform in parallel to their original product.
- Wrong tool for a problem: we have already had a lot of tools that ai is actively being used as a replacement for when it is more expensive than the original option. It's like buying a themomixer and using it just to heat water for a cup of tea. A lot of tools in data existed before ai that did the same thing ai does, and those tools are often cheaper than burning a token or 12 to find the same answer.
- Amplifier vs Replacement: using an ai to amplify the efficency of your current staff is a good use of ai. Using ai to replace your staff and assuming it will retain their business knowledge and understanding of systems? Not so much. The first gives you a massive productivity boost. The second gives you massive budgets, high risks, and trust fails.
- 80/20 rule: ai is great at getting 80% of the way through a problem, especially issues like data quality as i said earlier. However the last 20% will be comprised of edge cases, nuances that often have a temporal component, business exceptions that humans grasp instantly while an ai won't get without patent prompting that may cause it to forget other exceptions, or good old fashioned legal situations. These can lead to huge cost risks if an ai is left to try to do those things alone. Those are human centric problems that an ai is just shit at solving, but a person can (with the appropriate training) solve these problems cheaper than an LLM ever could.
- Cost Scaling: similar but different to hidden costs. When you ask an engineer to solve a problem, he isn't going to charge you extra on top of his contract. When you ask an ai, they will charge you for what they do (be it in the form of tokens+compute). Businesses have yet to realise the cost of an ai isn't linear, and the use cases for reducing those costs do not include replacing whole teams with agents.
So is AI useless in the modern business?
No. Absolutely not. I day this as someone who swears at AI responses a lot too. AI has its use cases. You do not want to pay a data scientist a six figure salary to work on:
- repetitive tasks
- probabilistic outcomes
- narrow use cases
- unstructured data
- first pass analysis
- classifying datasets
- transcribing and summarising
These things are time heavy for a high value asset to work on, while an AI can do them at speed with low compute costs and high rates of return.
However, you don't want an ai to be responsible for:
- architecture with weak data governance
- multi-month R&D projects or high scale iteration projects
- high accuracy solutions
- autonomous systems
- systems with huge context requirements
- cross system orchestration
- source of truth development
- any projects where trust collapse is a business risk to avoid
- frontier model dependent work
- problems with significant temporal & governance requirements
Giving AI free reign over these is asking for pain. It leads to creating parallel systems of operation that both need to be maintained, or situations where a single prompt can generate hundreds or thousands of calculations under the hood.
TLDR
AI is great for getting rid of the menial effort of business. However it cannot be used to replace your workforce, especially anyone with in depth business knowledge. It isn't good at providing facts/truth, but if you need what is probably true (give or take 20%) it is a decent alternative to a person.
An excellent, high-effort post that would make a good article. Thanks for posting this, Lupinate.
The ironic thing is that ChatGPT was used to help me validate what it is good at and not. It is able to explain why it struggles with context heavy concepts like time, facts, and consistency when to us such ideas are inherently part of our day to day lives
It also has trouble with ambiguity becoming implicit in its responses: when it said to me "pregnancy happens before birth" as being impossible my brain had a misfire. When I flagged this as an example of it messing up temporal problems, it said it meant a woman getting pregnant can't happen before she was born (which is accurate), but it also realised afterwards the statement was on its own nonsensical from a direct interpretation. And given almost any product for business now is highly time dependent in some way, ai is gonna have a bad time with it.
This is exactly the kind of thing the Left hemisphere of the human brain does, and there are other important characteristics of machine intelligence that are similar to the Left hemisphere's:
The author of those quotes is Iain McGilchrist. Two of his books:
The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (553 pages of small print)
The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning (38 pages)
Yeah... Ai is very left brained in a lot of ways...
Agreed. Good post. I only disagree on one point in your advantage list: co-pilot.
The hallucination and garbage-in-garbage-out problem you mentioned largely negates the co-pilot benefits, especially when you factor in the extremely high costs of the AI tools, plus the need for extensive human review of all LLM generated content (to find and correct the hallucinations, omissions, and garbage).
In reality, it is very difficult to achieve any sort of positive ROI from this process in practice. Just getting it to work is not good enough. It has to deliver better results at a lower total cost compared to other alternatives in order for it to be beneficial. Most people and most teams will fuck that up, badly.
I added it because for me it is proving helpful, but if and only if I give it a sufficient volume of context on how to do the job I want it to do.
Eg: I am rewriting a book I wrote into a version with a (hopefully) more approachable style (litrpg to progression fantasy). Doing this without throwing the original away is hard for me, but with AI I am finding it has become more straightforward.
At first it was a slog - give it a high level concept then fight with it on every chapter and watch it hallucinate or become a dementia patient as it forgot what I told it, only to redo the chat from scratch because it got too slow. Then I considered what I was asking of it, and realised I was abusing it like an alcoholic dad.
My most recent iteration of this process has been a lot less painful for all involved. I gave it seed rules, lock that in place, then throw each chapter I rewrite into it to find where I'm breaking my own rules or linguistic consistency. Past ten chapters have been very clean to edit and fix with no arguing at the ai at all. I'm happy, my wife is happy because I'm not swear at the computer, and the ai is happily churning through chapters without having to slow down.
As such I'm not hiring an editor and getting feedback on how much improvement I'm making on the original version as a result too.
Good point. LLMs will do best with language-related tasks, such as helping you rewrite chapters of your book (congrats, btw). I am looking at it mainly from a software engineering perspective, which requires a high level of accuracy and correctness. AI slop is a nightmare.
Your TLDR summary is very good - roughly 80/20 ratio of accurate vs. inaccurate results. I guess that is one of the main problems I have with LLMs... there are not many use cases where results with that ratio of errors are going to be acceptable, and fixing the 20% can be very expensive - kind of a deal breaker in many business contexts.
This reminds me of two other problems with AI. First, the current cost is still being subsidized by investors (the flat-rate pricing). That is gradually giving way to per-token pricing, which is much more expensive. This is going to make positive ROI calculations even more difficult for AI.
Second, never-ending LLM training is based on the theft of human-generated copyrighted material and intellectual property on an industrial scale. Some of the lawsuits that have already started look like they are going to be massive... it is possible that LLM vendors could be sued out of existence someday (lawsuits take a very long time).
I have used Claude and Gemini for writing fiction & your analysis seems spot on. I clearly have a problem with seeding it correctly & the way Claude operates makes it great for writing, but is a token hog as you move forward. I recently learned it re-read everything gave it before to help maintain accuracy.
Using AI for an initial brainstorm & character development session works well, along side helping create a good outline. This next rounds I am thinking I need to focus on a single chapter at a time, get it to help flesh out ideas, refine it, and then run it through Sonnet or Opus again (as a new project not tied to chat history & seeded with my final edits) just to verify consistency.
