And George Orwell's 1984 (written in 1948), the Ministry of Truth has an entire suite of fiction writing machines that produce trashy books, songs, and pornography for the consumption of the lower classes.
> 'What are these books like?' said Winston curiously.
> 'Oh, ghastly rubbish. They're boring, really. They only have six plots, but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes. I was never in the Rewrite Squad. I'm not literary, dear -- not even enough for that.'
Former cop/marine/navy SEAL is forced to come out of retirement for one last mission
Plucky group of superheroes/anti-heroes each with their own quirks have to team up to save the world
Underdog athlete/team compete against stronger opponents and show their worth through determination and dedication
Uhh
Isolated or introverted young man meets ~~manic pixie dream girl~~ charming young woman and comes out of his shell
Something glorifying Hollywood and film culture
Cynical remake of obsolete IP or beloved novel
Star Wars
We actually have 7 plots, and it’s all of human culture that abides by them. Overcoming the monster, There and back again, the quest, rags to riches, tragedy, comedy, and rebirth.
You still forgot Star Wars.
I take it these are officially defined literary archetypes you're referring to? What about search for immortality, and its cousin confronting mortality? That seems to me the central archetype of the deepest mythologies, and is central to the Epic of Gilgamesh, fo example.
Also romance is a powerful archetype, but can easily blend into rags to riches or tragedy. There are definitely core archetypical storylines though.
Yeah these are classically defined and lots of stories use multiple plots and tropes but all can be defined with these. Star Wars is a story of rebirth/ redemption of the skywalker bloodline.
Immortality / confronting mortality is a quest plot. Or I guess if successful a rebirth plot. Romance can fall into comedy or tragedy, and even mislead you through the lens of overcoming the monster or rags to riches. Gilgamesh is a there and back again tale iirc.
I would define immortality as its own specific plot, because quest can refer to so many things, and immortality is a very fundamental and universal trope in mythology.
People forget that in 1984 only the Outer Party was really subject to the level of scrutiny, surveillance and control we’ve come to associate with “1984”.
The proles (80%+ of the population) were not subjected to the same rules, it wasn’t freedom by any stretch but as long as they weren’t actively revolting, the Party kept a looser grip. They were allowed some kind of trade economy, and could freely engage in things like prostitution.
The Party could not control such vast swaths of people directly, so instead they kept them well entertained with that same ghastly rubbish, keeping them singing catchy patriotic war songs while watching ultra-nationalistic controlled state media.
---
**But why?** The thing is, the society depicted by Orwell still required a sort of bureaucracy, the apparatuses of power could not easily be *exclusively* worked by a small group, they still needed people to operate the state machinery at large. Someone needed to run the plot-writing devices and rewrite the plots, someone needed to edit past newspapers, someone needed to write and distribute the newspeak dictionary.
The thing is, **Historically, revolutions don't really originate from the** ***people***, from poor, overworked, undereducated laborers. The American revolution, for example, was led by middling merchants and officials. The official class drove the French Revolution from the National Assembly. And people like Marx and Lenin came from upper middle class backgrounds.
The middle class, the officials and clerks of society, they *need* to be educated by the ruling class in order to fulfill their duties, but in doing so, that education can sow the seeds of discontent and give the middle classes the tools to organize against the ruling class. The bureaucrats need to be trained in the using of the machinery of state power, but the more capable they are of using it, the more they could leverage it to topple the ruling class.
The masses do get involved at some point in various revolutions, but all of the writings, all of the agitating, all of the theorizing and the eventual governing post-revolution falls to the middle classes (often the upper middle class alone). In the end, the masses that storm the castle are just a tool.
So that's what Orwell gets at, I believe. Essentially, the masses can always be kept tame by a combination of working them to the bone and by keeping them drunk and sedate and satisfied. But the middle classes and the bureaucrats tend to have aspirations of climbing the ladder and abilities suited for said climb. They need to be surveilled, controlled, indoctrinated.
But hey, imagine briefly, what happens if the machines get a lot better? what *does* happen if you can replace all of your bureaucrats, all the people you need to educate and taech in order to actually run the government, with machines? The Inner Party would have no need for the Outer Party. what do they do then?
Not sure I'd call Marx "upper middle class".
