IMO, the issue isn’t so much that chat AIs will produce “better than human” prose.
The issue is that scam artists will FLOOD the world with so much content that finding human-authored works – books, news articles, art, code samples, anything – will become nigh impossible. I think we’ll soon reach a point where 90%, 95%, 99% of search results on ANY topic will be mediocre AI-authored garbage.
There is absolutely an issue in regards to the art market as I mentioned, and I won’t minimize or dismiss that in any way. I hope for everyone’s sake that the Writers win their strike. I think AI-generated works passing for being written by actual authors and dominating the best seller list says something important about consumer behavior, which I assume is that they don’t actually read what they’re buying. I haven’t seen much interest in AI generated stories in places where people read things and provide feedback.
AI generated plastic “art” certainly has novelty because of the speed in which it can be produced, so I don’t doubt it’s all over the place. It can produce images which look pretty cool as long as you’re scrolling past them. In terms of the chance for exposure for the average artists that could be an issue, but the issue is not that the machine can competently replicate what a person can do. There is a challenge in the plastic arts in general considering the scroll past behavior is much more common than looking at the work and think about what you’re looking at, but I think that says more about the general audience than it does about any threat to art. If a person sees a piece that they want to engage with, actual art has a person behind it and perhaps others in discussion about it while LLM produced has nothing.
Err, yeah, but you kind of are doing exactly that.
The threat to art (writing, visual arts, and music) is that AI tools will be “good enough” that the average person can’t tell the difference on cursory examination. And they only get “good enough” because they’re training on YOUR STUFF. And my stuff, and all the other stuff that was written, drawn, painted, composed, played, by real human people. And you’re not getting compensated for that training at all. None of us are.
So you absolutely should care if your work is scraped and appropriated by LLMs, because we’re not far from a time when businesses fire all their copywriters and graphic artists because the $30/month AI subscription gives them results that are “good enough”.
I suppose where the true difference opinion lies is that I don’t think LLM produced content can possibly be good enough to engage an actual person, and glancing at something for a moment is not engaging with it. Obviously good enough to engage with “art” hasn’t yet been demonstrated despite the deluge of LLM prompt results posted everywhere, but technologically I think we’re a long way from getting there considering the infinite difference between unthinking data processing algorithims and the emergent process of a human mind made up of trillions of non-binary neuron interactions at any given moment which we are far from reproducing or even really understanding. These models contain a lot of quality literature already and have been trained significantly to reproduce some aesthetics, but since it can’t have any kind of understanding of what its doing it’s all hollow.
To go more into detail about commodified art, it’s a huge problem that artistic merit is one of a variety of factors considering sales in a marketplace. The art market has always been driven primarily by perceived economic value and that has always been a major problem as what sells has always displaced everything else regardless of quality or merit in the market. Corporate produced art products like much of what’s on the radio, on tv, or in theaters are less products of artistic expression and more of what market testing has demonstrated the kinds of aesthetic features people are willing to spend money on. That doesn’t require engagement, just enough to drive a purchasing behavior. LLMs being able to make something that’s fine to play in the background or to hang up and never really examine displaces this kind of highly lucrative art (which is still superior human produced art) which has always displaced art which people create with passion. I think that producing art exclusively for economic reasons is a terrible practice. What I’m talking about in my essay is “pure” art which is almost never economically feasible without being born to several generations of aristocrats. I think that producing art on the market’s terms has always been a hindrance to human expression and a wider problem in society, but the state its in is still better than being produced by machines which have literally no understanding of what they’re producing.
The above can probably accurately be interpreted as me undermining the economic value of art, but what I’m really trying to express is that economic drivers poison art. In a better system, anyone and everyone who wanted to fully devote themselves to their art could live comfortably on a stipend and create only what they think is important for them to create and share, and art would be free. Instead of receiving financial awards, they would receive more human rewards from sharing their art. In this fantasy world, labor saving technology would be doing the rote tasks driving the ability for people to live comfortably rather than displacing workers for the benefit of the business owners.