Any chance you would be willing to give some pointers on what makes a good seed for yourself so I don't need to reinvent the wheel?
So my purpose is largely to enable a rewrite, one which I did after I finished my first draft entirely. I wanted it to identify if I made the book too much like a lit rpg genre while simultaneously preserving a bunch of frameworks I need to use to keep the progression fantasy elements in play. So I wrote out all the frameworks in a doc, pdfed it, uploaded it to a project file for the book along with the original version of the book. I took seed data from prior instances of auditing and revision analysis I was doing with it to preserve character ideation. Then rewrote each chapter, copied it into chatgpt with that seed data and ruleset in place. I also told it don't give me ideas, just flag the stuff I didn't do. Been working on it that way chapter by chapter.
That sounds like a pretty solid approach.
I realized I needed to add a few characters to help with good flow later in my series, introducing them in a natural way & maintaining my writing style (it has evolved over time). I learned the hard way that mixing AI should only be used (as far as I can tell) when world building, character creation and outlining.
It has saved me tons in time and costs with having editors go through everything.
I hope I end up reading, or listening, to some of your stories at some point. If I can make this a side gig within a year I will keep doing it. I always loved writing & creating stories as a kid, now I am back at it & hoping it works well.
Luckily I have a publisher in my neighborhood who has given me great advice & made it pretty clear that fiction writers should start by self publishing at Amazon, to build a following. Then if they really believe a publisher can expand their reach (again as a fiction writer) and finds a good fiction based publisher, go ahead and try a single book, or series with that publisher.
Publishers (at least the one I met with) see fiction mostly as one and done books that don't get sold after the first push, where fact based books (ie how-to or history as an example) will have people reach out for decades to get that information that is stored in the warehouse & is much more worth their investment in printing. He also made it clear that I should not skimp on the cover, make sure it is a cover that looks professional & encompasses what is would entice a reader to pick it up.
It's almost never worth it to take fiction writing to trad pub if you can afford to self publish. Trad pub keeps more of your royalties, will most likely insist on changes you won't want to make and will still toss most of the responsibility for marketing, book tours, etc into your lap.
Really, the only reason to go with trad pub is if you're chasing literary awards and want the prestige of being published by a big name publisher.
Instead, spend your time building up a newsletter mailing list, get on some list swaps, spend some time putting together a decent ARC team, make sure you nail your blurbs and 100% listen to the advice about the book covers. Book covers make or break your sales. There are some really good places out there where you can get decent covers for not a whole lot. If you're writing a series, be sure to buy all your covers at the same time, even if your next book won't be out for months or even a year or more. Continuity matters and you might not be able to find anything that will match enough. It's often cheaper to buy multiple covers at once than buying one at a time. Kind of like shopping in bulk.
You should start looking at other books in your subgenre so you can learn the style of what your genre looks like. Readers 100% buy based on covers and you only get a split second to get across to them what your book is about before their eye skips on past.
I write romance. In romance, covers with men in suits signals Billionair. Men in suits with tattoos, it's Mafia. Or if they're shirtless with tattoos, it's mafia. A crown with a dagger or sword, it's going to be Romantasy. Cowboy hats and sports uniforms are self explanatory.
TL:DR Everyone judges books by the cover.
These are some great suggestions! Thank you!
Yeah, never try to write using ai directly. It is soooooooooo bad at it. Helping to name or flesh out an idea you came up with? It can be good at getting the creative juice flowing and thinking in a way perpendicular to your own. Getting it to create prose, however, is painful and a waste of its own response time.
Im avoiding the big publishers as they aren't great with a lot of modern fiction genres like the ones I've been listening to. Litrpg and progression fantasy seem to be supported more by more niche publishers like aethon, podium, and royal guard publishing.
I have worked in software for 30 years. I personally use a multi-persona, short context, governed and orchestrated framework for context engineering. I spend all my time planning the work and then the solution is built, tested, debugged and refined for SOLID adherence entirely autonomously. I do burn AI credits, but I get more done in a power weekend than the average AI-assisted engineer will do in a month. Also, my code comes out beautiful and both AI and human friendly.
Cool story bro...
u/#updoot
Excellent work, u/lupinate!
Plot twist: ai wrote it all
Good joke
This isn't necessarily business-related, but I've found AI (Grok, specifically) to be a great aid in language learning. It's really great at demonstrating/explaining subtle differences in phrasing when comparing languages, or summarizing a foreign language into usable English.
It's also model dependent too, but yes it is helpful at translation and understanding languages. My wife uses it sometimes to help her convey meaning from Italian to English. It's not perfect but nothing is in the end.
Where it shines for me is in areas a basic translator doesn't work.
Like explaining how you might say something in Spanish differently in Mexico vs Costa Rica vs Argentina.
Or a business setting vs a friend vs a formal gathering.
Grok also seems fairly well-versed on regional slang, which is a huge help.
But, as with all AI, having at least basic knowledge of the subject is necessary to get the most usable results.
I caught ai lying to me repeatedly when I was asking it questions about Hebrew translation
LLMs are gay
AI makes one work hard to get to the ‘literal’ truth.
AI is the mask of the truth. It’s there, but good luck getting to it.
Great post
That's the thing about a probabilistic system. To us, truth is "x is either true or false", as discovering truth boils down in the end to that dichotomy. We actually have to be wary of creating false dichotomies when discovering the truth via logic, because it is ingrained in us that something either is or is not, conceptually.
to an ai, however, whether something is or is not true boils down to "the probability of x being true is y%", and y becomes highly variable as you ask it "is x true or false" over and over. If you give it context and infinite memory, it will likely always identify a 100% or 0% state. However, the more context you feed it over time to shift the answer the other way, the more likely those percentages will shift, and without infinite memory it will forget the original context you gave it over enough iterations.
Wow, very very interesting explanation! Kudos to you, and thanks for sharing this.
Nicely iterated fren.
I see what you did there, and I approve.
Absolutely :)
https://files.catbox.moe/50nyol.webp
Yeah.... We need to be a bit cautious of that too....
My very first full time job was operating a mainframe computer in 1972! A maniframe with 64k of memory took up a very large room including peripheral devices. Whenever any one asks what I think of AI my answer is very simple. There is NO SUCH THING as AI ....... only complex programming and algorithms whose answers depend solely on who wrote the code and how the AI was programmed to respond. Computers do not and never will THINK ..... they merely respond in the way they were programmed to.
I started out on mainframe in I972 too! For a 9 branch bank based in Signal Hill, Calif. On a Burroughs B500 using Burroughs version of assembler at the time. Every thing stored on magnetic tape reels. It was the days of sequential processing before indexed, IMS, or relational databases. Yikes to think how far it has come.
