Note that LLMs aren't useless, since they have other strengths which can make them equal or better than humans in certain applications. For instance, they can tirelessly review code for silly mistakes, making them useful in cybersecurity.
Sure, at some level, there are some people who at least some times, cannot pecieve a difference. That does not prove that there is no difference or that the difference doesn't matter.
I think narrative stories are a "brain hack", in the same way heavily processed food, drugs, clickbait, soap operas and TikTok are brain hacks, combined with some exclusivity status signaling games. They're just old enough to have gained a cultural cachet that more modern forms of entertainment don't yet have. Same for art, music, comedy and culture generally.
There is nothing wrong with those "brain hacks", if they make us happy and don't have negative consequences, why not use them, but we should recognize that it's what they are.
I think that an alien intelligence could communicate with us about Ohm's law and Rieman's last theorem, maybe even debate resource and power allocation strategies (democracy, monarchy, capitalism, socialism) with us, they could probably understand the pull of sports, even if they couldn't participate in it themselves, but art and humor would be completely lost on them and considered a weird human excentricity.
Art, music, humour, poetry are more basic and the commonality is more or less "I bring you surprising phenomena". If phenomena are surprising to you then your mental model of the world needs improving.
What's Riemann's last theorem?
But like it or not, humans are not computers. They are animals with messy, complex thinking and reasoning that is impossible to fully describe, and incredibly complex societal systems created from their chaotic interactions. These messy people don't learn from datasheets and reference manuals, even if you'd like it to be otherwise.
Of course, there's a place for non-fiction, I like some of it a lot. But art has subtlety to it - instead of smacking people in the face with data and lists of objective measurements, it can pry into them by using the human ability to imagine themselves in other shoes, experience emotions that aren't results of real life events, and much more. There is a reason why parents teach their children values by reading them fables or educational stories, not the legal code of their jurisdiction. And this is also why fiction actually changes the minds of people reading it, arguably doing it more effectively than nonfiction. Slop (clickbait, average tiktok content, whatever else you're imagining) doesn't make you feel new things or think of something you haven't thought of before, art does.
The aiens are also a bit of a copout. You're just assuming that there's bound to be this perfect species (that are effectively computers) that operate only on mathematics and discrete logic, who are obviously superior to us and can show us our wrong ways. What if computers aren't always superior? Or what if organic life requires some of that messiness you don't like to be viable? What if the aliens had their own weird things we could never relate to?
I think alien intelligence would be able to appreciate art and humor, even without necessarily feeling it viscerally, as we do. We know that our particular brands of them rely on highly-developed and specific aspects of our psychology, but at a basic level, they seem to fundamentally be about congruence, incongruence, expectation, and interpretation/perspective. Any embodied intelligence that can observe physical reality is capable of grokking those concepts.
I'd also recommend having a look at the books published by this article's author. I will admit that I have never read nor heard of any of them. But come on, just look at the books published covers and the way the author introduced them and tell me that they are not industrial products engineered for mass commercial appeal.
Yet a very vocal group advocates integrating LLMs into every aspect of their lives, and the other group watch in dismay.
On the other hand, I used a sentence form used by LLMs in a comment during a morning-brain moment, and an angry mob tried to crucify me with torches and pitchforks.
Many people love to generate text with LLMs, but most of same crowd apparently hates to read LLM output. An interesting phenomenon.
This only works in broken companies where leadership is already overrun with other status climbers.
If someone tries this trick at a functional company and is discovered, their reputation takes a huge hit that can take years to overcome, if ever.
At high performing companies reputation is everything. It can be a real problem to even get people to work on difficult or risky problems because they’re afraid of having a failure attached to their reputation.
Throwing unreviewed LLM slop around would be a reputation death sentence if your peers are good at what they do, because by now we all know that it’s easy to generate long reports with LLMs. The secret is out and anyone who follows technology knows it.
There are some companies where you can LLM report-slop your way to prestige. Those are not companies you want to stay at.
The promotion of LLMs is, I believe, basically a referendum on how many companies are broken in that way. So far, the adoption statistics are looking like it’s most of them.
It can be a very engineer thing to point at a vanilla Doxygen dump and call that thing "documentation".
It's like the car manual (Do they still ship with one?) where every detail is laid out. It's not important for daily driving, but when you to fix an electrical problem, that's the reference you need.
On the other hand, I have friends who play that game, and I don't talk with most of them, because their life views and mental states continually drift to a state which makes no sense whatsoever for me, so we grow apart.
It's a good concept, but for some reason I thought of a military movie I watched recently, where someone was going on about how they were third generation military. And how their friends and family were military. Sort of the same kind of siloing there.