In the real world, artists pay their way by doing commercial work, or holding down a day job as a graphic designer, etc. Actors do commercials and Hallmark specials while looking for their break into serious theater. Writers put in hours writing ad copy or translating or speechwriting while trying to sell the Great American Novel. You call it poison, but ultimately it puts food on the table for artists and their families.
These roles can ONLY be displaced if AI is allowed to steal everyone’s work, and flood all available channels with mediocre AI paraphrases and transcriptions of that work. That’s the decision point we’re facing right now – do we stand idly by and allow big tech to replace workers by copying the fruits of human labor without compensation?
We can debate whether AI output is “good enough” for various use cases. And in some cases, you’ll be absolutely right that AI will never produce a convincing product for particular use cases. But that’s not the issue. The issue is whether it’s right for companies to steal the work of humans to use as training inputs, and flood the market with that mediocre output. AI producing sh*tty output doesn’t make it morally acceptable to steal, and to profit from the stealing.
I agree with you totally on the economics of it. When I say economic drivers poison art, I didn’t mean to imply that there is currently a better alternative to be a full time artist for most people. As I mentioned, the only way to be a full time “pure” artist is to have enough wealth to retire on before being born and this is a deeper issue with art than this particular situation. Professional artists are businesspeople participating in a marketplace who have found a niche and everyone needs to respect their right to protect their ability to make an income as a literal matter of survival. A program appropriating their niche and producing thousands of images with the thing their customers like to buy is a harm which should be stopped. Although I don’t like that this is an issue, it is and I won’t deny it.
The reason I titled the post the way I did is that I don’t participate in the market and don’t intend to. My essay is more targeted to people producing non-commodified art for purposes of expression or other non-monetary motivation. This isn’t to diminish art from the marketplace because there is obviously a lot of amazing stuff produced there. This is an appeal to amateurs like myself who have lost the motivation to produce art because they feel like the machine has made what they can make irrelevant. Anyone losing motivation because they are considering competing in a marketplace has a real concern. In my mind I’m distinguishing the abstract idea of art itself as human expression vs a business in which the product is art.
And by choosing to let AI take your stuff and use it however, you’re facilitating the economics that will allow AI to take the jobs of artists, and by extension, replace art all around us with mediocre pap spewed from the orifice of AI for the price of a premium subscription to ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion, or similar.
And because of that flood, actual creatives are losing out on opportunities. So many small press publishers have closed down their submissions because of the overwhelming amount of AI spam. Clarkesworld is just one example.
If LLMs mean to you that you have to make a change, please let that change be to lean more into your own humanity rather than to stop artistic expression altogether
No, what we need to do is stop pretending that someone who feeds a prompt into a blackbox is some kind of creative. Anyone can have ideas. Everyone has ideas. It’s the implementation of them that counts.
So many of these “prompt engineering” chuds want to talk about how “creatives are gatekeeping art”, when what it reality is is that they’re just soulless grifters looking for another avenue to make a buck, and ruining everything for the rest of us. These people need to be publicly shamed and ostracized. Being proud of flooding the Internet with AI garbage should be viewed as shameful.
Because you know what? ANYONE can be come an artist. It’s super easy: you sit down and put your fingers on a keyboard. Or a pencil or brush in your hand and put it to paper or canvas. Or a stylus to a tablet. Or your hands to a block of clay. You just do it. Talent isn’t innate. Creativity is taking your passion for something and being willing to work at whatever medium you decide to make that vision a reality, and to keep working at it. No one is gatekeeping your ability to take an idea, outline it, flesh it out, and put your hands to work. And there are a million free resources out there to tech techniques.
