Reading is incredibly important for mental development, it teaches your brain how to have the language tools to create abstractions of the world around you and then use those abstractions to change perspectives, communicate ideas and understand your own thoughts and feelings.

It’s never too late to start exercising that muscle, and it really is a muscle, a lot of people have a hard time getting started reading later in life because they simply don’t have the practice in forming words into images and scenes… but think about how strong that makes your brain when you can form text into whole vivid worlds, when you can create images and people and words and situations in your mind to explore the universe around you and invent simulated situations with more accuracy… I cannot scream enough how critically important it is for us to exercise this muscle, I hope you keep looking for things that spark your interest just enough that you get a foothold in reading and writing :)

the writing reminded me it was written by a person who obviously cares about other people reading the text.

This is what’s missing being discussed in nearly every online argument about AI art that I read online, there are rarely people who make the actual argument that the whole purpose of art and writing is to share an experience, to give someone else the experience that the author or artist is feeling.

Even if I look at a really bad poem or a terrible drawing, if the artist was really doing their best to share the image in their head or the feeling they were having when they wrote it, it will be 1000X more significant and poignant than a machine that crushes the efforts of thousands of people together and averages them out.

Sure there are billions of people who are content with looking at a cool image and think no deeper of it and are even annoyed at criticism of AI work, but on some level I think everyone prefers content made by another human trying to share something.

Large discord groups and forums are still the proving ground for new, young writers who try to get started crafting their prose to this day, and I have watched it for over 30 years. It has changed, dramatically, and I would be remiss to say I have no idea where the change came from if I didn’t also see the patterns.

Yes it’s entirely anecdotal, I have no intention of making a scientific argument, but I’m also not the only one worried about the influence of LLM’s on creators. It’s already butchering the traditional artistic world, just for the very basic reason that 14-year-old Mindy McCallister who has a crush on werewolves at one time would have taught herself to draw terrible, atrocious furry art on lined notebook paper with hearts and a self-inserted picture of herself in a wedding dress. This is where we all get started (not specifically werewolf romance but you get the idea) with art and drawing and digital art before learning to refine our craft and get better and better at self-expression, but we now have a shortcut where you can skip ALL of that process and just have your snarling lupine BF generated for you within seconds. Setting aside the controversy over if it’s real art or not, what it’s doing is taking away the formative process from millions of potential artists.

“Wise fwom youw gwave!”

I know exactly what you mean, I still frequent a lot of writing communities and that “cardboard” feeling is spreading. Most young people who have an interest in writing are basically sponges for absorbing how their peers write, so it’s tragic when their peers are machines designed to produce advertiser-friendly ad-copy.

I played around with ChatGTP to see if it could actually improve my writing. (I’ve been writing for decades.)

I was immediately impressed by how “personable” the things are and able to interpret your writing and it’s able to detect subtle things you are trying to convey, so that part was interesting. I also was impressed by how good it is at improving grammar and helping “join” passages, themes and plot-points, it has advantages that it can see the entire writing piece simultaneously and can make broad edits to the story-flow and that could potentially save a writers days or weeks of re-writing.

Now that the good is out of the way, I also tried to see how well it could just write. Using my prompts and writing style, scenes that I arranged for it to describe. And I can safely say that we have created the ultimate “Averaging Machine.”

By definition LLM’s are designed to always find the most probable answers to queries, so this makes sense. It has consumed and distilled vast sums of human knowledge and writing but doesn’t use that material to synthesize or find inspiration, or what humans do which is take existing ideas and build upon them. No, what it does is always finds the most average path. And as a result, the writing is supremely average. It’s so plain and unexciting to read it’s actually impressive.

All of this is fine, it’s still something new we didn’t have a few years ago, neat, right? Well my worry is that as more and more people use this, more and more people are going to be exposed to this “averaging” tool and it will influence their writing, and we are going to see a whole generation of writers who write the most cardboard, stilted, generic works we’ve ever seen.

And I am saying this from experience. I was there when people started first using the internet to roleplay, making characters and scenes and free-form writing as groups. It was wildly fun, but most of the people involved were not writers, but many discovered literation for the first time there, it’s what led to a sharp increase in book-reading and suddenly there were giant bookstores like Barns & Noble popping up on every corner. They were kids just doing their best, but that charming, terrible narration became a social standard. It’s why there are so many atrocious dialogue scenes in shows and movies lately, I can draw a straight line to where kids learned to write in the 90’s. And what’s coming next is going to harm human creativity and inspiration in ways I can’t even predict.