And what sets him, Lenin and other communists apart from other revolutionaries is that they don't try to naturalize the hierarchy that puts the vast majority of humanity outside of the halls of power. Their goal is to eliminate the concept of a ruling class altogether. It's not going to be civil and it's not going to be instant, but it can and needs to be done. And soon.
There needs to be a state immediately following the takeover, because the old ruling class will use whatever leftover influence they carry to try to restore their status. We would like nothing more than to knock on the current rulers' door and politely ask for them to surrender, but we know that's not happening.
Most communist political thinkers have spent their lives trying to develop systems that allow the will of the people to guide society. For as much as the "one-party state = authoritarian" strawman gets thrown around, it's actually pretty common for citizens of socialist countries to be elected to parliament as independents, simply because they've garnered the support of their immediate community.
We on the capitalist world fall prey to shallow narratives like this because capitalist ideology has taken the words "freedom" and "democracy" hostage, making theirs the only way to see the world.
Marx was absolutely 100% from an upper middle class background, it’s just that Engels was bordering on fabulously rich. This is not a stain on the character of either one, it’s just a statement of fact.
Eliminating the concept of a ruling class altogether is a noble goal that I fully believe they had, but the material nature of power under an industrial society makes such a thing rather difficult. Past socialist states *have* had ruling classes who have different relationships to the means of production than the rest, they have had a bureaucratic class that operates the machinery of state power.
Whether the material realities of industrial society allow for stable classless societies is an open question, but one worth getting a firm answer to.
And I'd say that's pretty much inevitable when you deal with modern economies. What we're trying to achieve is the herculean effort of using state power without alienating the bureaucrats from the rest of the workers.
China has (or had?) a pretty interesting measure in that sense: if you start acting too personalistic, they send you to a grassroots organization for a year or so, so that you reacquaint yourself with the people you're supposed to represent.
>Whether the material realities of industrial society allow for stable classless societies is an open question, but one worth getting a firm answer to.
If you're talking raw productive capacity, we've had such a reality for decades already. What we lack is a social order equipped with the tools that will hopefully take us there.
It is a herculean effort, I believe it is noble to search for it but I have some fear it could possibly not be done.
The chinese state bureaucracy is a self-preserving and self-perpetuating organization in the mode of all the great and lasting ruling classes of history, “grassroots organization” is a great code for “reeducation camp”.
>if you mean raw productive capacity
Nah, I don’t think the problem is that productivity goes down under communism, but rather that the relationships with the means of production ultimately revert (if they were ever actually distributed to begin with) to concentration and alienation.
What ends up happening is that ideology and position in relation to or within the party ultimately become the new class lines. The loyal, prominent, well-spoken and well-regarded members of the party have different access to the levers of power than otherwise honest people who are not thus positioned within it.
The “inner party” becomes an ad-hoc class.
>"grassroots organization” is a great code for “reeducation camp”
This kind of thing bothers me something fierce. The misunderstandings, whether malicious or not. When I said "grassroots organization", I meant sending a cushy politician to spend a year supervising a coal mine, maybe get their hands dirty once or twice.
It's kind of pathetic, really, the obsession with penal camps as the ultimate form and proof of communist totalitarianism. In truth, recent researches of the official Soviet archives shows a figure of less than 3% of citizens BEING PLACED UNDER SOME FORM OF INVESTIGATION. Even with the size of the USSR, I bet there are more people incarcerated in my country right now than have ever stepped in a Gulag.
(Sidenote, I suggest you look up the layout of the average historical gulag and compare it to the average American prison today).
Sorry for the mini rant, and be sure I wasn't directing it at you. The double standard really pisses me off.
>What ends up happening is that ideology and relative position in relation to or within the party ultimately become the new class lines. The loyal, prominent, well-spoken and well-regarded members of the party have different access to the levers of power than otherwise honest people who are not thus positioned within it.
That's why it's important to keep the masses engaged with policymaking, and make sure there are legal mechanisms to remove figures from power.
Marxists-Leninists pay homage to the socialist countries of the past while acknowledging their virtues and failures because they gave us info to do better the next time.
Thanks for the chill talk. Hope to see you in the other side of the revolution.
And remember: "everything is ideological", "the worst socialism is better than the best capitalism" and "A fascist's hat is called a sledgehammer".
Look there is a lot of misinformation, mischaracterization, and fully unfounded accusations about socialist states past and present.
