I didn’t use any AI to critique your work or write my response to you. I am aware that people are really not able to distinguish between most humans writing and LLMs though, especially if the LLMs are given a good prompt. For instance, if you took the first half of your story, gave it to a good LLM with a good prompt and asked it to write a good ending, I don’t think random strangers would be able to tell which was which.

To be clear, about the beginning of your story, it may be that the beginning was good, and that the situation in which I read it was part of my unability to immediately immerse. I wasn’t expecting to all of a sudden be reading a fictional short story and so was possibly just going through the motions a bit more than someone who was excited to be enjoying a bit of art. Situation is very important I believe, you were not writing for this sort of situation I imagine.

I appreciate your feedback. I see writing strictly as a personal development tool. I have no ambition to use it to make money or impress people any more than cold showers, breathing exercises, meditation, lucid dreaming, or any other practice that I use for self improvement. Because of this I have no need to push myself to go to great lengths with it, it is more of a platonic thing for me. I have no desire to make things awkward by trying to get more from the relationship.

I do agree that ChatGPT specifically has been dumbed down a bit. I think that’s just a bit of corporate nature of it. The opensource local LLM community has really been thriving though, and that is where I expect lots of the most incredible progress to be made. After all, the world’s important computers all run on Linux, not Windows or iOS. It will take some more time, but I really think huge breakthroughs are not that far around the corner.

I saw it big time with the visual artists when disco diffusion(pre-dalle) and then eventually dalle came out, they went through a cycle of fear, anger, and then insulting the ability of programs. They were right, those early generations were awful. Now, just a short time later we have stable diffusion, midjourney, Dalle3 making some very impressive art, and nobody can really imagine where things will be in 5 years. I can’t imagine how upsetting it must be for people to watch as a force that they are powerless to stop consistently inches toward consuming the thing that they get most, if not all, of their personal worth from. To say it clouds their judgment and removes their ability to make realistic predictions of the future would be a gross understatement. I truly believe that we are headed towards a period of people being forced to look inwardly for their personal worth to an extent that many have never imagined. It worries me a bit that many people will refuse or be unable to look for it there, and I don’t really know what that will mean for a society with so many people who see themselves as so worthless. I think this is possibly the biggest immediate threat of AI on society. Even if we get basic income or whatever to cover all the jobloss, that doesn’t solve the problem of people hating themselves because their “special human ability” has been chewed up and spit out by an emotionless chunk of microscopic metal dots.

30 years ago laptops would make your lap go numb if you put it there, and only the wealthy had them. 20 years ago most people never used a personal touch screen. Now we fit many orders of magnitude more computing power than those original laptops into a device not much thicker than a touchscreen, and they are in the pockets of some of the poorest people on the planet. To think that 30 years from now authors will be seen any differently than the sweet old lady who makes her own hats simply is not realistic. Probably not even 10 years. The sooner people start looking at this situation objectively, the sooner they can start preparing for the future. The World changes in waves, learning to surf is way more useful than trying to convince yourself there’s no water.