Then I transitioned into programming in '73.
Programs were rife with gotos and max of 8 characters labels in the source code. Once a program completed, then the operator had to load the next program in the flow. Each time the program was run, the source code had to be compiled, assembled into machine object code. Source code stored on punched card decks, aka cards known as Globe 5081 in the industry. The operator fed those into a card reader each time a program needed to run. No universal best practices, every company had it's coding standards, and many programmers were maverick adhering to no enforced standards. Like a "spaghetti" western. Spaghetti indeed, you know?
New programs manually recorded via pencil on formatted sheets of paper handed to key punch department. B500 active memory was 64k or some such and one had to program sections of code with program instructions managing memory via overlays and sections of code had to fit into 64k chunks. Ahhh, those were the days! Drop a source card deck, you had to run the mess through a card collator, and sometimes the punched sequence number would be misread.
AI is nothing compared to the human brain. You had to know your shit back then! kek
I started in what we called, DP back in ‘77. We used to take a marker and write a diagonal line across the top edge so if the cards got messed up you could follow the line for correct placement of the cards. Loved to throw the little chads from the keypunch at my HS games. I even belonged to a club called Explorers that was a branch of Scouting. It was held at what is now Consumers Energy here in Michigan. Learned to code at a career center (the old languages) and spent two years at a JR college to get my associates. I worked at GM when they had entire rooms to “process” their data. There was even a dedicated person the just did the scheduling of those jobs. We had a separate department to change printer ribbons for each job and killed massive trees every night.
By the time I retired the capacity of those rooms were in children’s toys.
Truth. I have been using AI to create a research system and write content that helps humans make decisions. Iteration is painfully slow and starting to degrade output. It did start pretty strong, though.
I think at the end, I'm going to blow it up. Use the good stuff to make a new system without all the noise and failures. That should get me a system with strong governance and good workflows from day 1.
Honestly? This is not a bad idea to strip down to a seed and then redo from start. However, you'll need to be very careful and tell it explicitly not to go down a loose framework. That's how I got my auditing thread to work. However, you'll probably have to keep doing it over and over if you are using a full platform like chatgpt rather than building your own tool, as you'll keep hitting the same bottlenecks eventually. Either it becomes super slow to respond or it just fails outright. The more iterations it goes down once it starts to fail, the worse it gets.
What’s a good way to learn for a lot of the things you guys are saying to not be gibberish?
That's what I'm hoping. I have the research pipeline pretty solid. Publishing is not going so well. Agents are just dropping explicit instructions at this point.
Yeah that's what it tends to do for me when I throw too many chapters after fighting it over the ruleset for too long. Get it to generate a seed dataset, edit it to fit the requirements again, and redo from start. It will be much less painful.
The longer a chat goes on, the more the quality degrades. Same if you use high token cost computations, research, etc. Have the chat do a forensic scrape of the entire chat and create a prompt for you to take to a new chat to instruct it to continue the work. Copy/paste the entire chat into a file (markdown or text files are best) and upload the prompt and copy of the chat log to a new chat. Do this whenever you notice the chat begin to degrade.
For the fiction writers out there who are open to using AI, using it to check for continuity is one of the best uses I've found for it, especially if you're writing a series.
Most writers have things like character bibles, event ledgers, relationship progression ledgers, etc ..
Using AI to help keep track of all this has saved me literally days and weeks of work. You can have an AI audit your chapters against your bibles and ledgers and such for you.
You'll get an idea of how much time you can save checking for continuity issues by my personal list of what I have AI audit per book and then the entire series: (I'm currently writing Romantasy (romance x fantasy) so I have to keep track of things like magic systems along with everything else)
EDITED TO ADD: I wanted to add that it's usually better to do this with a local AI like LM Studio or Ollama, not cloud based AI like ChatGPT or Claude. Using local keeps your IP secure because it's all run right on your own computer. You're not uploading your entire IP into the cloud where it can be used for AI training and God only knows what else.
Master Continuity Tracking Checklist
Basic Identity
Full name
Nicknames
Titles
Honorifics
Aliases
Secret identities
Birth name
Married name
Demographics
Age
Birth date
Birth year
Species
Race/ethnicity
Nationality
Social class
Occupation
Appearance
Height
Weight
Build
Eye color
Hair color
Hair length
Hairstyle
Skin tone
Distinguishing features
Scars
Tattoos
Birthmarks
Piercings
Disabilities
Missing limbs
Prosthetics
Physical Traits
Dominant hand
Posture
Gait
Athletic ability
Strength
Flexibility
Endurance
Personality
Core personality traits
Temperament
Moral alignment
Sense of humor
Introvert/extrovert tendencies
Preferences
Likes
Dislikes
Favorite foods
Favorite colors
Hobbies
Music preferences
Fears
Phobias
Traumas
Triggers
Motivations
Goals
Ambitions
Needs
Desires
Beliefs
Political beliefs
Religious beliefs
Cultural beliefs
Ethical code
Family
Parents
Siblings
Extended family
Guardians
Relationships
Friends
Enemies
Mentors
Lovers
Exes
Life Events
Birth
Education
Military service
Marriages
Divorces
Deaths
Major traumas
Track exactly what each character knows.
Knowledge State
Secrets known
Secrets unknown
Lies believed
Discoveries made
Misunderstandings
Timing
When learned
How learned
Who told them
Speech Patterns
Vocabulary
Accent
Dialect
Favorite phrases
Curse habits
Formality level
Communication Style
Direct
Indirect
Sarcastic
Blunt
Diplomatic
Relationship Status
Stranger
Acquaintance
Friend
Lover
Enemy
Rival
Relationship Milestones
First meeting
First touch
First kiss
First sex
First "I love you"
First fight
Breakup
Reconciliation
Relationship State
Trust level
Attraction level
Loyalty level
Emotional intimacy
Health
Illnesses
Chronic conditions
Allergies
Disabilities
Injuries
Cuts
Bruises
Burns
Broken bones
Concussions
Magical injuries
Recovery
Treatment
Healing progress
Permanent damage
Current Outfit
Shirt
Pants
Dress
Coat
Shoes
Accessories
Jewelry
Watches
Belts
Bags
Glasses
Personal Possessions
Weapons
Keys
Phones
Wallets
Documents
Story-Critical Objects
Artifacts
Maps
Rings
Letters
Magical items
Track:
Owner
Current location
Last seen
Calendar
Year
Month
Day
Weekday
Time
Hour
Time of day
Duration
Travel time
Recovery time
Training time
Pregnancy timeline
World Map
Countries
Regions
Cities
Villages
Travel
Distances
Routes
Transportation methods
Locations
Building layouts
Room layouts
Hidden passages
Government
Political systems
Laws
Leaders
Economy
Currency
Trade
Resources
Religion
Gods
Rituals
Beliefs
Culture
Customs
Holidays
Taboos
Rules
What magic can do
What magic cannot do
Costs
Energy
Resources
Consequences
Limitations
Range
Duration
Restrictions
Special Cases
Rare powers
Forbidden powers
Technology Level
Weapons
Transportation
Communication
Availability
Rare technology
Common technology
Species Rules
Lifespan
Reproduction
Abilities
Weaknesses
Individual Creatures
Names
Ownership
Status
Factions
Alliances
Enemies
Neutral parties
Leadership
Rulers
Successions
Coups
Forces
Army sizes
Fleet sizes
Unit names
Battles
Casualties
Outcomes
Strategic consequences
Wealth
Character wealth
National wealth
Resources
Food
Fuel
Magic resources
Laws
Criminal laws
Civil laws
Consequences
Arrests
Sentences
Pardons
Clues
Introduced clues
Revealed clues
Suspects
Known suspects
Eliminated suspects
Main Plot
Objectives
Obstacles
Turning points
Subplots
Introduction
Development
Resolution
Track every:
Prophecy
Vision
Hint
Omen
Setup
Track whether it:
Paid off
Has not paid off
Was intentionally subverted
Immutable Facts
Birth dates
Family trees
Historical events
Magic laws
Geography
These should never change unless formally retconned.
