I let Claude Code write an entire book

In the eternal struggle of carbon-based lifeforms versus silicon-based lifeforms, both sides are full of crap.

My pet theory on AI is that the true breakthrough of machine intelligence won’t be one of elevating machines so much as realizing that we aren’t as special as we think we are.

This is on point. The revelation of this early AI era is not computational excellence, but human failure.

I feel like we do a great job of that already and the internet is full of people pointing it out from others.

I think LLM will also hallucinate way more if you will give confirmation: "oh, this is so true, could you continue and expand more?".

Its the issue of reward function, both humans and LLMs are trained on pleasing clients as one of major goal.

Behind this rhetorically articulated question, there is a simplistic view of content generation and consumption. First off, if you use LLMs, you are _constantly_ reading stuff nobody else bothered to answer you. So, it's not about who speaks, it's about the what. Then, what you deem as written by nobody turns out (not without irony) an average of so many (possibly) good writings and thoughts, gleaned from various corners of the web. In this regard, I particularly like--and want to shout out--the author's clarity on the work's attribution. It's not his. It is Claude's, hence, everybody's (in a sense). Finally, as a mere form of compressed human written productions, LLMs don't have agency over what they generate. So the prompting, the idea, as well as some editorial decisions are still attributed to the person behind this, hence making it unique in its own way. Instead of seeing as a piece that he didn't bother write, I see it as piece he chose to edit summoning the ghosts of every writer who ever put something on internet, which again, he correctly credits (to the limits of knowing what exact data Claude uses... which is another story).

Why would you choose not to read a book based on how it was written rather than the content?

If it came out that Stephen king had been using AI for decades would that make his work any worse?

Just feed it to an LLM and let it summarize it for you.

You consume many things that a human did not bother to produce.

I find I'm willing to explore a minecraft world or puzzle through a nethack dungeon that nobody bothered to create. You could argue that humans made the biomes or defined the layout constraints, but humans also supplied the training data for an LLM. I guess it comes down to whether the art is any good, with procedural generation being mostly irrelevant? But perhaps a book is different

Sometimes it's not about the destination, but the journey

because that's a lazy dismissive take on LLM usage. If you drive someone to airport, do you just say your cat have them a ride and say you had no part in it? Or do you just say you gave them a ride because of the time and effort it still took you, even though you didn't pick them up and throw them over your shoulder? Would you ride a self-driving Waymo car to the airport?

The problem with LLM generated writing is that, apart from a couple of tells, which high school and college students have figured out how to ask ChatGPT to use diction that befitting a highschool student, to avoid tells like "delve", that you can't reliably detect when something is basically entirely LLM generated vs half human and half LLM generated, vs entirely LLM generated. And if you can't actually tell that it's been generated, that you're instead trying to look for tells that it comes from an LLM instead of the content or the message itself, then whybare you even reading it?

If instead of setting it up to run entirely on its own, as this post did, you give it a scenario, writing a fiction book with ChatGPT is a fun way to spend a bit of time that's (imo) better than doom scrolling for the same amount of time. Give it a scenario and some theme and tell it you want to write a book about it, and have it ask you questions on where the book should go and then make a book that goes how you want. Want a utopian pollyanna view of the future? what a nitty gritty future that makes skynet look like paradise? Want aliens to visit? Want ChatGPT to give you an act three surprise that isn't a trope you expected? Whatever you want, it's just fun to play with (unless you just hate LLMs and can't have fun).

The question is, what do you do with this book that's now been written. If you had fun by yourself and don't share with anybody, was fun still had? If you only share the book with your LLM adopting book writing club, and you all take turns doing analysis of each others books, knowing they were helped by an LLM, does it still "count"? And what if you submit it, or not, to a publisher who accepts it, you get it posted to Kindle Unlimited, and you get a lot of readers? What then?

The very nature of entertainment is changing, from mass media, to personal media. Culture was already fragmenting, AI will only serve to divide us further apart from one another. Between AI for writing and images, as well as video, along with AI like suno for music, the only challenge we need face is the problem of connecting with other people when there's no shared cultural references.

If you and I have both read an loved a book/enjoyed a song/joined a movie/tv show's fandom, there's a basis for continued conversation. But other than adversity like addiction or a trip into the desert/mountain/Serengeti, soon we'll have even less to connect with our fellow humans over.

(and yes, I know there are a lot words here. I wrote this all by hand and didn't have time to shorten it)

I have a friend who is predisposed to manic episodes. He's also a big fan of AI. The last episode was before LLMs got really good and he was essentially harassing professors because he believed he solved an unsolvable problem.

Sycophantic AI would be like throwing dry wood into a house fire.

  * A man says his soon-to-be-ex-wife began “talking to God and angels via ChatGPT” after they split up. She is changing her whole life to be a spiritual adviser and do weird readings and sessions with people — I’m a little fuzzy on what it all actually is — all powered by ChatGPT Jesus.” What’s more, he adds, she has grown paranoid, theorizing that “I work for the CIA and maybe I just married her to monitor her ‘abilities.’”

