No, ChatGPT, *I* Am Still The Writer

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I see ChatGPT as a great — wonderful even — development tool when it comes to writing this novel. I’ve gotten pretty good at using it to speed up the process of writing scene summaries.

I use scene summaries to give myself something of an agenda before I sit down to write out a scene. With ChatGPT, what could have taken hours…now can be done in pretty much a few minutes.

The problem is, of course, that people are very fucking lazy and hackined and would rather just lulz the entire writing process to the point that they don’t actually have to write anything at all. This is not only very, very lazy, it kind of misses the point of writing to begin with — writers tend to be pretty fucked up and need an outlet for all their bent up neurosis.

But “normal” people — IE, Hollywood suits — who want to cut out all the expensive, weird people who produce fiction will see LLMs — and eventually AI — as a way to pretty much end the very idea of writing as a profession. Writing will go the way of the horse and buggy.

Combine the natural tendency to load freaky weirdos up with drugs to make them “normal” and there is a good chance that the future will be bleak place for writers. Not only will we all be turned into drones living off of UBI, but we’ll have reached some sort of post-human future.

Ugh. Fuck that.

Anyway. ChatGPT is a great tool. But for me, at least, it’s just a tool.

Building The Perfect Beast: ChatGPT is a Dangerous (and Dumb) Threat To Hollywood

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve spent much of the day today using ChatGPT as an impromptu manuscript consultant as I gamed out scene summaries and, in general, it was a struggle. A fun, interesting struggle,but a struggle nonetheless.

But key takeaway is how dangerous LLMs are to the future of traditional Hollywood. It may not be ChatGPT. It may not be Bard. But at some point in the near, near future, the very idea of human-produced recorded entertainment may seem rather, well…quaint.

And, remember, for all the talk of how ChatGPT can “hallucinate” when you ask it a question, what is fiction, but a usually some neurotic human “hallucinating” a truth that makes them feel better for having a weird childhood. Or losing their parents at a young age.

You name it — fiction could be described as a “truthful hallucination.”

In fact, if I were to design a LLM for Hollywood studios, that’s what I could name it — Hallucination.

In short, LLM — which aren’t even AI — are really good at bullshit. They aren’t at the moment, very good at writing without a lot of hand holding, but that will come soon enough. If you combine LLMs propensity for bullshit with just a bit more abstract thought and, well, there you go end of (the human told) story.

As I keep saying, it could be — after we have a civil war / revolution in starting late 2024, early 2025 — that we wake up one day and Netflix is more about being a database of body scans of Hollywood stars than it is any sort of movie studio. I just don’t see “mass media” as we currently conceive of it lasting much longer.

By 2030, Hollywood could be a quaint memory, replaced by Broadway and local community theatre which is where everyone goes to if they want to see any sort of human-generated story. Otherwise, they just plop down on their couch and vedge out to a very unique, very personal story that was specifically created by a scan of their face by a device on their TV or phone.

That’s the future, folks.

Talk about Burn, Hollywood, Burn.

At a minimum, LLMs will be a very powerful tool in developing of fiction, ranging from novels,and TV to movies. It will be a lot like how we take for granted that a writer might use a search engine to help game out a fictional story.

The danger is, of course, that because of greed and people being dumb and hackied, that soon enough Hollywood will be three types of people: Suits, a few programmers and a shit ton of interns making minimum wage. Any actors that exist will first make their name on Broadway, become popular enough to get a body scan then live passively off the income of that scan.

Programmers will replace movie directors — do you hear that DGA? You, too, will become moot soon enough if you don’t demand human carveouts.

In a sense, I think it’s too late.

Now that people understand the power of LLM and they understand that we may be zooming towards Artificial General Intelligence, welp, that’s all folks, for human Hollywood.