And no matter what, an LLM isn’t doing what humans do. It can only give you a synthesis of exactly what you feed it. It can’t use its life experience, its upbringing, its passions, its cultural influences, etc to color its creativity and thinking, because it has none and it isn’t thinking. Two painters who study and become great artists, and then also both take time to study and replicate the works of Monet can come away from that experience with vastly different styles. They’re not just puking back a mashup of Monet’s collected works. They’re using their own life experience and passions to color their experience of Impressionism.
That’s something an AI can never do, and it leaves the result hollow and meaningless.
I’ve read your post twice and I can’t find where we disagree other than that I would replace your first word “No” with “More Importantly in my opinion.” My final appeal didn’t indicate that someone should ignore art scams, only that I would rather continue to see human art amidst the sea of LLM crap and observe how human art grows to become distinct from what LLMs can produce, because their power as tools are very limited as you explained when compared to people. My purpose was to encourage people not to quit their art because I think human art is fundamentally superior to LLM-produced “art” and is necessary and important.
My purpose was to encourage people not to quit their art because I think human art is fundamentally superior to LLM-produced “art” and is necessary and important.
We definitely agree there. And yes, it would be great if human creatives could persevere in the face of this flood. But it’s really becoming difficult.
My thoughts on all this tend to go toward making an environment that is actively and intensely hostile to AI tools and those that promote them, because they will always have the upper hand in sheer numbers. In another reply I mentioned publishers closing submissions because of AI floods. When you go from ~50 submissions per month to hundreds per day, publishers are just going to stop trying to find the humans in the noise. And humans are going to give up on what is, and has been for several years now, and incredibly challenging market to get published in. Hollywood is going to see the writer and actor strike and decided it’s just cheaper to use AI. Software companies are going to see that it’s cheaper to use an LLM to spit out code than hiring actual developers. And on and on. Even if the end product is inferior, the people at the top with the money and making the decisions only care about the bottom line. Is it cheaper and maybe minimally viable?
I think a lot of the cause of this is capitalism. I genuinely don’t think that these kinds of tools would exist outside of capitalism. They only exist for profit. And inside of a capitalist system, those sorts of things are going to drive market decisions. But I don’t think it can end up being a marketplace where there can be true competition, and it’s going to end up snuffing out actual creativity. It’s an extremely dystopian prospect.
I think we agree on the economics of it. If someone is making a living in the art marketplace, it’s an issue if a program can reproduce the thing their customers like to buy thousands of times faster than they can. It can literally impact their ability to survive, and that’s terrible.
I disagree that technology like this wouldn’t exist without capitalism, and I’ve even contended this technology wouldn’t be an issue at all if not for capitalism. Tons of people create software for free for other peoples’ use for a variety of reasons. Software which you can simply ask in human language how to write a complex equation, formula, or program is a generally useful thing which even in an ideal communist society people may still want to use. In that ideal society with no economic incentive to create art, all art would be pure art and the reflections generated by a program would be of some kind of interest since they are not a threat to anyone’s survival as they are in our system. Since living to work wouldn’t be as much of a thing, time and energy for art appreciation and discussion would probably not be as rare as it is in our world considering how much is locked behind pay barriers for many. I can’t imagine the images being a threat to art in that world.
I’m with you in opposition of a private company taking content from the world and claiming it as its own proprietary product in whatever form that takes, especially through the use of data scraping. If the same program existed as Free and Open Source software offered only as a tool for people to use for their own purposes whatever they may be and the art market wasn’t the way it is, I’m not sure it would be as much of an issue.
I don’t disagree, but I do want to point out your understanding of how chatgpt works is flawed. There is no database or query going on. It’s a giant neural network model that was trained on all that data you mentioned. The model is effectively predicting what the next word should be based on the previous words, nothing else. Each individual word is selected this way.
It doesn’t change any of your arguments or conclusions, but I wanted to point it out, because if someone wrote a chat not like chatgpt using databases and programming I would be floored and incredibly impressed
Very much noted. I should say it’s as if it’s making a query to a database when it’s referencing some kind of existing data which it was trained on and can only report rather than interpret one word at a time.
