> Despite this success, evidence about non-experts’ ability to distinguish AI-generated poetry has been mixed. Non-experts in poetry may use different cues, and be less familiar with the structural requirements of rhyme and meter, than experts in poetry or poetry generation. Gunser and colleagues14 and Rahmeh15 find that human-written poems are evaluated more positively than AI-generated poems. Köbis and Mossink16 finds that when a human chooses the best AI-generated poem (“human-in-the-loop”) participants cannot distinguish AI-generated poems from human-written poems, but when an AI-generated poem is chosen at random (“human-out-of-the-loop”), participants are able to distinguish AI-generated from human-written poems.
This is a huge difference. Writing is a two-step process: idea generation, and selection. The first part is similar to what a randomized algorithm or an LLM might do, in smaller chunks (and indeed, the history of aleatoric processes in creative endeavors is long -- see Oulipo for one example in literature.)
The second step -- selection -- is the heart of creativity. It's about taste. Knowing what is and isn't "good."
When you consider the creative processes of Dada, Duchamp, Brian Eno -- I think it becomes clear that this automation of creative generation is a continuation of existing trends rather than a sudden disruption.
If an LLM were able to, on its own, generate and select poems, independently developing a new style of poetry that resonated with readers -- that would be something else entirely.
I've met some people who have that outlook, and almost all of them have come from competitive high schools on the coasts, with successful parents who put a lot of expectations on them to achieve from a young age.
If your goal is to have some perfect career of "Perfect SAT -> Ivy+ -> Consulting/Finance/FAANG -> Senior Management -> C-Suite" then you're doomed to rumination and regret unless you end up falling into the smallest fraction of a fraction of perfectionist achievement, and I highly doubt even the survivors of that funnel are anything close to "happy."
As someone who grew up in a rural oil town and didn't go to high school, making ~200k at my B-tier tech company feels like winning the lottery several times over. Plus, I have time to pursue my actual goals (making art, building genuine relationships, hiking.) Any Ivy+ grad who ended up in my shoes would probably feel like a failure, and yet I'm in the top 1-2 percent of earners in my age group in the country and have never wanted for anything.
Also, just as an aside -- I know someone who has published some very ground-breaking research in genomics, runs their own lab at a young age, PhD from an Ivy+ program etc, and they actually did get a D in intro biology their Freshman year (at a B-tier school nonetheless.)
But they still ultimately out-performed entire cohorts of neurotic strivers because they were much more passionate, obsessive, and creative. Although their competition was very hard-working and ambitious, they ultimately didn't care about the actual research as much as they cared about their own careers. In the end, nothing beats passion and obsession.
A melancholic and romantic but ultimately useless perspective.
It is impossible to know, with certainty, if any decision is the best one because we only live one life. We can make educated guesses about our "what if's" but we'll never know.
And furthermore, you have to accept that the road not taken will also have disadvantages and trade-offs that you could not have anticipated at the time.
There are some decisions that you can be pretty sure are big mistakes. And some of these are irreversible. And we are all running out of time.
But generally speaking, I tend to agree with the Proustian perspective -- the "big moments," generally speaking, are the product of a lot of little moments and decisions. Spouses don't suddenly decide to cheat one day, careers aren't made by one or two wrong moves. Rather, I think we only remember the moments in which all of our little decisions culminate into one event -- precisely because it is memorable.
You have to learn to love your fate. There are so many branching permutations of quantum lives that it's impossible to ever know if you chose the "best" one.
Not necessarily, you could just tax based on weight thresholds, established in legislation, in the same way you could ban vehicles based on the same factors.
"fixing the problem" would mean banning these vehicles, which is politically impossible.
I think the most practical solution will be to take all of the externalized costs of these vehicles, and charge them to their owners. I would argue that this is, in fact, less bureaucratic than creating more regulation.
I have a modest proposal to end all time-zones forever: the fractalizing time grid.
Currently, partly due to a historical legacy of railroads, time-zones are longitudinal. That is, they help standardize time (and daylight hours) across east-west distances.
However, given that the number of daylight hours is even more starkly affected by north-south latitudinal differences, we should also implement time-zones in that direction. After all, what does "12:15am" really mean if its dark in London and sunny in Reykjavik?
So, in order to standardize daylight hours, we could implement north-south time-zones as well, producing time-offsets for each lat/long cell on the globe. We could standardize the number of daylight hours in a given 24-hour period (using the equator as reference) and standardize each cell to have the same number of daylight hours.
In order to do so, we would simply have to redefine what a "second" is (or really, all time measurements.) So, the further north you go during the summer, the shorter a "second" becomes (so as to preserve the same number of "seconds" per time-cell) whereas in the winter you would have the opposite effect. Therefore this also has the interesting consequence of changing the duration of all time measurements seasonally, with a greater delta the further away from the equator you are (a "second" would always have the same duration at the equator.) So the further away you are from the equator, the quicker the duration of time changes with respect to equatorial time as time passes seasonally. Still with me?
Good, because we can do even better! Why even have time cells? Time-zones were implemented as lines on a map because that was the technology that was available at the time. But now that we have the internet, we can instead standardize an algorithm that could be implemented into all RTC chips and run on reference servers a la atomic clocks. So instead of "crossing over" into the next time cell, all of your time measurements would be sped-up or slowed-down proportionally to your GPS-measured latitude (standardized to some number of significant digits.)
So all analog clocks would immediately be rendered useless -- unless you are exactly on the equator -- and we would live in a world where you could speed up time by running north, but only in the summer.
If you've made it this far without throwing your laptop/phone out of the nearest window in rage, thank you for your patience (and welcome to the time grid!)
You're right that emissions-per-capita in Western countries are unsustainable, and that consumer demand is out of step with the true cost of fuel, meat, etc.
But how exactly would any country succeed in deliberately destroying their own economy? They would face revolts, civil unrest, and the economic vacuum left behind would simply open the door for any country that doesn't play along to gain a monopoly on forbidden economic growth, and potentially establish their own global hegemony.
No economic system has ever had "fair" or equal distributions of wealth, and no system will ever have a fair distribution of carbon emissions either.