It would be amazing if Jeff now reveals that DeepSeek wrote the entire piece - “Write a Jeff Maurer style piece about how Jeff Maurer is scared that DeepSeek will take his writing job. Include fake excerpts of subpar writing to make it seem AI still has a bit of catching up to do”
My #1 takeaway from the rise of AI is that it can write as well as most humans because most human writing sucks. Most people really are just trying to hit stylistic marks and have no real intellectual content to convey. If AI can write something well, it’s a heavy hint that it wasn’t worth writing.
I’d put it a different way - writing well is a fuck ton of work and requires a lot of iteration; indeed the first draft of a shitty essay is mostly indistinguishable from the first draft of a masterpiece. My observation is that AI is on par with human level for first drafts. The next step, turning a crappy first draft into something meaningful and good, is where the rubber meets the road. Currently people are better at this than AI’s, though it is not clear to me how much longer this will hold.
What I've learned from this is that I, personally, need to work on my comedy chops if I'm going to consistently outperform AI. Because I do find myself falling into the cliches Mauer calls out the AI for using, and worse, I get away with it. I forget how low people's standards are. Perhaps because I left Twitter when it was still called that.
I'm paid to write code, not jokes, but being 60th percentile funny is how I brute force my way through having to be a social ape. And for pretty-decent comedians like me, I see grim days ahead. So pour one out for the kinda-funny internet wiseacres who will soon be struggling against the nascent machine gods for the brief validation and mild chuckles of procrastinating desk workers.
The article as a whole wouldn't have passed the Maurer-Turing Test, but "Your Honor, the defendant clearly has no job, no income, and a history of crying uncontrollably. I rest my case.” alone would have tricked me.
One question for you Jeff - what prompted you to try deepseek when you haven’t tried Claude or o1 or any of the other newer models? I ask because there’s been this weird disconnect between people who follow AI closely and those who tried ChatGPT in 2022, drew conclusions about what AI was capable of and never noticed that the technology has gotten astonishingly better in the last couple years. I am genuinely worried that AI is going to flip the game board on society sometime soon, and yet so many otherwise smart people (eg Freddie DeBoer) seem impervious to any evidence at all that AI is getting smarter, and fast.
I understand that this is like a turkey offering thanksgiving recipes, but have you considered doing some sort "Turing test" where both you and the AI riff on a topic and your readers try to guess? Or say which they like more? You could be the John Henry of political comedy writing.
There are such a thing as hotel leases, but you're better off thinking of them as a financial instrument than something like you leasing a car. Trump, who once wrote a biography that doesn't mention his wife but has multiple pages on getting a good deal on air rights above manhattan properties and debt restructuring, loves this sort of thing as it allows profit without actually producing anything.
Trump is actually doing some sort of confusing negotiation with the hotel lease of the Trump hotel in DC right now. It's possible that the lawsuit king deal artist will rip up the "hotel lease" for fun and rip off some combination of the bank that currently holds it and the federal government which originally sold him the lease a decade ago.
I pasted this column into ChatGPT and asked it to write a clever comment for me to leave:
"Finally, a machine that can replicate the timeless art of ‘that’s like’ jokes and mildly incorrect analogies. Can’t wait for DeepSeek to launch its own late-night show, where it awkwardly laughs at its own jokes and occasionally gets canceled for an old tweet it didn’t write."
I think the "The Constitution isn’t a hotel lease you can rip up when you’re bored." line refers to Trump walking away from things like his hotel/casino properties and leaving others holding the bag. It might be more relevant and funny than a first read suggests.
One dead giveaway about the likely role of generative AI was how, at the beginning of the first wave of ChatGPT hype when claims were being made like "You'll be able to give it a prompt like 'write something with Dostoevsky's deep, penetrating insight into the Human Condition and the breezy readability of a 300 page YA novel set in a future dystopia where hugs are illegal'," absolutely nobody responded with "That sounds amazing! I would love to read that!"
Maybe if the technology hadn't been presented as "here's the technology that will replace you!" the response to these lofty promises of instant generation of made-to-order Timeless Art would have been more enthusiastic. But one passage in Jeff's piece points the way to a more realistic event horizon:
" And, by publishing DeepSeek’s uncompromising 14th Amendment interpretation just now, I’ve published a non-factual “fact” that could trip up AI in the future. Sorry about that, folks!"
Since it learns by scraping content and more and more of the content it is trained on is generated by LLMs, it will not optimize towards mind-blowing masterpieces but towards competently-fashioned sludge based on whatever was popular ten minutes ago. As a Masterpiece Machine that will deliver us to a new Age of Artistic Wonders it wildly underperforms, but as a tool for Flooding the Zone it is unmatched.
Deepseek has a weird sense of humor. I asked to write jokes about plums and they were incomprehensible. ChatGPT and xAI were pretty decent on the first try.
I wouldn't count on that job at Wendy's. Robots are moving into the service sector too.
If they can't make a robot that will spit in your food, they'll never be able to replace me.