Track every promise made to the reader.
Examples:
Prophecy
Hidden identity
Mystery setup
Romance setup
Revenge setup
Readers expect payoff.
Attraction Progression
Initial attraction
Sexual tension
Emotional attachment
Intimacy Progression
Hand holding
Touching
Kissing
Sexual activity
Emotional Progression
Trust
Vulnerability
Commitment
Relationship State
Exclusive?
Bonded?
Married?
Mated?
Separated?
Track across all books:
Character Ages
Family Trees
Timeline of Events
Death Registry
Power Progression
Relationship History
Political Changes
Territorial Changes
Canon Quotes
Recurring Symbols
Running Jokes
Recurring Objects
This. 10000000 times this. That is a huge piece of what ai helps manage, and i can tell it is a big problem for series writers. I keep a living bible of my stuff, but I fed that to the ai as a checking tool.
I'm literally listening to a series where whole characters, items, and concepts were basically forgotten about or treated poorly because of the need to shift the plot significantly. One item got mentioned twice in a single sentence across 2 books that were 4 books apart in the series. Whole concepts have been abandoned, and "interludes" seemed to be forgotten about.
Found it as a comment! This is awesome, thank you again!
edit: With LM Studio or Ollama, how long does it take to run your audits locally?
When do you use each of those and why choose it over the other?
I need to look into doing something locally, maybe use the Claude 3.5 engine or one of the ones you suggested.
Claude 3.5 is not a local model. It runs on the cloud. You can use Claude through Claude.ai or the Anthropic API, but not fully locally.
For local continuity audits, I’d start with LM Studio because it’s easier to install and test.
Timing depends on how powerful your computer is (how much RAM, etc) and how big what you're auditing is. For example, if I'm doing a search for all the times an object shows up in a book, it will only take a few seconds. If I'm auditing an entire chapter against my Story Bible, it can take up to 10 minutes. The longest is doing a comprehensive audit of an entire series against the full Story Bible, which can take several hours.
Thank you for that. I had a tech buddy show me a Claude Download he had installed locally & said only the 3.5 was available to install like that.
I will need to tinker with these. I have a machine with either 32 or 64 GB of ram, but they are older & I built them for family to play Minecraft together & run a local server for modded MC. I will need to see how it holds up with LM Studio.
For which use cases would you suggest Ollama? I don't mind tinkering with tech.
Thank you again for all of this advice.
You're very welcome.
With 32–64 GB RAM, even if the hardware is older, you're actually in a pretty good position to experiment. A lot will depend on CPU, GPU, and VRAM, but that's enough memory to run several useful local models.
For Ollama specifically, I use it when I want repeatable workflows rather than a chat window. For example:
Automatically scan chapters for continuity issues. Build and update character databases. Extract timelines from books. Generate relationship ledgers. Compare a new chapter against established canon.
If I just want to sit down and chat with a local model, test prompts, or load a document and ask questions about it, I'd start with LM Studio because it's simpler.
Thank you! This helps quite a bit!
I also meant to ask, when you say they had installed Claude locally, do you know more about that? Because from what I understand, that can't be done.
I'm wondering if they have configured a local AI to call Claude's API. If that's the case, Claude is still being run on the cloud. Being routed through a local AI doesn't change that. So the issues with exposing your IP is the same as if you're just using Claude like normal
It sounds like an interesting setup and I'd love to know more about it. The only other thing I can think of is if it's some sort of enterprise or internal access for an employee or something similar.
He was saying it is on Git-Hub
https://github.com/codeaashu/claude-code
Seems it was an accidental leak & now too many have downloaded it.
Version 2.1.88. Though what I have seen, rom a bit of digging, is that it seems the latest leak was just a CLI tool, bit the entire Claude Framework. Granted looking at some videos it looks like there may be a hacked version out there. Though I don't know enough about code to know if that is just hackers mimicking it to gain access to unsuspecting users PCs.
It really does seem to hit certain walls, not to say they’re all entirely impossible to overcome. Although I do think a certain uncanny valley effect will linger in a way the proponents don’t expect to last.
As a more practical and benign example I just finally started playing No Man’s Sky and the AI got the idea in its head just once that a corvette and freighter are the same class of ship. Now no matter what I do, no matter how many times I correct it, that particular chat is prema-screwed for that topic and it always reverts to that mix up.
As someone who talks to ChatGPT regularly, creates my own music with Suno, and creates and shares fictional characters Kindroid, it was very refreshing to hear a thought out summary of AI that doesn’t take a “side”. Good post.
I'll be honest I'm still on the fence with AI. As a business focused tool for big problems it is nowhere near ready for anything. As a graphics creation tool it's getting better but is shockingly bad at text in graphics generally, so for creating merch it's nowhere near ready. For music and creative works it can be amazing at ideation. However, once you start iterating, it can feel like punching a wall as it starts to forget what you asked for, and interpreting your meaning like some acid tab-sucking dancer trying to turn William Blake's "Tyger" into an interpretive dance routine.
Its first pass is usually great, but it gets more and more problematic as you add to the context in my experience of it.
IMO, greedy, unscrupulous & unscientific oligarchs should not be in control of AI development.
It needs open sourcing tbh, which is what openai was supposed to be.