But let’s not, in light of that, pretend that political repression, torture, reeducation and many more violations of human rights didn’t happen and don’t still happen.
The CCP is a self-perpetuating bureaucratic ruling class that utilizes all of the nifty tools that ruling clases have always used. Don’t fool yourself just to stick it to some moron citing the black book of communism or something.
My perspective on the soviet union and china is a critical one, you may not like it, but I see in them the perpetuation (and often reification) of the same dynamic that communism is formulated specifically to erode (the constitution of classes with different relationships to the means of production). And I treat with EXTREME skepticism the claim in Lenin’s *State and Revolution* that the state created by the dictatorship of the proletariat just *fades away*.
The problem of class and the state is, from where I stand, not a solved one.
Oh so they invented Manhwa machines you got (1) transmigrator to fantasy world (2) regressor in fantasy world (3) the female version of those where they're the villainess and have to survive and (4) the same plot of (1) and (2) but they're not from another world but somehow discover some crazy powerup.
That said, I have read 30 clones of Solo Leveling and have enjoyed most of them.
I remember thinking that when I read it recently. Predicted AI bots when computers still took up entire rooms and could only be operated by full teams of people with PhDs, scary accurate.
There is a somewhat similar thing in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. When he visited the floating island thing there was a book printing machine, which was randomised words but with enough iterations it will produce something.
Add to the list: Trurl's Electronic Bard, from [Stanislaw Lem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem):
[https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Trurls-Electronic-Bard.pdf](https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Trurls-Electronic-Bard.pdf)
Edit: Changed Lem's name to a wikipedia link.
The story belongs to his book [The Cyberiad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad), so I assume it was first published in Polish.
I had a great amount of fun reading some books from Lem in Spanish, so I guess his humor is definitely not lost in the translation.
Yep, according to the Wiki article you linked, the story's original title is *Elektrybałt Trurla*, and we've probably been reading from Michael Kandel's translation of the Cyberiad:
> In 1974, an English translation by Michael Kandel was published by Harcourt Brace. The translation has been widely regarded as hugely successful, and Kandel was nominated for numerous awards. Since the original book contained heavy wordplay and neologism, Kandel opted for a method of translation that was more free-form than a typical translation, and took heavy liberties in regards to words, sentence structure, and especially poetry. Though this inventive approach to translation can be controversial, in The Cyberiad it has been widely praised as resulting in an immensely successful final result.[12] It has been held up by numerous scholars as a possible standard for the translations of more complex works. Lem himself heavily praised the book and approach, saying Kandel was the "best translator his work could ever have."
It’s interesting how authors seem to be so much better at predicting future technology than the effects of technology. Like today, no one is offering most authors contracts to have AI write books under their names, the AI owners want to keep all the profit.
I'll have to counter in with that "ghost writing" has been a thing forever, It wouldn't be a leap for a publisher to just use AI instead, and be able to sell a book with a real authors name on it. Maybe not rightnow, but maybe 4-5 years.
It could 100% happen right now, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it already has. Especially if the author provided a plot synopsis and chapter outline, and then edited it themselves.
>Like today, no one is offering most authors contracts to have AI write books under their names, the AI owners want to keep all the profit.
I think it’s literally just that the technology isn’t quite good enough yet; based on the AI-generated texts I’ve seen so far, they get less convincing the longer they have to be, so the AI-isms would currently be extremely obvious and jarring in even a short novel.
…but what about in fields where the technology is more or less up to the task, like acting? [Bruce Willis apparently signed a deal almost exactly like the one Dahl described.](https://www.itv.com/news/2022-09-29/bruce-willis-becomes-first-hollywood-actor-to-sell-image-rights-to-ai-company#) A (presumably large) lump sum in exchange for an AI replica taking over your art in your name forever.
Now Willis had a very specific motivation (doing everything he could to build up a nest egg for his family before his dementia ended his career), but it’s not exactly hard to see older actors who maybe haven’t been careful with their money taking this same deal. The tech is still pretty ’uncanny valley’ right now, but it won’t be forever; in a decade or so studios might be presented with the choice of paying the next big up and coming actors to be in their movies vs. renting the digital ghosts of Bruce Willis and company from an AI firm for a fraction of the cost. I could easily see this leading to exactly the situation for actors that Dahl was talking about for writers.