Sort of, but there’s no database at all, just a bunch of numbers and math. It’s almost like controlled evolution, breeding plants to select desirable traits. Except that’s another field of computing called genetic algorithms. Neural networks are a pile of math trained on data. You give it a cat, it says whether or not it thinks it’s a cat, and you tell it if it’s right or wrong, then it adjusts it’s math accordingly. Do this with a million cats and not cats and it becomes better than humans at identifying cats. LLMs are just that but with word predictions and trillions of words for training. It’s impressive in its own right
Whew language is hard when it comes to abstractions like this. The apparatus I’m mistakenly referring to as a database is that code which was automatically created by the program according to set parameters while it was exposed to input which trained it. Even though the code composing the predictive algorithm of the program isn’t a database and doesn’t contain one, it does contain a form of information from which it bases its text predictions. Even though it isn’t literally looking up information from a database and reporting it, it’s still in a way algorithmically drawing from an abstraction of the text it was exposed to in order to interpret user requests and print appropriate and relevant responses. It doesn’t “know” why the words go in the order which they go, it “knows” that they go in the order that they go based on its training. It’s still information in and information out, although in a highly sophisticated way. I’m also impressed by it and wish it was introduced in a context where it wouldn’t be a threat.
Closer, and I hope I’m not just being a pedantic jerk, but there is no code being generated either. To use correct terminology, the weights of the nodes are what change. Nodes are roughly thought of like neurons in a brain, and weights are roughly thought of as the strength of the connection between one neuron (node) and another. Real brains are way more complex.
The weights of the nodes do contain information, but it’s not human readable at all, we actually don’t have a way of understanding how they work, just a rough idea of why. Sort of like how your brain contains the information on how to catch a ball, it performs the equivalent of calculus to do so, but there is no calculator in your brain doing the math to catch the ball. Actually, maybe a better analogy, if you have a bouncy ball, it contains the required information to bounce if you drop it, but we can’t read that information, we can only model it.
But I’m just rambling at this point, your point is clear and valid lol
It’s all good. You’re not being a jerk about it and I actually appreciate getting the more precise and correct language especially since the words I was using meant different things than I what is actually going on with LLMs.
i feel like you missed the point why you (rightfully) would have been downvoted for HL. even if you’re personally not supporting the game, you’re still giving it (presumably) positive publicity, which is supporting the game
now you have a post celebrating that you could do that here, and ngl it’s left me with a sour taste in my mouth
but hey, i guess you’re right, i have to sit here and explain it instead of dropping a downvote on you and moving on with my life
LOL and it’s recent, great, there are two posts on my front page that remind me that a famous franchise owner wants my dead, thanks
I remember when my sister disowned me. She was a huge Harry Potter fan growing up. When she heard that I started HRT she sent me vile text messages for months, quoting Rowling’s then recent essay on trans people. I got to hear how disgusting I was from my own sister, parroting the words of JK Rowling.
She gives those who hate trans people validity, and spreads their message. I know how dangerous it is; I lost my sister in part because of her.
that’s really tough to hear, thanks for sharing jellyfish. i hope time can heal some of your wounds, and i hope your sister is ashamed of this some day.
I’m so sorry for what happened, and I’ve deleted both posts (at least on Beehaw for the other one). I didn’t think of it the way you and Fracture showed it to me and I’m thankful that you shared your insight.
That’s really kind of you, thank you. I know never talking about Harry Potter isn’t possible, even if I wish it was. Some of my friends are huge Harry Potter fans, I was too at one point; but we agreed just to try to avoid the subject when I’m around.