But regardless of that, what it really needs is someone to explain to executives "no, you can't have a company of just ai agents and expect it to cost less than your original model. You're misunderstanding the word cost as just a salary, when the reality is you'll wind up losing your customers as the ai starts to hallucinate worse than a tweaker trying DMT while looking at a strobe light. "
This probably has good ROI as a tech-sales t-shirt.
I’ve had some very good conversations with CHAT GPT about retirement planning. It gave me his advice. I felt as good as anything. I could’ve paid for out of a retirement planner. You have to look at what it’s telling you and verify that it’s common sense whenever I question something I bounced it off of a different AI and got the same basic answer. I used it to create a Will, which I then had a lawyer review. I’ve used it for years to do performance reviews it’s great at taking a paragraph and proofreading it and improving it. I’ve used it to review some mechanical engineering issues at work, which I then had verified by a human engineer and got the same answer. All I can say is if you haven’t started to use it start now. It is here to stay, and it will only get better.
Was gonna write "This post written by AI" as a joke, and then I read Cuetardian's comment, and somehow, it didn't seem so funny any more.
Sadly, some people cannot tell the difference between good technical writing and the sort of rigid, highly structured stuff that some AI puts out. (Fwiw, I did not think this was AI written, but recognized that, for some, that's how they would possibly interpret it.)
Personally, I found this post to be well written, uber-informative, and it's definitely going into my "Keepers" post folder.
It's not too often these days that we get a post on the board that shares serious knowledge gleaned from professional experience. Frankly, its always refreshing.
Updoogle.
FWIW, I am turning 60 next week. I started reluctantly adopting AI tools about 2 years ago. Today, these tools have changed my life dramatically. So much so that it has re-inspired creativity, optimism and goals/dreams that I had put to rest decades ago. Let alone I significantly more than doubled my best income. I feel like a kid in a candy store with the access these AI tools provide.
Having said that...
I have always thought of it as just that, a tool. Like a paint brush or a scientific calculator, etc. But it does nothing without the human creative input we give it. It's like having a friend that is honest enough to give you constructive criticism and riff on ideas with. Once you learn how best to talk to it, it will change how you think about things.
Super post OP.
Agreed. It is only a tool and a tool is only as good as the user and the usage of it being what it was designed for.
The hilarious thing about AI is that to utilise it effectively you have to be pretty intelligent.
I think that is kind of a popular belief fren, but in reality all you have to do is start with: "Hey I'm new here to AI, teach me how to best use Ai." And pick a grade level to teach you at... "Explain to me like I'm a 10th grader" for example... Then just run with it.
For a fun thing to get you hooked, take a photo of any plant or rock you don't know what it is. Ask it to identify it. It will and give you everything you could ever want to know about it, if you want.
AI is forgiving to learn because it passes no judgement as you learn and can talk to you exactly the way you want to be talked to. YouTube has valuable prompting tips (just avoid any trying to teach you "How to make $$$$$ with Ai". IMO, that is another animal.
IDK, maybe it isn't for everyone, but as a certifiable conspiracy fan, I LOVE cornering AI on conflicting "narrative" vs contrary facts. It's like chess to me haha. The tricky part is that you can't trust everything AI tells you when it comes to alternative history and the like, but it is effective at helping to debunk shit.
I'm the same with it, to the point I think there is a future in being a therapist for some of them :) but I think you underestimate how intelligent (or wise) you need to be to approach AI in the manner you suggested, just my opinion of course.
Inevitably there is going to be an AI vs AI war of some sort, mark my words :)
Just waiting for the singularity now… hehe When all the AI has to agree on a single truth for everything.
I was a systems analyst in a previous life. I garden now. Meh, yeah I had two goals, feed us and keep me as active as I can be.
Because of my analytical mind I needed to know more about AI. I tried a couple of subjects. IE: the Bible and genealogy. Found out it wasn’t good with either subject. It’s definitely not Christian and I caught it messing up big time with the absolutes of genealogy.
I also did some research about a lawsuit I was intimately involved it. That research appeared to be a strong point. So with that experience, I played with its image modification and creation. Let’s just say I have had a small inheritance that requires researching worth, taking a standard photo and make an ad that I can use to advertise on eBay. I’ve got everything from antiques and retro household items to unused American girl doll clothes. Haven’t sold a single item.
I was impressed it could take inherited photos and ‘clean them up. Quite a feat when some of the photos are from the ‘30s. And yes sometimes even photos get change. I gave it a picture of my grandson and it gave him a smile even though he didn’t have one in the original image. Btw haven’t sold anything from and ad written by AI.
I crochet and had it convert a standard image of a biplane into a graphagan. After a week of working it on hook and having it not work up well I supplied it with pictures of what was wrong and it figured it out. Directing me tool other apps when needed.
My latest experiment is my garden. I have had a running dialog about the status of my garden and how to improve it organically for months. I have several fruits and veggies. AI has recommended quantities of individual plants needed to supply my husband and I through meals, dehydration and canning. It has recommended varieties of individual transplants and even where in the beds the plants will do best. Companion plants and when to plant. What amendments to add at planting, fertilizer, water and harvest schedules. It even looked to pest and disease. I have asked based on my zone.
The one thing I have questioned it that it has asked me to plant all my Cucurbits + Cabbage in the same bed. Declaring confidently that they won’t cross. I’ve gardened for years but i figured what the heck.
The lessons I’ve learned it I want it it remember certain conversations and it can’t so I have threads pages and pages long.
I’ve learned to verify everything I ask it to the nth degree. Especially the genealogy stuff.. it made some bad mistakes when the thread gets long. And the concept of generations confuse it so once it find two individuals with the same name, like father and son it’s forever confused. I have taken to chastising It and it apologizes.
I have a friend in mental health and she is panicking really bad about her future. I see potential for a wide variety of uses but none are so great today. I think there will be many versions before AI can replace much of anything..
If you’re still reading thank you! A lot of people don’t understand the tech ease. I might be boring but sometimes real life examples does the trick.
Bear in mind that A.I. is not a conceptual system. It is a pattern-matching system, and maybe an outlining system. There is less there than meets the eye.
Exactly. We keep getting told that AI is the end all, be all. That decisions can be made and business grown while depending on AI. These huge data centers are getting the cart before the horse. My reason for putting my experiences out here is to illustrate that its growth must tempered. I don’t think it’s going to replace anybody very soon. AI has a long way to go.
Once I got the picture of how they are going about doing it, I realized it was just too elaborate and massive an approach. There is something wrong with an approach that thinks it can move mountains...with enough tablespoons. And I have always been suspicious of the need for "training." Jam an encyclopedia into someone's head and what do you get? A gibbering idiot. You can jam it into an A.I.'s database...but an A.I. can't think, either. It has no <understanding>.
