Youtube is giving you TikTok whether you want it or not.
Not all fads get adopted. AR is in my opinion still a tech before its time, which makes it a fad - for now - but not necessarily forever. Cellphones and particularly smart watches are a form of ambient technology that have caught on, and I think it's only a matter of process shrinkage and battery tech before it happens. Say another 7-10 years for battery density to double again. Early ebooks were objectively as bad as current or last generation VR equipment. Nobody was going to adopt that. It's a matter of connecting the dots.
If you don't like the idea of everyone in AR, that's fine. Then I recommend you start now to participate in environmental and conservation special interest groups, because there is a day coming when philosophers, ascetics, and people who touch trees on purpose are the main demographics of people who actively reject augmentation for augmentation's sake. There are loud opinions in each of those groups, and they have merit.
And frankly we could use a few more science-minded tree huggers to dilute the conspiracy theorists.
I have been meditating for a few years now and recently decided to start building some custom meditations into my routine. I had a meditation for when I get out of the shower that helps me reflect on the day ahead. One that I listen to before work to let me put down distractions and think about what I want to accomplish today. Then I have one for after work to help me relax and separate my work mind from my home mind. I created these with the help of ChatGPT, and an AI TTS, and audacity to put it all together. I could have voiced it myself, but I found that it distracts me from the meditation when I think about my own voice.
I share some of your concerns and I'd not thought about this angle - folks outside the west doing this kind of work. So thanks for sharing.
I have attempted to shift my mindset a little, thinking about how I might become an effective user of AI tools. I hope if I can do this that it will keep me employable, or even enable me to start some kind of venture down the line. Maybe there's a path forward for you and your friend on that route. Best of luck.
I worked at a paint store in my teens (2010s) that operated a beautiful text only PoS system that had been built decades ago and it was incredible. So efficient, purpose built, nary a click.
Yeah and owner would have to have SWE on payroll to continue having it working. It's why people migrated to a more general, albeit sometimes also more confusing apps/platforms.
As I said:
"that AI will also master therapy, sales, supervising children, customer service etc, as it now has an strong understanding of human behaviour."
Novel writing is like the training ground for emotional intelligence in AIs. Fiction writing itself is not economically important, but the skills learnt from it is.
As a passionate hobby writer myself. I say you should actually go and try the writing tools, sudowrite/verb.ai are examples.
Once you start using them, you start realizing how much they suck at writing stories, and your worries will go away.
Unlike art AI, fiction writing AI has not really improved significantly. The core challenges are unsolved since the days of GPT-2.
There's also little research money coming in. Having a truthful, helpful, inoffensive AI is the polar opposite of what you want in a story AI, which should be deceitful, aggressive, and offensive.
I tried pasting some paragraphs from my work in progress novel into ChatGPT, and asked it to "improve the writing". The output was exactly the kind of crap you'd expect from someone well read but with no writing experience. E.g. way too many adjectives, and reading as if it had been written by looking up every other word in a thesaurus. I tried having it add some paragraphs, and similar thing: A whole lot of beginner-level writing of the "first he did X, and then he did Y. A bit later he did Z" type of writing. And that's testing just the very superficial language issues and ignoring plot entirely
It's impressive it can even do that, and it'll improve, but anyone looking to these tools to generate good fiction at this point will be disappointed.
>> Why would we want an AI that writes novels though?
Well, if it was "an AI" like Lt Cdr Data, then we would want it to be able to write novels, among other things, just because humans can, and we presumably want to create artificial humans, no?
Maybe not, I think it's a very bad idea to create artificial humans. But the systems we're talking about are not artificial humans, they're the kind of system that everyone on the net has started calling "an AI" in the last few months (I know because it bugs me no end when people do that, but now it's everywhere so I can suck it up, it won't change). Those are only "AIs" in the very specific sense that everyone calls them "AIs", and not because of any of their real capabilities.
And the point is that those "AIs" that we have right now are not capable of writing novels. They are capable though of producing lots and lots of spam spam Spam SPAM.
And they will. There's already so many novels, short stories, novellas, novelletes, flash fiction stories etc etc written by humans, that a human lifetime is not enough to read them all. What is the "AI" going to add to all that? Another human lifetime's worth of spam?
Maybe that's not such a big problem. If I already couldn't read all the books written by humans up 'till now, then I can spend the rest of my life reading only books written by humans, simply by checking the publication date and rejecting any book written after the creation of book-writing "AI" (which we don't have yet).
I'm trying to say, we can avoid reading spam, nowadays, it mostly just clutters our inboxes. We can avoid reading "AI" spam, and it doesn't matter if it will get bigger and bigger or not.
Maybe the future web will be divided into a wastebasket for "AI" spam, and the rest. That's a bit of a bummer, but the web is already divided into shit (99%) and not shit (1%). Yeah.
So I don't know. Maybe this will turn out to not be as bad as it seems.
The main market for these tools are fanfiction and smut - it's a way to empower people who want to create their own personal fantasies or stories that nobody else would write, without having to be a good writer.
Personally, I like reading and usually prefer to read a book I like instead of a book I don't like, so the existence of more books I like would be cool. I expect I would still read human-written fiction, too.
Many authors are already "obsolete" in that they're not paid a living wage for the job of writing creative fiction. It's understandable to prefer being paid for it, and in an ideal world being obsolete would just mean you get to do it for fun and fulfillment and not worry about the money.
To add to your last paragraph: The median income for full time writers in the UK is below minimum wage. Most full time writers do it as a supplementary income only (the median household income for full time writers is above the average), and the vast majority of writers are not full time.
If you as a writer use a paid editor and cover designers, odds are it'll take you several years to break even today.
Unless you're "discovered" by a traditional publisher and they think they have the next Harry Potter on their hands, even being traditionally published means next to no sales for a large majority.
So it's already about fun and fulfillment for most authors. I went into writing (so far two) novels knowing the above, and did it anyway. That said, some do go into it thinking they'll make lots of money, or desperately looking for another income source.
I sort of assume this is always happening to varying degrees. The net effect even for a skeptic is that you are less trusting of all media. Feels like a nearly unsolvable problem.
Maybe it's not "elaborate", relative term, but it's multi step, several fake accounts, a fake mail server, multi step interview, and it's tailored to a specific company and targeted to a relevant audience.