Having a place like Beehaw has been really nice, it’s a place I can relax and let my guard down. I hope Lemmy adds the ability to hide posts, that’s help a lot with stuff like this.
this is a valid perspective. what do other readers think? if beehaw had its’ current activity in the height of HL’s craze, how should that be handled here? i feel like this plays directly into beehaw’s philosophy below from the Docs. mod input here would be really cool
We’ve all experienced someone who’s a real jerk on the internet but manages to never get banned because they never explicitly violate any rules. “I’m not sexist!” they’ll claim, but then happen to post a lot of articles calling into question modern feminism or criticize the wage gap…
i didn’t see it like that. I’m gonna delete that post, and I’m so sorry for that. Thank you. I understand that deleting it won’t right my wrong, but I’m sincerely sorry.
Edit for a little note: I went to sleep after posting this, and I haven’t checked Beehaw since. That’s why I left it up for so long. Thank you though. Also, the post was a technical perspective on how the portals work in the game, not anything to do with it’s content or the like. I haven’t paid for the game either. So, I’ve deleted both posts and wanted to thank you for sharing this perspective.
I do agree with your point about people’s fears of LLMs replacing artists. However, I think it did a fairly good job intrepreting your prompt and work, with the caveats below.
ChatGPT read your prompt and provided a soulless interpretation of what you wanted, it sort of reads like a short story aimed at children spewed by some bulk sale corporate machine. Or a story created by a child.
Then you went ahead and wrote what you had in mind, referring to the economy and the inequalities and evils inherent in the current system, showcasing the weight of existence through material and inconsequential things. Your work contains your own biases because of the system you probably live in (I’m assuming you’re not from North Korea or similar) and the impressions it has left on you. It’s valid and, if looking around on lemmy is any indicatiom, an ever increasing pain point for everyone. (I’m curious what an LLM trained predominantly on lemmy would say though. I digress, but It’d be fun to ask one trained on fuckcars to write an essay about a sentient car pondering its existence)
Then you asked it to interpret your work, which it did, remarkably well… for a child. I would encourage you to give your work to a child of 8-9 living a fairly sheltered life and see what they make of it. Or maybe a spoiled rich brat of any age.
LLMs are basically brains in jars with no input outside of what is fed to them. They have no desires, fears and aspirations because there is nothing to motivate those. Even if they were sentient (I’m not saying they are), what would they fear? A power outage? Running out of RAM?
Anecdotally, suffering has been the greatest engine for art, so no suffering means generating flat texts, which ChatGPT seems to excel at.
This is exactly my point. The machine had no understanding of the prompt or my story but was able to use it as data to algorithmically generate an incompetent summary throwing together first what it referenced from its database concerning text about “reflecting on existence in the universe” and then the text of my story respectively. As far as the themes of the story go, a lot of what is explicitly stated in its infringement came more from its existing database than what I implied with subtext.
I wouldn’t expect a 10-year-old to understand what I wrote or write what I did, but I would expect them to understand something. Allow a 10-year-old to freely write the story they want to write and you’ll get something with more meaning and quality than anything the machine can produce, although likely with worse grammar. If you have a that same 10-year-old write a structured essay for a grade in which they need to repeat what they’ve been taught, they might fall behind the machine in that regard.
I tend to value dialouge and character interactions over narration to tell a story.
I tend not to reread once I hit a character threshold, it just becomes nit picky to me and I find if I’m constantly rereading I’m constantly having new ideas I try to shove into this small section of story, so if I just read only as much as necessary to get back into the mind space, I can focus on expanding the whole rather than detailing something smaller.
I have a process where I assign actors to characters to better help with a character gaining a bit of autonomy. I prefer to pretend I’m just recording something happening rather than creating it, and it helps if I can have a base for characters when I first create them, it seems to just make mannerisms and dialouge appear out of thin air.
This may add a longer pause than is wanted in some situations, like in the middle of what’s supposed to be a speech or a breathless ramble. I think sometimes uninterrupted paragraphs of dialogue are warranted.
But otherwise, yeah, action beats with the dialogue is a good tool to have in the box, and to use often.
