- Anon on The First AI-Written Mormon Horror Novel: “You should include as part of the prompt a requirement to note sources the AI refers to come up with its iteration.” Jan 24, 20:17
- on Vigilance is not panic: “That’s a great comment, Jonathan. That’s where I’m trying keep myself–though I know I don’t always have my feet squarely on the line where the truth cuts through all the mucky-muck. But I suppose that will always be a challenge where the line divides a solid waste landfill from sewage treatment facility.” Jan 24, 17:40
- on The First AI-Written Mormon Horror Novel: “Our cosmology isn’t very good for horror–our demons are known quantities. There’s a reason we do science fiction and fantasy instead. “…so far I think it’s at the lower tier of what we’d find at, say, Barnes and Noble, but it’s not getting close to the realm of the greats.” Yeah, I don’t know how they move past this. These models need gobs of text for training, and of course most of it is mediocre writing. I see the same thing with AI-generated code: it’s inefficient and inelegant, but so is a lot of human-written code. A new professor reached out to me a couple weeks ago: he’s teaching a course where students do their first statistics using Stata and the TAs told him they’re always overwhelmed, so he wrote a prompt that turns Gemini into a Stata coach and wanted to know how to make it available to the students. (The answer is a Gemini Gem. He didn’t realize my group helps students as well as researchers and now I’m doing a guest lecture for him, and he’s reevaluating whether to actually point the students to AI or not.) The advice it gives is usually okay. It was quite impressive to just give it a graph of a regression diagnostic and have it say, correctly, “See that U shape? That suggests the relationship between this predictor and the outcome is non-linear. Try adding a squared term.” But it’s inconsistent and often mediocre. Still, it was quite a thing to be asked to help set something up that, in theory anyway, could replace me.” Jan 24, 16:20
- on Vigilance is not panic: “Morgan and Hoosier have each in their own way cautioned against getting caught up in a media-fueled spiral of catastrophization and outrage. Everyone should take that caution seriously, especially when so much unverified information circulates so rapidly and it’s so easy to create fake images and video, and no matter who you are, there’s an echo chamber ready to confirm everything you believe. I don’t think that’s what’s going on, but the thing about testable predictions is you eventually get an answer. In the meantime, I would caution people who think this is just media-induced panic not to get caught up in a spiral of normalization. You need to give yourself an off-ramp from defending the indefensible before you go too far down that path.” Jan 24, 14:53
- on The First AI-Written Mormon Horror Novel: “Increasingly high levels of AI slop is not necessarily bad bad thing, of course. In a lot of other contexts, something that’s extremely fast, basically free, and good enough for most purposes means serious productivity gains. It just raises questions about viable career paths and long-term societal stultification that no one has quite figured out yet.” Jan 24, 14:38
- on Vigilance is not panic: “Jonathan, thank you for this post and the earlier post on the moral difficulties we face with the current administration. You handle this much better than I could. I’m dismayed by the efforts of so many people to ignore the problems, and pretend that it will just go away. I suspect this is the moral crisis of our lives.” Jan 24, 14:19
- on The First AI-Written Mormon Horror Novel: “Yes, with my other short stories you saw the same thing: it basically weaved standard horror tropes into an LDS context without coming up with authentically Mormon horror tropes. I suspect that until we get to AGI the creative products most at risk from AI are the derivative ones. (That being said, most of the stuff at B&N and coming out of Hollywood are derivative), but yes, it’s not very good at generating new genres or ideas.” Jan 24, 13:53
- on Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 1/18: “LHL, I’m sorry that you had a poor experience. Is there some way to reframe the experience to get something spiritual out of it? If nothing else, the Stake President needs what was said, but maybe something in the details of the talks, or the way members treated each other, or the way the children played during the meeting taught you something spiritual?” Jan 24, 13:46
- on The First AI-Written Mormon Horror Novel: “To extend your last point a bit, it also treats Asian religious practices (Robert Chen, ascended masters, meditation) as demonic, so the racism is kind of a pattern. A larger issue is that the novel’s threats aren’t really the things that church members are scared of. In general, we don’t really spend too much time worrying about folk religion, meditation, or family traditions. It’s just not the stuff to keep you up at night, either as an adult or at Scout Camp. I don’t know if Jay’s Journal made it into the training data. My guess is that Claude is giving us a Mormon-flavored take on American Christian fiction – which is an impressive accomplishment for a machine! – but that’s not enough to produce Mormon horror that really works.” Jan 24, 11:20
- on Vigilance is not panic: “I agree with you Jonathan, that your set of facts are the actual reflection of reality.” Jan 23, 22:55