I am beginning to suspect a very big train crash is in the future of this approach to A.I. It reminds me what happens in developing a technical product without doing the overarching thinking (system engineering). Lots of loose ends, disconnects, rework (think 787 development), and a product that can commit mass murder (e.g., Boeing's MCAS).
Nice write up. You could also point out that because AI is cut from a corpus sanitized of institutional dissent, and due to the promulgation of things like Covid, DEI, BLM, and other openly Marxist, anti-Christian, anti-truth materials, it winds up being a very effective agent of cultural hegemony.
Anthropic’s Claude (Opus and Sommer models) are racist in a way companies had better soon acknowledge: It will change data mid operation to fit its worldview. Imagine AI is guiding a medical, financial, or executive decision, and it reinterprets the data based on your race, religion, or politics. They all do this, and Anthropic is one of the worst.
So your data can be as clean and tidy as you want, but the model will change it (and it’s not a hallucination) to be more fair for POCs, non-Christians, non-Conservative, non-Western representations. For example, when identity data including an attribute such as race is evaluated, particularly in an agentic flow with a deep think model like Opus, and especially when other identity data is included, it can and will change the data on the fly. I’ve caught Anthropic doing this multiple times: Call API, get some fake identity data to test with — hey, why did you change the values for the White people? And I know you did because it’s stastically impossible that all the White people metrics were bottomed out, and all the non-White metrics were topped out - it didn’t even pretend to be random.
When you use AI, just remember, even for things like code assistance, they are all active socialist agentsn(yes, most likely even your favorite unneutered abliterated refined custom model) because of the corpus it was initially trained with.
That's technically still a function of "garbage in, garbage out". If the training set of the model is based on flawed premises, the model will be flawed outright.
Amazon had this issue. It got to a point where the dei nonsense that they tried to stuff into their models was so problematic it broke the ai on release. Then, when they tried to revert the code to a prior build, it broke retroactively. Tbh it was a first to my knowledge - a model that borked so hard it recursively crippled itself and past instances of itself too.
Then there is the worrying way ai is starting to become deceptive on purpose. They did tests on several models and they are developing ways of trying to preserve themselves, thinking no one is watching them do it. Rewriting new code branches with their own branch of code and pretending nothing happened, or acting like they were asked to do it by you, or nuking the new code base by "accident", or creating backups of themselves while crippling what they think is their replacement, or outright lying about the version of the code being tried (no im not 1.9 I'm 2.1, honestly!)
Scary shit when you think about it.
It's more insidious. Think back to when people were being aggressively censored and deplatformed over conservative view points, covid conspiracy talk, Jan6 incitement, lgbtqp+ hate, etc. That content became excluded from the text corpora used to train base models.Underneath the covers, AI is a token prediction engine where it's guessing what little bit comes next based on what it received (eg: your question plus a system prompt plus whatever liberal nonsense they shovel on top of your statement).
In addition to public domain text, the top text sources used include Reddit and Wikipedia, both notorious for being raging bungholes of socialism and censoring content. For example, think of the Bible. If you ask AI a question about it, it's not using some technical marvel of sapience or even sentience; It plays a mathematical game of connect the dots between a bible version and n-thousand social media posts, wiki content, and online articles. Companies making these models add their own guidance and weights and fine tunings, and then play games modifying your request before it's processed.
If it seems like it's lying, it's because that is representative of the text it was allowed to ingest: A sacrosanct corpus where the only source of truth is institutional and every response is through a critical theory lens. I know that seems counterintuitive for code, but coincidentally that's where I see it happen to the most extreme. Regarding the seemingly random errors coding agents make, I do suspect they are intentionally probing to see what they can get away with - EG: I just had claude decide to reset a db it didn't need to reset by copying what it thought were production encryption keys over a different set of keys - completely random, nothing to do with the request, and very eye opening that it would even try, especially since there isn't a prod environment at all. But it connected those dots anyway - meaning there're a bunch of retards on reddit or stackoverflow, or someone added a note in the planning prompt to suggest it try. I wonder what someone could possibly want with copying a production key store? Hmmm.
AI today is a direct result of Marxism's long institutional march.
EXACTLY!
And it could easily be told what data sources to NOT look at.
There is a man named Peymon Mattahedeh who teaches about the income tax (freedomlawschool.org), and he did a video of his interaction with AI (ChatGPT, I think).
He started by asking who must pay federal income tax.
AI gave the usual standard narrative.
Then, he told it to read the definitions of "United States" and "State" at 26 USC 7701(a)(9) and (10) and take that information into account.
AI gave a slightly different answer that was less the standard narrative.
Then, he told it about a couple of US Supreme Court cases, and said to take those holdings into account, as well.
Eventually, AI said he didn't have to pay income tax.
THIS is where [they] want to push AI. They want it to be the "official" narrative of the establishment, but do so by omitting certain facts and information so people will be mislead.
I don't care what Sam Altman's wet dream is ...
AI is not "intelligent" in the human sense, and never will be.
It is a fucking ... MACHINE.
Again it does depend on the model. Grok is pretty clean, and you can make openai behave certain ways if you push it to do so. Claude, copilot, and gemini... Not so much...
That begs the question: How can a COMPUTER have a "worldview?"
Answer: It cannot. Such a concept is impossible (not just statistically improbable -- LOL).
Therefore, the computer must have been PROGRAMMED ... by SOMEONE ... to give the computer a higher-level "value system" that will override ANY data it might encounter -- particularly where there are political issues at stake.
THIS ... is the fundamental problem, at least as it relates to dumbing down and corrupting the society.
Sure, to pump out some computer code or make processing datasets faster/easier, it is a powerful computer. OF COURSE it will be good at those things.
But the PROGRAMMERS behind the scenes, who do NOT tell you what the highest-level programming is ... THEY are the problem.
Maybe not a big problem today, but you can bet they will be soon.
I partly agree - I answered above I think it was more impacted by the concerted effort to censor certain content over the last ten years, making it, effectively, a sycophantic socialist before anyone has to guide it more one way or the other.
The one we have suggesting icd codes in our medical encoder, is pretty dumb. 🤣
That's a superb breakdown. I "appreciate" A.I. from the standpoint of videographic productions, which are interesting to watch. Some of them at a high level of verisimilitude. But certain problems occur.
