this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023

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It’s bots all the way down at kindle unlimited (www.vice.com)

submitted 3 years ago* by cecirdr@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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My title might be a bit hyperbolic, but stuff like this worries me. I love to read and I love reading on a kindle. This has been going on for a while, but it has now reached absurd levels.

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[–] baggins@beehaw.org 4 points 3 years ago (17 children)

This is my daughter at the moment. Just gone 21, at university studying Creative Writing. Thing is she was doing so well with Biology etc. Changed about 3 months into her first year. She's had a couple of self published books on Amazon, nothing more than a dozen or so sales. She's going to find it hard to find full time work etc. in her chosen field.

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[–] TheTrueLinuxDev@beehaw.org 5 points 3 years ago (11 children)

I thought about bringing up technical writing, then I realized that it's a possibility that even that job isn't safe within the next 5 years considering the promising development of Spiking Neural Net. This is something I would probably suggests to your daughter at this point that she should probably reconsider her chosen field and try to enter biology or some stable job.

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[–] Valmond@beehaw.org 1 point 3 years ago (4 children)

And work with AI not against it. I mean if AI can quickly make a filler chapter that can be tweaked, more time can be used to make it all get together etc etc. Or so I figure.

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[–] potpie@beehaw.org 1 point 3 years ago

That's a really good point. Use the AI to bridge gaps and for short segments. Probably a good way to get around some writer's block.

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[–] potpie@beehaw.org 1 point 3 years ago

That's a really good point. Use the AI to bridge gaps and for short segments. Probably a good way to get around some writer's block.

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[–] TheTrueLinuxDev@beehaw.org 0 points 3 years ago (1 child)

Yeah, though it would be more challenging to make a living when it lower the barrier of entry for writers.

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[–] Valmond@beehaw.org 1 point 3 years ago

Yeah for sure, but someone good at biology can surely handle AI, while other writers might not.

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[–] baggins@beehaw.org 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

Been there, done that. She has her own mind, so I'll just have to get on board.

Kids eh?

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[–] TheTrueLinuxDev@beehaw.org 1 point 3 years ago

Guess that all you can do, yep.

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[–] tanglisha@beehaw.org 1 point 3 years ago (3 children)

I dunno, people have been trying to automate technical writing for at least 30 years. The results have been mostly garbage. I'm not sure an LLM is going to understand what's going on any better than the folks doing this work now, it tends to involve lengthy discussions.

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[–] TheTrueLinuxDev@beehaw.org 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

There are active researches on world model working alongside with llm. The idea generally is that llm is used for generating text, but world model provide more context for llm to understand the world.

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[–] tanglisha@beehaw.org 0 points 3 years ago (1 child)

When you say "the world", what do you mean? If it means the actual world, I don't understand how that would help with technical writing. Plenty of people can get around in the real world but struggle to use Excel.

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[–] TheTrueLinuxDev@beehaw.org 1 point 3 years ago

As in actual world, providing context to physics of things, providing logical association/evaluation, and so go on. It is basically something that supposed to help LLM get closer to understanding the "world" rather than just spewing out whatever the training dataset give it. It does have a direct implication for technical writing, because with stronger understanding of the things you wanted to write about in technical writing, LLM with World Model would basically auto-fill that.

This is something that the researchers are pretty much all hand on deck working on to create.

One example of the research involving this

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[–] livus@kbin.social 0 points 3 years ago (4 children)

I guess the silver lining is that academic creative writing is a bit of a pyramid scheme, so if she goes the route of writing "literary" stuff that gets published by her university press, she will probably be able to get work teaching creative writing...

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[–] SlamDrag@beehaw.org 2 points 3 years ago

As someone who's been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There's an incoming "demographic collapse" coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren't.

Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.

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[–] SlamDrag@beehaw.org 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

As someone who's been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There's an incoming "demographic collapse" coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren't.

Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.

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[–] funnyletter@lemmy.one 2 points 3 years ago

I quit a PhD program in a social science and this is absolutely true of basically any field about which you cannot say "You need a degree in X to get that job".

Additionally, colleges and universities are increasingly not hiring tenure-track professors and instead relying on adjuncts to teach their classes. Adjuncts make almost no money, get no benefits, have no job security from one term to another, and often have to adjunct at multiple institutions simultaneously to make ends meet. It's basically the gig-ification of post-secondary education and it's awful.

I quit my PhD because I loved the field but it was very clear I wouldn't be able to live comfortably working in that field. Now I'm a programmer and I made more money at my first non-academic job than my PhD supervisor did with tenure and a decade of seniority.

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[–] baggins@beehaw.org 1 point 3 years ago

I think that's her plan. She was a bit disillusioned with knock backs, until I sent her a list of 50 odd famous(?) writers that got rejected, some many times. Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie, J. K. Rowling, Isaac Asimov etc. That perked her up a bit ;-)

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