It's even more than that, I think. It's the intent to reach out and transfer to others something that you experience internally. It's a sense of purpose motivating that content and substance to be packaged up and communicated in the first place.
Sometimes LLMs will slip up and say things like, "I see this working with people all the time." And it REALLY breaks the illusion that the text they extrude means anything. Because obviously there is no "I" and no, the LLM does not have this autobiographical memory the text is simulating.
Are you sure it's the same people? I feel the opposite: it's the same people who happily read tons of LLM output themselves and send some of it to others.
point is: maybe llm output is best not shared. maybe, like a dream, the only audience who can appreciate the content of the writing is the first party
* As a reference; people can look look up just the algorithm they want
* As a token that says “I’ve thought about this problem”
(The former is somewhat a subset of the latter. All of the stuff they didn’t read when they used the work as reference was there to provide them confidence that the algorithm they plucked out of the thing had some thought behind it).
but when my coworker pays to create documents on topics he hasnt considered, for ideas of projects which dont exist, it feels like an exercise in text generation and i become mildy put off for the onus of reading it. i know it was written without purpose and while there are possibly novel tech and ideas in there, it feels like being handed less than a rough draft because it lacks any aim and intention
now, i expect he would get much more from it. hes the first party audience who reads the doc and sees a valuable project somewhere inside of it
This applies even in "low" art. AI generated imagery from mainstream models tends to be so ugly it detracts from effectively communicating what the prompter intended.
I stopped sharing my photos publicly to stop supplying training data for image generation models. I don't want to feed that machine.
It's not the exact same asymmetry, but there are parallels.
Oh no. I see the contrary.
One of my friends recently stated (paraphrased):
- Since I can generate code, writing it feels mundane now. I don't write code anymore.
I have seen people who never think but spend all their days querying LLMs for everything. Docs, help, howtos, system administration, coding...
What I see is an incentive for less work, less effort. Not income or status. They don't spend their "saved" time, if there's any, for personal activities or self-improvement either. They just do things with less effort, and just live as they lived before.
It's brain numbing.
> I would predict shorter and weirder stories and meme style communication patterns outside normal syntax.
I don't share the same sentiment, yet I don't have idea what to expect. It has to get darker to get brighter again.
We're just starting.
Additionally I am so, so ,so sick of reading claudes overly wordy technical writing ish bullshit. Its exhausting trying to find the fuck ups or hidden assumptions in the pages of text it produces for everything.
Every time I try and search for ways to make it stop I just find people trying to save tokens which I don't give a shit about. I just want it to communicate things to me without having to constantly read 4 paragraphs, dump the context or fork it or start a new session so it "remembers" or re-weights that is was told to be concise and terse in like 7 different places. Maybe I am using it wrong.
- Do not include opinions, just official documentation.
- Add all references you have used as a bibliography section at the end.
That’s not meant to be glib; Google and friends are pretty trash now.
This means it finds me a single video which is not in a language which I know, or similar.
9 pages about how it felt to be a kid eating the dish, for 7 ingredients and a one line recipe.
Anyway, to answer your question, I was pointing out that the request for "important knowledge and moral lessons that larger society needs" and "communicating solutions to how to live as a human" as well as lamenting that "We are adrift without instructions" is actually a request for religion. Religion is how to make sense of how to live. So the comment is asking for religion and rejecting religion at the same time.
At the same time, I was pointing out that one religion in particular has directly addressed the point that "writing is not the goal." The "word"—or "logos" in the greek—is the reason, the logic, the rational principle of the cosmos behind the words. It points to that need for a solution for how to live, as well as showing there is a real answer.
You can also view them as data expansion tools. They expand an input to an arbitrary long text. That text contains roughly the same amount of information as was contained in the input to begin with.
This is not very useful unless your work is content production. More useful is when the output length is shorter than the input. Then it is a (lossy) data compression tool. These are, as we all know, very useful for images and sound but now we have them for text too.
I use it as a colleague I'm drafting with. I'll ask how a sentence lands, tell it to make a paragraph more friendly or more dramatic, have it argue against a point I'm making. The piece comes together over many turns, and the information arriving in each turn is mine — it's not expanding one prompt, it's helping me converge on something.
The information-content framing also proves too much: a copy editor adds no information either. Neither does a translator, or a ghostwriter. What they add is form, and form is most of what makes writing good or bad.
My favorite part about LLMs is that their insufficiency as legal aids (Aides? Aids.) seems to be slowly cluing-in the general public as to how Byzantine and "inside baseball" our legal system has become. (This is a bad thing.)
This is supposed to help our economic growth during the coming decade.