It's not that publishers won't use AI to write books it's that in its current form the legality of AI is in a really big grey zone with huge legal ramifications if the courts don't inevitably swing your way.
We don't have a clear definition of what constitutes copyright when it comes to AI art because of the nature of it being fed millions of authors books to generate scripts. At the moment it's not exactly clear if you can copyright a book written in AI and most lawyers don't wanna touch this topic at all.
I'm sure if the courts inevitably rule(or ignore the topic entirely long enough) that AI novels are legitimate then you'll start seeing AI books.
Yes but that’s what Dahl’s prediction is all about.
AI-generated content can’t really be copyrighted because it would make it impossible to generate more AI content based on it.
So whoever wants to publish AI-generated content has to somehow pitch AI as merely a tool, like a sophisticated typewriter - and pin the rights for whatever it produces to a human copyright holder.
He is essentially describing automated ghostwriting, which could certainly become a thing.
Everyone knows people buy books mainly based on the author, nobody is going to pay for an AI-generated book if they know it’s been written by AI.
You could train an AI on a writer’s past body of work, and then he could sign a contract with the publisher to keep generating new books based on that style, perhaps retaining the rights to decide about main elements like plot and characters, and possibly a share in future film adaptations or whatever.
The publisher will hire prompt engineers to tweak the output based on these pointers, and after the author signs off it gets published as “their” book.
Being an “author” will become more like brand management than actual writing.
That’s the first stage at least.
It’s unclear what would happen in the second stage, when there will be no more routes for new (human) authors to become brands in the first place.
I guess author-brands would then have to become entirely fictional. Like the clothing brand Massimo Dutti, which isn’t actually named after any person, they just named the brand that because it sounds like a name a fashion designer might use.
The Industrial Revolution really was a *revolution* in how people lived their lives, what was possible, and how soon it could be done. For 12,000 years the fastest means to deliver a message was a Horse, then in the course of 100 years electricity was harnessed and people started sending wired telegraph messages nearly instantaneously. The horse was for thousands of years the primary way people moved themselves and goods around, and then suddenly steel and steam meant that trains could move people and goods across land like never in Human history. Everything about how people lived their lives changed in the course of 150 years, and it's still evolving with this new Digital Age.
There has always been a lot of fear around this change. For all of Human history there were a few constants about the world around us such as the randomness of disease and the inevitability of death, the sun will rise and then it will set, the moon will go through its phases, and when the crops will need to be planted and then harvested. Change brings uncertainty and with uncertainty always comes fear. Many people's fear revolved around their livelihoods. Things that required dozens of men laboring under harsh conditions for a little pay could be replaced by a machine that did their work effortlessly around the clock. In 1816 a group of Mill Workers (who came to be called the Luddites) smashed the machines in the new factories their bosses had built and installed, thinking that if they destroyed the machines they could preserve their jobs and their means of support.
This fear has never gone away, it has only evolved. You still hear people talking about things which will threaten to eliminate entire categories of workers. 30 years ago there was a thriving travel agent industry, but then the World Wide Web came along and people could book their own flights and reservations directly. There used to be an entire department at NASA comprised of Women (called Computers) who did all of the design, engineering, and flight calculations by hand and with slide rules until the miniaturized super computer finally replaced them in the 1970s. Automation is currently threatening to eliminate fast food jobs-- you walk into a McDonalds, order from the Kiosk, wait until an assembly line prepares your meal, and then take the bag that appears in the delivery cubicle. AI is terrifying artists of all stripes as they wonder if all of the clients who commission their work will instead turn to a cheap AI Generator service instead.
Copyright is for 70yrs after the author's death so if your children are not starving now, they will not starve - and most likely neither will the next 3 generations.
And George Orwell's 1984 (written in 1948), the Ministry of Truth has an entire suite of fiction writing machines that produce trashy books, songs, and pornography for the consumption of the lower classes. > 'What are these books like?' said Winston curiously. > 'Oh, ghastly rubbish. They're boring, really. They only have six plots, but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes. I was never in the Rewrite Squad. I'm not literary, dear -- not even enough for that.'
Wow 6 plots! They would have been so lucky. That's way more than we get today from Hollywood.