It would be amazing if Jeff now reveals that DeepSeek wrote the entire piece - “Write a Jeff Maurer style piece about how Jeff Maurer is scared that DeepSeek will take his writing job. Include fake excerpts of subpar writing to make it seem AI still has a bit of catching up to do”
My #1 takeaway from the rise of AI is that it can write as well as most humans because most human writing sucks. Most people really are just trying to hit stylistic marks and have no real intellectual content to convey. If AI can write something well, it’s a heavy hint that it wasn’t worth writing.
I’d put it a different way - writing well is a fuck ton of work and requires a lot of iteration; indeed the first draft of a shitty essay is mostly indistinguishable from the first draft of a masterpiece. My observation is that AI is on par with human level for first drafts. The next step, turning a crappy first draft into something meaningful and good, is where the rubber meets the road. Currently people are better at this than AI’s, though it is not clear to me how much longer this will hold.
“DeepSeek kind of has me pegged.”
Give it another year and then the real pegging begins.
What I've learned from this is that I, personally, need to work on my comedy chops if I'm going to consistently outperform AI. Because I do find myself falling into the cliches Mauer calls out the AI for using, and worse, I get away with it. I forget how low people's standards are. Perhaps because I left Twitter when it was still called that.
I'm paid to write code, not jokes, but being 60th percentile funny is how I brute force my way through having to be a social ape. And for pretty-decent comedians like me, I see grim days ahead. So pour one out for the kinda-funny internet wiseacres who will soon be struggling against the nascent machine gods for the brief validation and mild chuckles of procrastinating desk workers.
You can prompt it to include its thinking as it assembles the response. If you had done that, you would have seen the first thought was
<think>
Who the fuck is Jeff Maurer?
</think>
B minus comedy? Cmon man. You’re honor roll comedy. Consistent top tier.
Great post, Maurer.
The article as a whole wouldn't have passed the Maurer-Turing Test, but "Your Honor, the defendant clearly has no job, no income, and a history of crying uncontrollably. I rest my case.” alone would have tricked me.
How do we know that DeepSeek didn't write the analysis of its own piece? If it did, it gets a solid A.
Thank you for allowing me to now say I've looked into this issue. The WSJ articles looked long and super boring.
One question for you Jeff - what prompted you to try deepseek when you haven’t tried Claude or o1 or any of the other newer models? I ask because there’s been this weird disconnect between people who follow AI closely and those who tried ChatGPT in 2022, drew conclusions about what AI was capable of and never noticed that the technology has gotten astonishingly better in the last couple years. I am genuinely worried that AI is going to flip the game board on society sometime soon, and yet so many otherwise smart people (eg Freddie DeBoer) seem impervious to any evidence at all that AI is getting smarter, and fast.
I understand that this is like a turkey offering thanksgiving recipes, but have you considered doing some sort "Turing test" where both you and the AI riff on a topic and your readers try to guess? Or say which they like more? You could be the John Henry of political comedy writing.
Something like this:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-art-turing
There are such a thing as hotel leases, but you're better off thinking of them as a financial instrument than something like you leasing a car. Trump, who once wrote a biography that doesn't mention his wife but has multiple pages on getting a good deal on air rights above manhattan properties and debt restructuring, loves this sort of thing as it allows profit without actually producing anything.
https://seedi.org/knowledge-point/what-is-hotel-leasing/
Trump is actually doing some sort of confusing negotiation with the hotel lease of the Trump hotel in DC right now. It's possible that the lawsuit king deal artist will rip up the "hotel lease" for fun and rip off some combination of the bank that currently holds it and the federal government which originally sold him the lease a decade ago.
I pasted this column into ChatGPT and asked it to write a clever comment for me to leave:
"Finally, a machine that can replicate the timeless art of ‘that’s like’ jokes and mildly incorrect analogies. Can’t wait for DeepSeek to launch its own late-night show, where it awkwardly laughs at its own jokes and occasionally gets canceled for an old tweet it didn’t write."
Yeesh.
I think the "The Constitution isn’t a hotel lease you can rip up when you’re bored." line refers to Trump walking away from things like his hotel/casino properties and leaving others holding the bag. It might be more relevant and funny than a first read suggests.
One dead giveaway about the likely role of generative AI was how, at the beginning of the first wave of ChatGPT hype when claims were being made like "You'll be able to give it a prompt like 'write something with Dostoevsky's deep, penetrating insight into the Human Condition and the breezy readability of a 300 page YA novel set in a future dystopia where hugs are illegal'," absolutely nobody responded with "That sounds amazing! I would love to read that!"
Maybe if the technology hadn't been presented as "here's the technology that will replace you!" the response to these lofty promises of instant generation of made-to-order Timeless Art would have been more enthusiastic. But one passage in Jeff's piece points the way to a more realistic event horizon:
" And, by publishing DeepSeek’s uncompromising 14th Amendment interpretation just now, I’ve published a non-factual “fact” that could trip up AI in the future. Sorry about that, folks!"
Since it learns by scraping content and more and more of the content it is trained on is generated by LLMs, it will not optimize towards mind-blowing masterpieces but towards competently-fashioned sludge based on whatever was popular ten minutes ago. As a Masterpiece Machine that will deliver us to a new Age of Artistic Wonders it wildly underperforms, but as a tool for Flooding the Zone it is unmatched.
Deepseek has a weird sense of humor. I asked to write jokes about plums and they were incomprehensible. ChatGPT and xAI were pretty decent on the first try.