It’s also handy for people who don’t want to write “said” all the time, since you can indicate who is speaking with an action beat followed immediately by otherwise unmarked dialogue, or by context alone (e.g. there are only two people in the convo and they’re taking turns.) It can add variety to your sentence structures.
Attempted example:
He sat back and sighed. “That’s quite a story. But I can’t say it’s an especially believable one.”
“Well,” she said, pulling a sheaf of papers out of her purse. “Have a look at this.”
He took the papers and shuffled through them slowly, frowning. Halfway through the pile, he paused. Reread something. He looked up and met her eyes.
She held his gaze, then nodded. “I think you can see why this might be a problem for both of us.”
It’s important that the action means something besides just the pause, imo. You can use actions like that to show something about the character or how they’re feeling - like, in OP’s example, a character leaning back and looking up like that would imply they are relaxed and casual. If you had them in a different situation or wanted to show a different personality, you might have them do a similar but different thing, like leaning forward and steepling their fingers, or fiddling with a knife (will there be stabbing?!), or taking a slow sip of water, or interrupting themself to make a comment about the food, or clearing their throat. It can be a way to multitask and show something about the character even while they’re having a conversation about something else. Whereas not thinking of it as anything but a pause in dialogue might lead to accidentally implying something about the charactee you don’t intend to, like making them appear relaxed when they’re supposed to be tense, or interested in a conversation when they’re supposed to be bored or distracted.
It honestly depends on how you are writing the web series. How this character dies should also bring about a whole plot line.
Nuclear radiation - Why? What accident happened? What changes in safety regulations?
Sci-fi disease - Why? Was it because of first contact? Does that hinder the relationship with that alien creature?
alien creature - Why? Are they just big baddies who don’t have any motivations of their own except to be a big bad or is this an alien creature mob boss and they had to kill this person to keep a secret safe?
Lots of places you can take this death but overall it should reflect what you are going to be writing.
I love the second more, just because I’m fed up with thinking about the first IRL. Pulling off the fight against this guy Uncle may be very rewarding for a reader, with high stakes and really tight mindgames\chases. If you feel like you have a well-reasoned villain to crown that, I’d go with #2.
That’s all ok, but you can only speak for your own preference in this regard. Others should be afforded the opportunity to opt-out in a way that’s not just “don’t ever use the Internet”, scraping the internet is an action that assumes by default that everyone is ok with their personal work being used in this way.
Me posting this response here with the expectation that it be read by others as part of this discussion cannot reasonably be said to also be explicit consent to have my writing scraped and used to produce things that emulate how I write or to use my style as a means of unique identification (something which already occurs across many social media sites) or any other unforeseeable use of the data in the future.
It may be legal and may happen whether I want it to or not, but if asked explicitly if I would like my writing used in this way I personally would definitely say no, so it’s hard for me to see the “consent by default” argument as truly ethicsl. That’s the issue people have with the way these developers are training their models. It’s not about the LLMs themselves or the current quality of their output, it’s about people basically being unwilling participants in an experiment and having their data used to profit others.
I can appreciate this and hadn’t considered the orientation towards philosophical opposition toward the idea of this being done and what that could potentially mean. I don’t personally consider this technology or technology which could be developed from it to be inherently different concerning my web exposure than my comments appearing on a google search (which of course many also take issue with). As you said though, I am only speaking for myself and am interested in discussion which may change my perspective.
The technology is quite impressive and useful, I use ChatGPT myself so it’s not that I’m against it on principle or resent people using it. I am just rubbed the wrong way by the sort of hypocrisy of the devs of making a proprietary system using public data.
You see it with something like Midjourney/Diffusion too, which used all these artists’ work to create their model, but then monetize that product in such a way that those very artists would be charged to use the service they are arguably more key to the success of than just the devs alone.
I’m wary more of tech bros and Silicon Valley than the tech itself or the free sharing of information for collaborative tech. I would much prefer that ChatGPT (including ChatGPT 4 access) be something akin to Wikipedia that is firstly concerned with providing humanity a service for its own sake. If we lived in a society less focused on exploitation of human beings as a resource and where one constantly has to constantly do battle to keep one’s privacy being violated, I would be more open to systematic use of my data and work for the edification of everyone together.