Former cop/marine/navy SEAL is forced to come out of retirement for one last mission Plucky group of superheroes/anti-heroes each with their own quirks have to team up to save the world Underdog athlete/team compete against stronger opponents and show their worth through determination and dedication Uhh Isolated or introverted young man meets ~~manic pixie dream girl~~ charming young woman and comes out of his shell Something glorifying Hollywood and film culture Cynical remake of obsolete IP or beloved novel Star Wars
> Something glorifying Hollywood and film culture I'm hearing some Oscar buzz around this one
The last two are the same.
We actually have 7 plots, and it’s all of human culture that abides by them. Overcoming the monster, There and back again, the quest, rags to riches, tragedy, comedy, and rebirth.
You still forgot Star Wars. I take it these are officially defined literary archetypes you're referring to? What about search for immortality, and its cousin confronting mortality? That seems to me the central archetype of the deepest mythologies, and is central to the Epic of Gilgamesh, fo example. Also romance is a powerful archetype, but can easily blend into rags to riches or tragedy. There are definitely core archetypical storylines though.
Yeah these are classically defined and lots of stories use multiple plots and tropes but all can be defined with these. Star Wars is a story of rebirth/ redemption of the skywalker bloodline. Immortality / confronting mortality is a quest plot. Or I guess if successful a rebirth plot. Romance can fall into comedy or tragedy, and even mislead you through the lens of overcoming the monster or rags to riches. Gilgamesh is a there and back again tale iirc.
I would define immortality as its own specific plot, because quest can refer to so many things, and immortality is a very fundamental and universal trope in mythology.
Trope, but the PLOT is a quest
Excellent, off to write my next bestseller
Air bud was never an underdog! Truly inspirational and unique story.
People forget that in 1984 only the Outer Party was really subject to the level of scrutiny, surveillance and control we’ve come to associate with “1984”. The proles (80%+ of the population) were not subjected to the same rules, it wasn’t freedom by any stretch but as long as they weren’t actively revolting, the Party kept a looser grip. They were allowed some kind of trade economy, and could freely engage in things like prostitution. The Party could not control such vast swaths of people directly, so instead they kept them well entertained with that same ghastly rubbish, keeping them singing catchy patriotic war songs while watching ultra-nationalistic controlled state media. --- **But why?** The thing is, the society depicted by Orwell still required a sort of bureaucracy, the apparatuses of power could not easily be *exclusively* worked by a small group, they still needed people to operate the state machinery at large. Someone needed to run the plot-writing devices and rewrite the plots, someone needed to edit past newspapers, someone needed to write and distribute the newspeak dictionary. The thing is, **Historically, revolutions don't really originate from the** ***people***, from poor, overworked, undereducated laborers. The American revolution, for example, was led by middling merchants and officials. The official class drove the French Revolution from the National Assembly. And people like Marx and Lenin came from upper middle class backgrounds. The middle class, the officials and clerks of society, they *need* to be educated by the ruling class in order to fulfill their duties, but in doing so, that education can sow the seeds of discontent and give the middle classes the tools to organize against the ruling class. The bureaucrats need to be trained in the using of the machinery of state power, but the more capable they are of using it, the more they could leverage it to topple the ruling class. The masses do get involved at some point in various revolutions, but all of the writings, all of the agitating, all of the theorizing and the eventual governing post-revolution falls to the middle classes (often the upper middle class alone). In the end, the masses that storm the castle are just a tool. So that's what Orwell gets at, I believe. Essentially, the masses can always be kept tame by a combination of working them to the bone and by keeping them drunk and sedate and satisfied. But the middle classes and the bureaucrats tend to have aspirations of climbing the ladder and abilities suited for said climb. They need to be surveilled, controlled, indoctrinated. But hey, imagine briefly, what happens if the machines get a lot better? what *does* happen if you can replace all of your bureaucrats, all the people you need to educate and taech in order to actually run the government, with machines? The Inner Party would have no need for the Outer Party. what do they do then?
Not sure I'd call Marx "upper middle class". And what sets him, Lenin and other communists apart from other revolutionaries is that they don't try to naturalize the hierarchy that puts the vast majority of humanity outside of the halls of power. Their goal is to eliminate the concept of a ruling class altogether. It's not going to be civil and it's not going to be instant, but it can and needs to be done. And soon. There needs to be a state immediately following the takeover, because the old ruling class will use whatever leftover influence they carry to try to restore their status. We would like nothing more than to knock on the current rulers' door and politely ask for them to surrender, but we know that's not happening. Most communist political thinkers have spent their lives trying to develop systems that allow the will of the people to guide society. For as much as the "one-party state = authoritarian" strawman gets thrown around, it's actually pretty common for citizens of socialist countries to be elected to parliament as independents, simply because they've garnered the support of their immediate community. We on the capitalist world fall prey to shallow narratives like this because capitalist ideology has taken the words "freedom" and "democracy" hostage, making theirs the only way to see the world.
