The latest hilarious story from the world of artificial "intelligence" is the sorry saga of a Redditor who "worked on a book" (and I use the term "worked" loosely) with ChatGPT and found that they couldn't download it.
You want to know why? This is the best bit. It's because ChatGPT hadn't actually created anything, because it can't do that. It had outright lied to the person because, as a large language model — which, let's not forget, is essentially fancy predictive text, not actual intelligence — it believed, based on the data it had ingested, that telling the user it had successfully created 487MB of book was what the user wanted to hear.
To be fair, it was what the user wanted to hear, only they wanted that 487MB of book to, you know, actually exist.
The Redditor's eventual conclusion was thus:
After understanding a lot of things it's clear that it didn't [generate the book at all]. And it fooled me for two weeks.
I have learned my lesson and now I am using it to generate one page at a time.
Several other Redditors commented, quite correctly, that this is perhaps not the ideal takeaway from this lesson. This is my absolute favourite response, though. This response deserves to be framed and put in a museum as a monument to how utterly stupid the age we're living in is:
At least you're finally admitting that ChatGPT is working on creating this fictional thing instead of you having "worked on it together". lol. Meanwhile real writers don't need this nonsense to be creative.
As a wise person once said: why would I invest more time reading something than the author spent writing it? Best of luck on something literally no one, including you, will read.
Absolute perfection.
Even more hilarious is the fact that the original poster was supposedly trying to create "a collection of a lot of children [sic] stories with moral lessons that [they] wanted to present in a colourful manner with underprivileged kids of [their] area". They claimed that the text was "all theirs" and that they were using ChatGPT to "refine the flow"… and generate 700 images.
Because what the world needs is an AI-edited book of children's stories almost certainly ripped off from existing tales, illustrated with AI slop images.
Dear Lord. I absolutely despair that we're living in an age where people are this fucking stupid.
Let me be 100% clear on this: if you're using ChatGPT to generate or "refine" anything you want to publish, you are not an author. You are certainly not the illustrator.
Learn to write. Practice it. It is a craft like any other. Develop your own unique, distinctive voice, because AI very much has a "voice" of its own — a particularly obnoxious, hand-wringing, obsequious, simpering one — and it is immediately recognisable. And, if you want to improve, hire a fucking editor. Or, at the very least, just give it to another sodding human being to look at.
ChatGPT is not an editor. ChatGPT gets things wrong a significant proportion of the time. And, as this story shows, ChatGPT just fucking makes things up quite a bit, too. You cannot trust it. You should not trust it. It is not a person. It is not intelligent. It doesn't "know" anything.
And if you need art? Two options: one, learn to do it yourself, which can be rewarding and fulfilling in its own right. Or two, and you'll like this, can you guess what it is yet? That's right, it's hire a fucking artist.
I truly despair for the fucking dumb age we live in right now. I can't wait for the AI bubble to pop and all this stupid shit to go the way of the Metaverse and NFTs. Because it's actually driving me insane what it's clearly doing to people. We're going to end up completely incapable of producing cultural artefacts if we're not careful. And that's not a world I want to live in.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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