We've already gone through "very", "truly", "really", "actually", and probably many more. I just don't think humans were meant to have an antonym for "figuratively". It's too much power for any single person to wield.
Academic Authors: $0
FAKE NEWS
This should be in the negatives. We have to pay to get papers published in these traditional journals.
Those websites send you directly to Google, so they no longer have control of the web page when you're entering your password.
Ham licenses make sense. If you screw up, you ruin things for everyone, so you have to make sure everyone who transmits knows what they're doing. The problem is the elitism, and how many of them look down on anything more modern than vacuum tubes as not being real amateur radios.
Ah, I remember House of Leaves. I can't say I was particularly into the story itself, but it was an interesting experience. Very immersive book.
On the topic of complexity / richness of prose, is the value of that mainly artistic? I've always aimed to make my writing as simple and concise as possible to aid in communication. Complexity and richness seem to go against this goal.
Sorry, I'm dumb. I do go to libraries quite often, but if I'm looking at the books, it's to find something specific. I never browse the shelves.
Ah, right. Sorry about that. I'm just thinking through all the things I've read in the recent months and looking through my bookshelf. Seems our reading habits here are rather narrow.
What else do you read that can be measured in number of books? You wouldn't do that for news articles, blog posts, or scientific papers. Cookbooks, textbooks and dictionaries are books, but you rarely read those from cover to cover, so you wouldn't see people talking about the number of books they've read in that context.
even if you read only fiction
Isn't this post specifically about fiction? When we say that a person "reads", it normally means fiction. Plus, I don't think anything else is typically measured in number of books.
I guess what I mean to ask is: what we can gain from reading works of fiction over other forms of text? Would you give the same answer given the clarification?
For those of us who don't read, what do you feel that we're missing out on?
Yes, but how does that negate its usefulness as a tool or a foundation to start from? I never made any assertion that AI is able to make connections or possess any sort of creativity.
It is useful. Never said it wasn't. I'm pointing out problematic uses of an otherwise good tool.
Maybe it's easier to think about this through the lens of the end goal. We want good art to exist. We want good art to continue being produced for the foreseeable future. What inhibits this from happening? If artists stop producing art and AI can't replace them, then we stop getting art. The point about current AI not being able to create the kind of art we care about is that we still need human artists. So how do we ensure that human artists continue producing? By making sure they get properly compensated for value they produce and that their work does not get used in a way that they don't like. I'm personally not a fan of forcing people to work, so my preferred solution would be to give artists what they want in exchange for their work.
There’s a common saying that there is no such thing as an original story, because all fiction builds on other fiction. Can you see how that would apply here? Just because thing A and thing B exist doesn’t mean that thing C cannot possibly be interesting or substantially different. The brainstorming potential of an AI with a significant dataset seems functionally identical to an artist searching for references on Google (or Pixiv).
I'm not sure if I understand this correctly. Are you saying that an interpolation between two existing artworks can still make interesting artwork? If so, then yes, but if that's all you're doing, it severely limits the space of art that you have access to compared to something that also interpolates with a human being's unique life experiences and is also capable of extrapolating by optimizing for the emotional cost function.
I don't know about other fields, but we did do this for AI. It's all community-run, papers are freely available for everyone to read, and the cost of submission in a peer-reviewed venue is to review other papers. The publishers don't actually provide anything of value except name recognition and being "reputable", which they maintain through momentum.