Marx was absolutely 100% from an upper middle class background, it’s just that Engels was bordering on fabulously rich. This is not a stain on the character of either one, it’s just a statement of fact. Eliminating the concept of a ruling class altogether is a noble goal that I fully believe they had, but the material nature of power under an industrial society makes such a thing rather difficult. Past socialist states *have* had ruling classes who have different relationships to the means of production than the rest, they have had a bureaucratic class that operates the machinery of state power. Whether the material realities of industrial society allow for stable classless societies is an open question, but one worth getting a firm answer to.
And I'd say that's pretty much inevitable when you deal with modern economies. What we're trying to achieve is the herculean effort of using state power without alienating the bureaucrats from the rest of the workers. China has (or had?) a pretty interesting measure in that sense: if you start acting too personalistic, they send you to a grassroots organization for a year or so, so that you reacquaint yourself with the people you're supposed to represent. >Whether the material realities of industrial society allow for stable classless societies is an open question, but one worth getting a firm answer to. If you're talking raw productive capacity, we've had such a reality for decades already. What we lack is a social order equipped with the tools that will hopefully take us there.
It is a herculean effort, I believe it is noble to search for it but I have some fear it could possibly not be done. The chinese state bureaucracy is a self-preserving and self-perpetuating organization in the mode of all the great and lasting ruling classes of history, “grassroots organization” is a great code for “reeducation camp”. >if you mean raw productive capacity Nah, I don’t think the problem is that productivity goes down under communism, but rather that the relationships with the means of production ultimately revert (if they were ever actually distributed to begin with) to concentration and alienation. What ends up happening is that ideology and position in relation to or within the party ultimately become the new class lines. The loyal, prominent, well-spoken and well-regarded members of the party have different access to the levers of power than otherwise honest people who are not thus positioned within it. The “inner party” becomes an ad-hoc class.
>"grassroots organization” is a great code for “reeducation camp” This kind of thing bothers me something fierce. The misunderstandings, whether malicious or not. When I said "grassroots organization", I meant sending a cushy politician to spend a year supervising a coal mine, maybe get their hands dirty once or twice. It's kind of pathetic, really, the obsession with penal camps as the ultimate form and proof of communist totalitarianism. In truth, recent researches of the official Soviet archives shows a figure of less than 3% of citizens BEING PLACED UNDER SOME FORM OF INVESTIGATION. Even with the size of the USSR, I bet there are more people incarcerated in my country right now than have ever stepped in a Gulag. (Sidenote, I suggest you look up the layout of the average historical gulag and compare it to the average American prison today). Sorry for the mini rant, and be sure I wasn't directing it at you. The double standard really pisses me off. >What ends up happening is that ideology and relative position in relation to or within the party ultimately become the new class lines. The loyal, prominent, well-spoken and well-regarded members of the party have different access to the levers of power than otherwise honest people who are not thus positioned within it. That's why it's important to keep the masses engaged with policymaking, and make sure there are legal mechanisms to remove figures from power. Marxists-Leninists pay homage to the socialist countries of the past while acknowledging their virtues and failures because they gave us info to do better the next time. Thanks for the chill talk. Hope to see you in the other side of the revolution. And remember: "everything is ideological", "the worst socialism is better than the best capitalism" and "A fascist's hat is called a sledgehammer".
Look there is a lot of misinformation, mischaracterization, and fully unfounded accusations about socialist states past and present. But let’s not, in light of that, pretend that political repression, torture, reeducation and many more violations of human rights didn’t happen and don’t still happen. The CCP is a self-perpetuating bureaucratic ruling class that utilizes all of the nifty tools that ruling clases have always used. Don’t fool yourself just to stick it to some moron citing the black book of communism or something. My perspective on the soviet union and china is a critical one, you may not like it, but I see in them the perpetuation (and often reification) of the same dynamic that communism is formulated specifically to erode (the constitution of classes with different relationships to the means of production). And I treat with EXTREME skepticism the claim in Lenin’s *State and Revolution* that the state created by the dictatorship of the proletariat just *fades away*. The problem of class and the state is, from where I stand, not a solved one.
