Despite being mostly underwhelmed by LLMs*, I have seen a few examples recently of people using them in interesting ways. I saw one in an Indie Author group the other day. People are feeding a custom LLM all their content and then using that to build a world-building database they can refer to. Got a character returning in the second book but can’t remember what they look like? Ask your LLM to provide all the descriptions you’ve written so far. Need a list of names you’ve already used? LLM can help. Personally, I’m sticking with Airtable for things like that, but I can imagine it would be pretty handy for people trying to bash out book 18 as part of a 4-book a year publishing schedule. Then again, do custom AIs hallucinate? If so, that renders it basically useless…
* That said, Chat GPT does a really good job of taking an Otter AI transcript and having a good stab at fixing errors (once I’ve given a list of proper nouns) and introducing paragraphs and speech marks etc. But it probably isn’t worth billions of dollars.
I think allowing smartphone to be one invention covers up some of the advances made: I’d split it into at least 2. Internet in every pocket (which you more less covered) and camera in every pocket, which has altered how we watch events, consume news, present ourselves and so on.
I reckon drones deserve a bit more credit too. It’s more subtle but the amount of film, tv and sports coverage that was simply impossible a couple of decades ago is wild. Not sure that makes it the next most important invention, mind.
Despite being mostly underwhelmed by LLMs*, I have seen a few examples recently of people using them in interesting ways. I saw one in an Indie Author group the other day. People are feeding a custom LLM all their content and then using that to build a world-building database they can refer to. Got a character returning in the second book but can’t remember what they look like? Ask your LLM to provide all the descriptions you’ve written so far. Need a list of names you’ve already used? LLM can help. Personally, I’m sticking with Airtable for things like that, but I can imagine it would be pretty handy for people trying to bash out book 18 as part of a 4-book a year publishing schedule. Then again, do custom AIs hallucinate? If so, that renders it basically useless…
* That said, Chat GPT does a really good job of taking an Otter AI transcript and having a good stab at fixing errors (once I’ve given a list of proper nouns) and introducing paragraphs and speech marks etc. But it probably isn’t worth billions of dollars.
I think allowing smartphone to be one invention covers up some of the advances made: I’d split it into at least 2. Internet in every pocket (which you more less covered) and camera in every pocket, which has altered how we watch events, consume news, present ourselves and so on.
I reckon drones deserve a bit more credit too. It’s more subtle but the amount of film, tv and sports coverage that was simply impossible a couple of decades ago is wild. Not sure that makes it the next most important invention, mind.