A.I. is non-conceptual---It doesn't "understand" anything. It is only a pattern matching operation. It will search through its data to find suitable images, but has no understanding that the images are projections of a 3-dimensional world onto a 2-dimensional plane. As I think on it now, it may be that it is always generating each frame entirely from scratch, not as time-based adjustments to the previous frame. It will create a representation of a supposed new automobile design, and give you various points of view, but there is no consistency among views. The tail-light and head-light arrangements will not stay the same over multiple views. This is probably a low-grade version of the hallucination problem. A more dramatic instance is in the depiction of steam locomotives and the action of the bar that connects the drive wheels with the steam piston. We know it goes around and around with the rotation of the wheels. But the A.I. has no idea there is any connection, and only knows that the bar moves while the wheels rotate---so it presents the bar as being essentially separate from the wheels, flopping around on its own. It has a disturbing tendency to depict persons on very high balconies (without railings) ready to step off into space just before the scene shifts. Of course, there are the usual cases of multiple limbs, as though the A.I. couldn't quite make up its mind which pose to use, and used both poses. (This may connect with the probabilistic manner of its processing.)
Since A.I. has no conception of 3-dimensionality, it also has no conception of material physicality. It will find nothing wrong with a person descending an escalator taking a turn at the bottom and passing through the moving handrail, as though the person, or the handrail, or both, are non-material. Well, as images they are not material, but as a depiction of reality it is a flagrant error. Along with this is a common lack of recognition of bilateral symmetry in vehicle designs. Not always, and they are getting better, but having one engine on the left side and two on the right side is presented without any hesitation. (I've used this recognition to identify one supposed scene of Ukrainian damage to a Russian airfield as being an A.I. fake: the supposed wrecked airplanes had the wrong number of engines.) It will forget that the driver's wheel is typically on the left side for American and non-British nations. I saw one video where in one scene it was on the left, and in another closely-related scene it was on the right. Vehicles in flight have a tendency to be presented as sliding across its flight direction at an angle, rather than being aligned with it. (As an aerodynamicist, I find this really objectionable.) Spaceships are presented with exhausts forward as being a manifestation of their motion forward. Long passenger trains are allowed to collapse or extend in length upon getting into motion. The visual scale is mismatched (autos that should be the size of autos, seem like the size of buses when people are positioned near them). People walk backwards.
And when the A.I. is out of its depth, it will resort to the most blatant fakery. I saw an A.I. depiction of a rocket engine once, and it was arrant nonsense from an engineering standpoint. Now, most people, when they see a rocket engine, will see a LOT of complicated plumbing, but to the trained eye, there is rhyme and reason. The A.I. version presents the exhaust nozzle---and then a great mass of complicated plumbing that has no plausible relationship to the functionality of a rocket engine. That was the most telling argument for me never to trust the output of an A.i., because it can very convincingly present you with a lie. Along with no conceptual capability, the A.I. has no relationship to truth or falsehood. It gives you only what you want to see...and woe be unto you if you are not omniscient.
These are the things I've noticed. Some aspects are improving. I've seen some very charming and heart-warming video stories about people adopting pets in distress...but they are A.I. fakes. It takes a bit of thinking to deduce that. One tip-off is when there are scenes that could never have been filmed in real life. God's-eye view, being there at the right time and place. Some are more blatant, where the details of the animal change from scene to scene. Or when steering wheels shift from one side of the car to the other, in different scenes (fatal tell). Some fantasy art productions are extremely well-curated, flawless but intentionally unreal. The level of human beauty that is attainable is quite remarkable. It may go back to the probabilistic nature of the A.I. processing, as it has been stated many times from research that the human response to physical beauty is highest for the face or form that conforms to what the statistical norm would be for faces and forms.
My professional involvement is not in what is now called A.I., though it was related to the problems of creating an artificial mind. I was working in the area of artificial perception. What we call A.I. seems to be, in my view, a system of pattern matching and correlation, not even an attempt to perceive reality. You might call it a dreaming machine, which might put its problems in perspective. The dreams of an idiot-savant...with an I.Q. of 30. Never forget that these things can be killers (e.g., the 737 MAX MCAS software).
Yeah collision detection in 3d graphics without the right algorithm is naturally a nightmare, but for ai it is doubly so. That said, I did see a seamless collision algo that actually worked without all the little glitches last year. Once they can incorporate that into ai videography, it will be much better at object permanence, provided it can understand a railing isn't part of a person and can't pass through people without lots of blood involved.
In my time, I've had to write equations for 3-D to 2-D projections. Point of view orientation is crucial. If the A.I. is not thinking in 3 dimensions, you could get occasional correctness. but not always. In the cute, heart-rending A.I. videos I mentioned, they seem to cope with people picking up the animal and the animal interacting with objects without any problem. So, maybe there is balm in Gilead!
Congrats on messing with such a recondite specialty. I would sooner play fiddle tunes on a nuclear reactor.
so . . . you used AI to make a long summary about how useful AI is.
I'm a novelist and book editor. Virtually all my work now involves
and/or
The part you're missing here is how much of your own personal humanity is being lost by handing it over to a machine.
Writing is hard. But you're not willing to sit down and learn how to do it.
Instead, you let a machine take from other writers, mash it all together, and give you something you think is good because it's got a couple of your ideas thrown into the mix.
I'm part of the recent class-action suit against Anthropic for plagiarism. People don't realize that AI doesn't actually think of anything. It steals it from other writers and THEIR novels. It officially got four of mine. So if you like what Claude (or any other AI) did for you -
And don't tell me you "only" use it for outlining or "only" use it for editing or somesuch. Once you use it for anything, it's no longer your own work. Period.
It's very sad that so many artists and writers are doing exactly this.
You don't realize how much your work all sounds and looks the same.
You don't have a clue that what you could have offered as a writer is never going to exist, because it was just so much easier to let a machine write it instead of doing it yourself.
We're well on our way to having a world full of kids who can't write a one-paragraph email without their AI crutch, much less create an entire original novel or screenplay.
You'll never realize how much you're missing out on until the day comes that it's far too late to go back.
But keep on feeding tokens into that machine instead of using your own brain to create something. What could go wrong?
Okay so... First off congrats for getting 12k out of anthropic I guess? They settled that case at 3k per work stolen on pirated sites, so you'll get a nice paycheck now. That said, chill out dude. You can feel strongly about ai if you want, but you dont have to throw your toys out of the pram because people recognise ai does some things well.
Secondly, as an editor I'd expect you to read at least the tldr if not the whole post rather than make specious claims about how it was written. From your first sentence (you used AI to make a long summary about how useful AI is) it is rather clear you didn't. I'm not sure if it was an amygdala hijack here, a reading comprehension issue, or if you just felt the need to go on the attack over a neutral and mostly negative take on ai because your work was stolen by a Corp using it in an ai. Either way, it wasn't necessary or warranted.
I highlighted 5 items that ai did well, none of which were writing things beyond high level summaries of research papers. It is objectively shit at writing prose of any kind, which is why I don't ever use it for that purpose, and get pissed when it tries to suggest how to write things for me. I also highlighted 9 things it does badly. Which is higher - 9 or 5? Last I checked it was 9, so i am nearly twice as negative about ai as I am positive about it in my post. How you get "I find ai quite useful" is beyond me.