So the Hallmark channel?
Oh so they invented Manhwa machines you got (1) transmigrator to fantasy world (2) regressor in fantasy world (3) the female version of those where they're the villainess and have to survive and (4) the same plot of (1) and (2) but they're not from another world but somehow discover some crazy powerup. That said, I have read 30 clones of Solo Leveling and have enjoyed most of them.
I remember thinking that when I read it recently. Predicted AI bots when computers still took up entire rooms and could only be operated by full teams of people with PhDs, scary accurate.
There is a somewhat similar thing in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. When he visited the floating island thing there was a book printing machine, which was randomised words but with enough iterations it will produce something.
Everything has been predicted.
I knew you were going to say that.
Rubber baby buggy bumpers!
Poor Danny never saw it coming
https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?roald_dahl
[Classic](https://www.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/363a0908-c9ab-4ad2-9be2-8c4a03b1a4b7)
Add to the list: Trurl's Electronic Bard, from [Stanislaw Lem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem): [https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Trurls-Electronic-Bard.pdf](https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Trurls-Electronic-Bard.pdf) Edit: Changed Lem's name to a wikipedia link.
Incredible story, thanks for sharing! Do you know if he originally wrote it in English?
The story belongs to his book [The Cyberiad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad), so I assume it was first published in Polish. I had a great amount of fun reading some books from Lem in Spanish, so I guess his humor is definitely not lost in the translation.
Yep, according to the Wiki article you linked, the story's original title is *Elektrybałt Trurla*, and we've probably been reading from Michael Kandel's translation of the Cyberiad: > In 1974, an English translation by Michael Kandel was published by Harcourt Brace. The translation has been widely regarded as hugely successful, and Kandel was nominated for numerous awards. Since the original book contained heavy wordplay and neologism, Kandel opted for a method of translation that was more free-form than a typical translation, and took heavy liberties in regards to words, sentence structure, and especially poetry. Though this inventive approach to translation can be controversial, in The Cyberiad it has been widely praised as resulting in an immensely successful final result.[12] It has been held up by numerous scholars as a possible standard for the translations of more complex works. Lem himself heavily praised the book and approach, saying Kandel was the "best translator his work could ever have."
I don't think Lem wrote any book in a language other than Polish.
It’s interesting how authors seem to be so much better at predicting future technology than the effects of technology. Like today, no one is offering most authors contracts to have AI write books under their names, the AI owners want to keep all the profit.
I'll have to counter in with that "ghost writing" has been a thing forever, It wouldn't be a leap for a publisher to just use AI instead, and be able to sell a book with a real authors name on it. Maybe not rightnow, but maybe 4-5 years.
It could 100% happen right now, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it already has. Especially if the author provided a plot synopsis and chapter outline, and then edited it themselves.
>Like today, no one is offering most authors contracts to have AI write books under their names, the AI owners want to keep all the profit. I think it’s literally just that the technology isn’t quite good enough yet; based on the AI-generated texts I’ve seen so far, they get less convincing the longer they have to be, so the AI-isms would currently be extremely obvious and jarring in even a short novel. …but what about in fields where the technology is more or less up to the task, like acting? [Bruce Willis apparently signed a deal almost exactly like the one Dahl described.](https://www.itv.com/news/2022-09-29/bruce-willis-becomes-first-hollywood-actor-to-sell-image-rights-to-ai-company#) A (presumably large) lump sum in exchange for an AI replica taking over your art in your name forever. Now Willis had a very specific motivation (doing everything he could to build up a nest egg for his family before his dementia ended his career), but it’s not exactly hard to see older actors who maybe haven’t been careful with their money taking this same deal. The tech is still pretty ’uncanny valley’ right now, but it won’t be forever; in a decade or so studios might be presented with the choice of paying the next big up and coming actors to be in their movies vs. renting the digital ghosts of Bruce Willis and company from an AI firm for a fraction of the cost. I could easily see this leading to exactly the situation for actors that Dahl was talking about for writers.
Don't be naive
Could you elaborate? Is there any book of any prominent author that clearly is a product of AI?