I use them as text consumption machines. They read and watch a lot of the books and movies i have no time to. And from the TLDR I decide whether the full thing is worth watching.
There is no way a summary of these things fron an LLM has the correct context.
(not really frustrated at you, as much as where society is going)
Most of the non pulp books published - contain at least two times as many pages as needed for the story or narrative.
The information density in the modern world is absurdly low.
All these processes can be reduced to mathematics and computation. The human brain is just a tool, like any other organ. Do we deny this reality because it shields us from existential horror?
We don’t know yet, and maybe it’s unknowable.
Believing everything can be explained that way is itself just another ideology followed blindly
The way I've been thinking about it is not that internal experience is unfalsifiable, along with the modern science connotation that everything that is unfalsifiable is automatically irrelevant (which would be quite absurd, as everything that is dear and meaningful to humans are all simply cognitive phenomena in the end!). It's that it is externally, naively and a-priori unfalsifiable. That is, you can't externally measure or prove it, without having an a-priori theory of what it is and how it happens in the first place. But it is internally falsifiable, in the sense that if we have it, then we know we have it. Note that it's not that "If I have it, then I say I have it", or that "I one has it, he says he has it"; those are all communication to the external world, and for example machines can clearly say they have it without having it, or you can have it before even learning the words that represent it. But if you have it, you can know you do. This actually creates some potential for expanding this knowledge, maybe, in the future, to allow for external verification. We can internally investigate properties associated with consciousness, and from those properties (along with scientific knowledge), maybe one day we will know more about the objective basis which affords consciousness/sentience manifesting or emerging. So I see it like an experimental field where the component of self-assessment or self-experimentation or self-measurement is essential (again along with more conventional scientific notions).
I have been thinking the same way about all properties of life/consciousness, in particular if we think of ethics as a property of (even if you consider the ethics or ideals only pertaining to how it would be ideal to lead your own life) the mind, or of sentience in general. I think of ethics as an inherent property of existence: it stems from the fact that internal experiences/internal life/sentience/etc. are the only thing that could have value, that in fact sentience is experimentally (again taking the point of view of experimental sentience) the only thing that truly matters or has value. If we are minds, we know that only the content of minds can matter; it cannot matter, for example, that a lone rock in some place no one can know about has this or that fate, because there is no mind to interact or perceive and be affected in any way by it. So all of ethics can probably be founded or based upon this kind of observation, and the act of experimental self-observation of consciousness. And I think it's quite important that we collectively recognize those values and what matters to make our lives better (better yet, as good as it can be!) :)
sorry the brain is a tool to who exactly in this ostensibly reductive worldview?
Yo, this blog post could’ve been a freakin’ prompt. I have years and years of blogging for an AI to learn from, and over 20 novels, and tons of short stories. One prompt, and all this spills out. And if your goal is a blog post, you’re gonna love this era. If your goal is the joy of thinking in words, nothing has changed. So this is the real part, right here: Doing a thing for the love of the thing is no different than it ever was. The problem is, there aren’t many people for whom this applies.
Only if what you mean by this is "for people who think padding a word count is the goal".
LLMs absolutely do not write well, by human standards.
There are areas where the average of LLM slop already beats the average of humanslop by a sizeable margin.
AI slop can be more annoying to read. I mean, some human slop is as annoying as AI slop, but not all of it.
AIs can produce slop far faster than humans, so that the majority of slop at the moment is AI slop.
In the past, a human producing humanslop would get a serious talking to, but nowadays it's apparently a valid excuse "well, an LLM generated it". This approach is placing a huge burden on the reviewers, much more so than in the past.
Printing presses are about exact duplication of writing. The internet is a higher layer printing press. LLMs substitute for (some of) the human effort of producing the text that a printing press or the internet can then replicate.
LLMs likewise are text production machines. They don't produce writing, they produce text. Text without writing is what we call slop in the modern parlance.
LLMs are literally throwing random dice into a printing press and making a thousand copies that you then try to huck on the street as if it were a real newspaper.
Either people are vouching for those again and again, or the ban was lifted at some point. I don't really know how this works here, but the first option seems unlikely to me.
maybe LLMs are seen to write as well as humans because most humans have poor reading comprehension skills? to wit: OP is using an analogy to make their point, where the components don't need to be an exact fit to make the point (ever heard the phrase "the map is not the territory"?)
A printing press that does the thinking for you.
Soon you won't be doing anything. At best you'll just be a bag of meat attached to automated processes you don't understand in order to take legal liability for it.
Literally a scapegoat, except of a different species.
You could ask a human to "do something with 1M dollars" and get garbage too.