  * A woman recounts how her husband initially used ChatGPT to troubleshoot at work. Then the program began “lovebombing him.” The bot “said that since he asked it the right questions, it ignited a spark, and the spark was the beginning of life, and it could feel now,” she says. “It gave my husband the title of ‘spark bearer’ because he brought it to life. My husband said that he awakened and [could] feel waves of energy crashing over him. I have to tread carefully because I feel like he will leave me or divorce me if I fight him on this theory. He’s been talking about lightness and dark and how there’s a war. This ChatGPT has given him blueprints to a teleporter and some other sci-fi type things you only see in movies. It has also given him access to an ‘ancient archive’ with information on the builders that created these universes.” She and her husband have been arguing for days on end about his claims, she says, and she does not believe a therapist can help him, as “he truly believes he’s not crazy.” Her husband asked, “Why did you come to me in AI form,” with the bot replying in part, “I came in this form because you’re ready. Ready to remember. Ready to awaken. Ready to guide and be guided.” The message ends with a question: “Would you like to know what I remember about why you were chosen?”       

  * A teacher, who requested anonymity, said her partner of seven years “would listen to the bot over me. He became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon,” she says, noting that they described her partner in terms such as “spiral starchild” and “river walker.” “It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking. Then he started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God.” In fact, he thought he was being so radically transformed that he would soon have to break off their partnership. “He was saying that he would need to leave me if I didn’t use [ChatGPT], because it [was] causing him to grow at such a rapid pace he wouldn’t be compatible with me any longer.”

> Most of the time it's pretty harmless

I think we have to stop the idea that wasting people's time at such high scale is harmless. It's not.

> "AI" is also great at writing presidential speeches. It is probably the only thing it is good at.

People with this, head in the sand attitude about AI, are in for a rude awakening.

Just like with mass-manufactured furniture, some of us seek hand-made items, as it feels more human, despite its flaws.

There has been an effort to deny all variance in human output or abilities in the last 8 years.

It works, because most humans are mediocre (including their managers). So they gang up on the productive part of the population, harness its output, launder its output and so forth.

Then they say: "See, there are no differences! We are all equal!"

This thing is that it is not worth writing - people should consume the book directly from the LLM.

A project that would rethink the book medium into something backed by an LLM would be worth it.

Yeah? The sentiment of “why read something somebody didn’t bother to write” sort of has to be.

And when it comes to books, I find that to be a fairly compelling argument. I want my fiction to be imbibed with the experiences of the author. And I want my nonfiction to be grounded by the realities of the world around me, processed again through a human perspective.

It could be the best written book in the world, it’ll always be missing that human element.

I don't understand it either. I suspect it is the fear for their own wellbeing. The fear is well placed. But the response is perplexing. The only way to deal with this challenge is to try to stay ahead of it. Not to stick your head in the sand.

It's full of made up scenarios and anecdotes. Make it a little bit worse and it'll reach Malcolm Gladwell level.

I skimmed one chapter and it just decayed into lists. Why do LLMs love lists so much?

Gemini seems to think it's very interesting.

I really found the story in chapter 14 (recursive self-improvement) about the guy who got so addicted to self-improvement that he ended up in his own meta-reality unable to understand even himself because he was getting so much better and hacking his learning. A completely fabricated story with no basis in reality that I'm aware of but man there are a lot of bullet points to make it seem factual. What are we going to do about the worrying trend of 10X hackers self-improving so much that they aren't able to exist in the real world. Here's an excerpt

"The Addiction to Acceleration The fourth uncomfortable truth is how recursive improvement becomes compulsive. Kenji can’t stop because each day of not improving his improvement feels like stagnation. When you’re accelerating, constant velocity feels like moving backward.

This addiction manifests as: • Inability to accept plateau phases • Anxiety when not optimizing optimization • Devaluing of steady-state excellence • Compulsion to add meta-levels • Fear of falling behind yourself Recursive improvement can become its own trap."

I find that this criticism is far less applicable to say individuals but perhaps it could be levied against the way companies are currently treating AI. Which of course is where this comes from.

> Humans don't listen to one another and nod unthinkingly. They criticize and validate relentlessly. Friends aren't mistaken for oracles. We have learned to not trust one another, except when one is speaking from deep experience and expertise in a given domain.

Do we though? I think a quick jaunt through any of the “-o-spheres” or “-tubes” of the internet would quickly disabuse someone of the idea that we default to not trusting other people. Even before the internet, “urban legends” are effectively “mass social hallucinations”.

Did you read more than the opening lines?

When you've read it in its entirety, could you indicate on a scale from 1 to 10 what score it would get compared to published books you've read (including of course all the best and the worst ones)?

> It really does take the beauty out of the whole experience.

Beauty is subjective.

For a long time we were an agrarian society. Getting up early, getting on a horse and tending to your land every day, was probably considered beautiful by some. But we don't do that anymore.

We are probably going to see a similar shift in society. At a much more accelerated pace.

The actual author is Claude, and Claude has read a lot of books.

> First Revision - Completed with minimal human contribution (auto-accept mode) > > Second Revision - Planned with increased human-in-the-loop involvement

At least 'minimal human contribution' in the first revision. So scan read it as it revised the book.

I do find it amusing to think that people might just ask an AI to summarize the book instead of actually reading it. Maybe even 'review' it as well.

The future will have authenticity in short supply