This early draft for The Last of Us just gets weirder and weirder.

I’m sorry you had to deal with that, and glad it wasn’t a much worse experience.

On my side, I am an older guy now, I used to teach martial arts and volunteer coaching young men and then went on to be a mod of a big men’s subreddit for a spell, and the incel problem online is a lot worse than any of us realize. I think my peers at the time thought incels, redpill, MGTOW and all the other word-salad men’s groups online were a passing fad, a speedbumb on our path to the bright, shining future of better ideas and equality.

Holy shit were we all wrong. Humans are SO easy to exploit that I am legitimately concerned for our species’ entire future. We may not survive the internet broadly, and this is before even talking about how AI will accelerate the problem a thousand-fold.

I used to be very good at talking incels down. I had people send me follow-ups years later thanking me for saving their lives. It felt like I was doing good, but there was always more. So, so many more. I would focus on one young guy for weeks, talking and being there and listening and prying apart his world-views with gentle care, and often it would work, but that kid would be replaced by twenty more, each more obstinate and willfully ignorant than the last. They feed each other, they validate each other’s darkest feelings, and they spread because hate is contagious.

They think their “rising ranks” are some sign of truth or validity to their movement, but it’s just that simple trick that brains do, where they invent (or attach to) stories to explain their feelings. The more people feel insecure and scared, the more their brains will invent or latch onto stories to explain those feelings, and it’s created a cycle of reading/scrolling for explanations for their loneliness, connecting with dark stories about why they feel bad (“it’s the fault of THAT group!”) and then feeling worse, so digging deeper into that same narrative to guide their rumination. It’s so bad and so addictive that men and women alike are now having an impossible time breaking free from it and everyone feels horrible and nobody knows how to escape, so they invent even more stories to explain why they feel the way they do.

I don’t know the answer. I just keep telling people to get off the social internet as much as possible, every moment you’re scrolling/chatting for escape from despair is a moment you COULD be using to better yourself and your life in even the most modest ways.

Human beings have brains that were forged during hardships and ice-ages to make us inclined to form groups for survival. Those same drives make us desperate for a social identity, to the degree that we literally can die without social identity. (A fascinating field of study btw.)

This has made the internet the most dangerous tool we’ve ever created, because it has allowed people to deconstruct the very notion of group identity and exploit the drives in our own brains to connect with others. This is why we have so much absurd bullshit now, so many conspiracy theories, flat earthers, incels and redpill grifters, science-deniers and chemtrailophiles. People are finding their own, almost random group identities to connect with, groups that often have no real connection to reality, and just offer validation for people’s feelings.

Validation for feelings is the next most important thing for humans, because it reflects how our brains actually work. Most people are under the impression that the brain is the seat of intelligence, that brains are calculating machines that work out problems and come to logical conclusions. Even if you don’t think this, you have most likely at least become comfortable in trusting what you work out in your head.

But brains are not reasonable or rational, there was no such thing in the ancient world that shaped our brains. That world was just threats and signs of threats. If your ancestor had a brain that could accurately connect the sign of a threat to an actual threat, they would likely be prepared and survive. See a paw-print by the watering hole? Maybe there’s a predator around.

That same tool now functions the same way in a vastly different environment, and it tells us wild stories that aren’t even connected with reality to explain the things we feel. The brain notices you feel fear, it looks around and pieces together things to explain that fear. Feel sad? Brain digs around and starts randomly tying strings together to explain it. No reason, no logic. This is where much of our mental health epidemic is coming from, unchecked brains doing what nature intended them to do, in a world nature never intended.

Welcome to the club. 12 year account for me, I told off some mysgonistic redpiller who called another user a slur, I quoted the slur so he couldn’t edit, told him to go fuck himself with a telephone pole, the kind with all the nails from years of posters being posted on it, and then reported him.

Mods banned me for “incivility and using a gendered slur,” took no action on the other user, I appealed it, they acted like pubescent fucksticks, so to keep talking to people I knew in that community I made a new account, then admins perma-IP-banned me for ban evasion.

I’ve been fighting this so long that I’m now instantly shadowbanned across all of youtube, google and reddit every time I make a new account. They’ve gotten very good at silencing users so that their bot-army can simulate human society and adjust our narratives at will. (Yes, google and reddit work together to produce AI bots, they announced it a while back, nobody paid attention.)