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bananaflagtoday at 8:00 PM1 replyview on HN

Okay here's one of his explicit predictions, from 2018 (before LLMs) about 2023:

"If AI can generate images and even stories to a prompt, everyone will agree this is totally different from real art or storytelling."

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/15/five-more-years/


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sheafificationtoday at 8:20 PM

The context shows he was simply whining about AGI skeptics back in 2018, and many of the “predictions” he makes in that paragraph (including the one you quoted) are trivially wrong because he phrased them so hyperbolically and categorically.

Anyway, there were plenty of normies who thought images generated by e.g. stable diffusion (c. 2022) was “real art” and equivalent to human artwork.

I don’t think it’s useful to glaze Scott (or any of the LW crowd for that matter) as if he was (or they were) some kind of prophet(s). They got a couple points right, sure, but most of it was them flinging armchair philosophy spaghetti against the wall and seeing who would fund MIRI to let them fling the next batch.

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