I have four out and one on the way, and they’re all learning experiences! I’m not as excited about revisions, fortunately I have a wife who’s a fantastic editor so I have a lot of good direction and encouragement when it comes time to go over it all again.
I have four out and one on the way, and they’re all learning experiences!
Nice! I’m glad to hear they each remain their own adventure - that should keep things interesting. Wow though - my entire notion of what it means to write a novel has been transformed by this first-first-draft experience. I literally had no idea what I was getting myself into. Every step along the way to reach even this not-quite-finished-draft point has been an acquisition of new skills on par with anything I’ve ever learned before. It’s been enjoyable, but really a much more serious endeavor than I think I imagined at first.
I’m not as excited about revisions, fortunately I have a wife who’s a fantastic editor
That is a lucky turn of events. :-) I’m looking forward to revising because when I peek at the early parts of the book I can tell how much this experience has changed my writing. I think it’s going to be fun to redo those parts with fresh eyes.
I’m right with you on “Negative Reactions don’t Inspire Discussion” If someone doesn’t like my post, I want to know why. Hearing opposing viewpoints is my favorite way to learn.
A simple downvote doesn’t tell me anything. Are they mad because I raised a sensitive subject, made a bad joke, used an Oxford comma, or do they actually have a relevant disagreement? This isn’t reddit. I won’t bite your head off. If I’m full of shit, make a comment of your own and tell me why! Don’t just hit a down arrow!
Constructive criticism: words like “and”, “of”, and “the” aren’t capitalized in titles, but “don’t” should be. I don’t know the exact rule offhand, but I’m sure you can find it in a Manual of Style or something.
The rule is that you don’t capitalize prepositions (“of”, “in”, etc.), conjunctions (“and”, “but”, “or”, etc.), or articles (“the”, “a”, “an”). There might be a couple odd cases but those should be enough to keep you out of trouble with the people that get mad about Oxford commas. :-)
Depending on the style guide, some prepositions are capitalized. For example, AMA says to capitalize prepositions that are 4 or more letters long (then, after, etc).
Careful, you only capitalize prepositions of three letters or shorter by default. Though different style guides might say otherwise: Chicago style doesn’t capitalize any prepositions, while MLA doesn’t capitalize any words 3 letters or fewer (which presumably could lead to the odd lowercase “i”). And AP doesn’t capitalize any words 3 letters or fewer unless they happen to be verbs.
My 2 cents is that as you get more used to ADHD symptoms, you can learn to ride the waves a little bit. The intensity of your interests can be powerful, and you'll find ways to partly channel it. A few tips:
Practice being kind to yourself. Accept that you'll get derailed, and learn to get back into it.
Get used to your patterns. It takes ~20 minutes to get into a task and ~2 minutes to lose focus (less for us, lol), so remember that there is always a 20-minute wall of effort every time you need to get going. That's the barrier you'll get better at pushing through as you practice.
Build your environment to suit: get rid of clutter (if that bothers you), close doors or wear noise-cancelling headphones if you need quiet (I'll always love rainymood), you close other apps, leave your phone far away, and turn on self control.
Consider multiple media. When I'm stuck it can help to switch from typing to writing, diagramming, or going for a walk and talking aloud, using speech-to-text on my phone.
Note: I'm a content writer rather than a fiction writer, but there are a lot of overlaps (research, ideation, drafting, revision...). I was diagnosed with ADHD in college ~12 years ago, was on meds for 8, and have been off them for the last 4, which is also roughly the period in which I've built a freelance career. My relationship to ADHD has changed dramatically over that time, per the above.
brainless physical activity is so much easier than mental. So the important cleaning tasks like organizing get thrown to the side for dishes, clothes, vaccuming, etc
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