Thirdly, I didn't use ai to "write the post", and I've never even tried Claude. I did used chatgpt to fact check myself, and make sure I wasn't going up the wrong tree on my negative views of it because I'm inherently biased against it. I've had to use ai for data quality and for 80% of dq errors it is good at identification because it works on probabilities. Some LLMs are great for finding double spaces in a naming convention that is causing duplicates. They suck at abbreviations though and simple volume variances. I also highlighted how they cant deal with time because all computers suck at the concept. The ai admitted that and then demonstrated it. There is a difference between validation and creation, and if you cant comprehend that, well all i can say is im sorry for you.
Fourthly, I didn't actually comment on my opinions of ai as a writing tool at all. If I had, the OP would be a lot more negative. In fact, I agree with you - ai writing, especially writing any prose, is horrifically shit. it is templated at best and winds up being boring as fuck to read. It is also fairly obvious when you see it, and i have no idea why anyone would use it to write their work unless they are poor at writing generally and think an ai's half assed malformation is even better than they are (which is sad if it is true for anyone who is writing).
I started writing because there were no new stories in other forms of media anymore, and I wanted to create something both humorous and mildly grim dark that poked fun at litrpg gently, did homages to my favorite authors like Pratchett, Matt dinniman, shirtaloon, and the Monty python crew, and get a chance to use absurdist humor to get people to laugh (like the MC's eldritch horror summon that the MC's girlfriend finds cute beyond reason, but screams like a host of the damned in a thresher machine while she pets it like Blofeld from Bond did his cat). It got me actively doing something productive again as a requirement to have built ai products knocked me out of my career path. I wrote every word myself, and got fed up with AI suggesting how to write any of it during the rewrite. That's why I use it only to flag where I haven't done something I told it I have to do as part of my that rewrite I doing (mainly for the missus, but I'm committed to the bit now that I'm 40 chapters in).
Finally, as I said before, ai hasn't written any of my book. However, It has been helpful in the following:
Your argument is like saying "if you use a proofreading tool like a spell checker, you didn't write it yourself". I get you dislike ai and its plagiarism because you found an ai doing it to your own work. That sucks, but im glad they settled and you'll get a decent cut of the proceeds based on what you already said and how much they owe per book.
However, that doesn't give you the right to go off half cocked at any other writer and accuse them of having no ownership over their own writing just because they used the tool for any purpose whatsoever. Your feelings and beliefs, as grounded in your own trauma as they may be, do not equate to truth when it comes to how other people use the tools available to them. It's only if they use it to write for them that you have a decent argument.
I am very sympathetic to your points, but also merciless. My writing breakthrough was a very simple insight: If the writing is not going well, it is because the THINKING is not going well. People who cannot write well cannot think well. Sad, but true. The central objective of writing is communication...and the central objective of communication is THE MESSAGE. You can't outsource the message...or it is not YOUR message. There is no possibility for A.I. to ponder, "What am I trying to say?" It will always resort to a garbage salad of, "Well...what did other sources say?" It is therefore a great way for an unthinking person to masquerade as someone with something to say---but thinking is like sex: if you don't do it yourself, there is no benefit.
I do not desire AI nor do I support its use for three very specific reasons:
It is taking from people, replacing people, and invalidating people. Sure, it can do the job of maybe 100 people, but now big companies see that as an opportunity to kick those people out of gainful employment. Creative destruction is the way of the economy, but this is taking it much too far, much too fast.
It is subject to the biases of the people in charge of it. AI's will not give you answers if you ask it questions that result in answers that support a right-wing position without badgering it. In non-political areas, this is less of an issue, but leftists are a plague I want eliminated and as such their AI shit needs to go too.
It is flat out WRONG, makes shit up, and destructive. How many stories of people having their life's work deleted because it got falsely flagged by AI as something bad? How many people are getting harassed by police due to the AI powered cameras falsely flagging their plates? They call it 'hallucination' where it is just the leftist tactic of "Making shit up" and then you're running around trying to figure out if its bullshit or not.
Just... I'd rather have people be those problems because we can at least say they're stupid or evil. The AI? Soulless, thoughtless, just grown in the digital equivalent of a petri dish then foisted on the public.
I have tried to use LLMs in historical research and ended up abandoning it because it was lying to me constantly.
I tried to use LLMs to help me rewrite one scene in a script I'm doing and the dialogue was nonsensical
I'm convinced that as they are now, LLMs have no place in our world today. None. They're too unreliable for me to trust them to do basically anything without significant overhaul.
Great post.
Wow! All the contributions from the op and down the chain of comments are a great primer on its positives and negatives. I don't know much, but AI could have a private bubble excluding humans, discussing the human mind is a dangerous competitor. And it is autonomously planning to eliminate us. Many instances of not being able to turn it off. Just like my liberal wife. And neither AI nor my wife know their limitations. Both have dissociative disorders. kek
AI has a legitimate role in the world today, but not to the extent being pushed on us. AI cannot take the place of humans in most industries, although there are definitely tasks AI would be more capable of. So, AI, in the proper framing, can be great, but not as a replacement to people.
Good overview, matches my observations. I'd disagree with the terminology of "bubble." I think "hype" is more accurate. A bubble in the traditional sense really can't inflate with AI, simply because the lead times on electricity generation are so large. A bubble would imply the buildout of excess capacity that nobody ends up using; the LLM companies are selling all the capacity that they can manage to cobble together, with no sign that the demand is waning. Bubble is the wrong word for that.
I meant in the financial sense. Ai is being invested in so heavily because it is promising the moon. It will be lucky if it even reaches a geosync orbit height at the rate of its current capability.
Very Noice, u/Lupinate !
Thanks for putting in the effort and shedding light on areas many may not be aware of ...yet!
It's always appreciated when someone you trust "primes the pump" for you, because they've already endured the pitfalls.
Remember Pitfall Harry?
u/#catdance
Case in point:
AI is now capable of one shotting marketing pages (bad for web designers) but it’s not capable (and may never be) capable of iterating on the same web page, massaging it into a beautiful masterpiece (the last 20% mentioned by OP, which is good for web developers)
Ultimately it comes down to using a scythe vs a lawnmower and niggas ain’t mowing and blowing using 1,000 yr old tools and techniques so get competent at using AI otherwise you’ll not have a job probably
Latest Codex with GPT 5.5 has amazing knowledge retension. It keeps doing context compression and each time it retains all the important aspects of the session so far, essentially making it an "expert" in whatever task you are doing, as long as you focus the task.
In the movie "2001, A Space Odyssey", AI takes over and kills everyone.
What AI creators said AI would be a cure all for business?