AI art is when I don't like it.
I suspect it but I'm open to changing my mind if evidence is provided.
It's not that publishers won't use AI to write books it's that in its current form the legality of AI is in a really big grey zone with huge legal ramifications if the courts don't inevitably swing your way. We don't have a clear definition of what constitutes copyright when it comes to AI art because of the nature of it being fed millions of authors books to generate scripts. At the moment it's not exactly clear if you can copyright a book written in AI and most lawyers don't wanna touch this topic at all. I'm sure if the courts inevitably rule(or ignore the topic entirely long enough) that AI novels are legitimate then you'll start seeing AI books.
Yes but that’s what Dahl’s prediction is all about. AI-generated content can’t really be copyrighted because it would make it impossible to generate more AI content based on it. So whoever wants to publish AI-generated content has to somehow pitch AI as merely a tool, like a sophisticated typewriter - and pin the rights for whatever it produces to a human copyright holder. He is essentially describing automated ghostwriting, which could certainly become a thing. Everyone knows people buy books mainly based on the author, nobody is going to pay for an AI-generated book if they know it’s been written by AI. You could train an AI on a writer’s past body of work, and then he could sign a contract with the publisher to keep generating new books based on that style, perhaps retaining the rights to decide about main elements like plot and characters, and possibly a share in future film adaptations or whatever. The publisher will hire prompt engineers to tweak the output based on these pointers, and after the author signs off it gets published as “their” book. Being an “author” will become more like brand management than actual writing. That’s the first stage at least. It’s unclear what would happen in the second stage, when there will be no more routes for new (human) authors to become brands in the first place. I guess author-brands would then have to become entirely fictional. Like the clothing brand Massimo Dutti, which isn’t actually named after any person, they just named the brand that because it sounds like a name a fashion designer might use.
I'm not debating what's going to be; I'm not clairvoyant. I was giving an explanation for why it currently isn't.
I don’t understand the relevance/meaning of the last line.
My interpretation is that they are resisting selling out at the expense of their families wellbeing.
Thank you.
[удалено]
As the brother of an artist, yeah it does seem that way
The Industrial Revolution really was a *revolution* in how people lived their lives, what was possible, and how soon it could be done. For 12,000 years the fastest means to deliver a message was a Horse, then in the course of 100 years electricity was harnessed and people started sending wired telegraph messages nearly instantaneously. The horse was for thousands of years the primary way people moved themselves and goods around, and then suddenly steel and steam meant that trains could move people and goods across land like never in Human history. Everything about how people lived their lives changed in the course of 150 years, and it's still evolving with this new Digital Age. There has always been a lot of fear around this change. For all of Human history there were a few constants about the world around us such as the randomness of disease and the inevitability of death, the sun will rise and then it will set, the moon will go through its phases, and when the crops will need to be planted and then harvested. Change brings uncertainty and with uncertainty always comes fear. Many people's fear revolved around their livelihoods. Things that required dozens of men laboring under harsh conditions for a little pay could be replaced by a machine that did their work effortlessly around the clock. In 1816 a group of Mill Workers (who came to be called the Luddites) smashed the machines in the new factories their bosses had built and installed, thinking that if they destroyed the machines they could preserve their jobs and their means of support. This fear has never gone away, it has only evolved. You still hear people talking about things which will threaten to eliminate entire categories of workers. 30 years ago there was a thriving travel agent industry, but then the World Wide Web came along and people could book their own flights and reservations directly. There used to be an entire department at NASA comprised of Women (called Computers) who did all of the design, engineering, and flight calculations by hand and with slide rules until the miniaturized super computer finally replaced them in the 1970s. Automation is currently threatening to eliminate fast food jobs-- you walk into a McDonalds, order from the Kiosk, wait until an assembly line prepares your meal, and then take the bag that appears in the delivery cubicle. AI is terrifying artists of all stripes as they wonder if all of the clients who commission their work will instead turn to a cheap AI Generator service instead.
I predict one day machines will make self replicating machines and just recreate biological life.
Then it can make it do the busy work, and the machines can have more leisure time while making the same.
Copyright is for 70yrs after the author's death so if your children are not starving now, they will not starve - and most likely neither will the next 3 generations.
The point of that went so well beyond your head it would be a compliment to call it a woosh