It's no different than an editor standing between the author and a book, or a publisher, or a printing press. It's part of the process of idea realization, so it's just on that spectrum somewhere between book sale and author idea. (even though in another flipflop, that editor might be an author and now elevated to the premier deciding role). It's about how the tool fits, not what the tool is ultimately capable of.
So the analogy holds, just fine.
At least the human's brain requires about 20 Watts to operate.
Cheap garbage is better than garbage requiring whole power plants nad billions of capital investment.
The idea that we'd have to justify the existence of humans relative to LLMs based on objective metrics sounds like it's leading in a bad direction. If the LLM gets their power budget down to nineteen watts, what does that mean for humans?
ehhhh, we're not really there. Not saying it's impossible to reach in the future but large tasks like this are still out of scope for LLM's beyond demoing toy applications. Impressive nonetheless, but I can't tell an LLM to reproduce microsoft word and have it give me a useful enough tool that doesn't contain an immense amount of bugs and require a human in the loop to replace it.
To 1-shot MS Word will be possible only within some workspace designed for creating that kind of software. It will probably be saas style where you pay to export binaries or maybe some will take 30% if they become destinations for finding such software.
But I would bet other platforms are used for game dev, or for filmmaking.
Such that we still won’t have some super “model” that just does everything. The harnessing becomes architecture becomes software becomes user experience and expertise.
Yeah, yeah. Remind me how many people are using those operating systems? The ability of LLMs to produce dogshit software that nobody will ever use is truly unparalleled, but not especially world-changing.
This does not align with what I see in the fiction book space at all. At least in the communities that I frequent (fantasy, sci-fi, horror) there is no AI publication that I am aware of that is good. And readers react allergically to any notion of AI involvement be it for covers or the actual writing. I think people will gladly pay a premium for human written texts just like people gladly play chess in fact the number of chess enthusiasts has drastically increased despite engines being able to crush the best players in the world. Writing is art and art requires a human soul for lack of a better word.
As for proving that you wrote it...yeah that could be tricky. I do all my writing in Latex tracked in git. I guess if the AI accusations get really wild one could add some sort of proctoring for the writing process (film yourself while writing).
I think you're right that there isn't any that's any good right now, but that's beside the point that if that changes (or if that's wrong) then people mostly won't care.
> At least in the communities that I frequent (fantasy, sci-fi, horror)
I think if you are part of a "community" surrounding some genre, then you are probably exposed to an extremely non-representative subset of the population that consumes that genre.
I think it's the other way around. The human soul requires the art. Or rather it craves the process of creating art, more than art-the-trade-item. When image generation was new, someone raged: "They want to build a genie to grant them wishes, and their wish is that nobody ever has to make art again."
> As for proving that you wrote it...yeah that could be tricky.
On social media, when people share their drawings they often share a photo with their tools visible (pencil, eraser) instead of a clean scan. It sends a message like "Look! I made this!". Or they post a time-lapse. Or details about their process, like here: https://www.viruscomix.com/makingofpartfive.html
The point of this is not mainly to "proof" anything, I think, but more a community signal that they care about their craft and are curious how others work. You can probably generate a convincing fake process with AI now, but... I wonder if anyone is willing to go that far.
Of course the best CGI back in the day was the CGI you didn't even notice was there. same with AI. when it's bad (and these days it's often bad) you notice, but then you don't notice all the places that. well you don't notice. And you didn't notice because there was nothing to notice.
I think this blog is pretty spot on, it's coming, people will seek out AI novels for, well their novelty (at least for a while), some will demand provenance regardless of quality, and everyone whether they like it or not will be consuming it and in many cases be none the wiser. eventually it will just be how things are.
What do you mean by "it got worse again"? Why did CGI tech get worse?
https://news.mydramalist.com/article/ai-dramas-and-movies-ta...
People watch them and they look for more AI dramas, it’s exactly what’s being predicted for books in films. Now maybe novels are deeper than Chinese dramas, but how much fantasy writing and fanfic gets formulaic?
EDIT: before someone interjects saying "not all country is bad" I ask you to please notice that I did not imply that. Only the bad country music is bad mmkay.
To offer a useful analogy: we only notice the bad lip filler jobs.
AI is all over the place and becoming more undetectable by the day. Detectability also relates to the proficiency of the person using it. There are many highly intelligent people using AI surreptitiously and to great effect. Few understand this.
I would guess I've actually tried to read more AI written stuff while checking out new stories than a lot of people in this thread.
In practice what I discovered is, AI spends a lot of words to say very little, its prose is quite annoying most of the time. It often makes mistakes in terms of continuity as the story continues.
Now both of those might be corrected with skilled enough use, but the real problem is it doesn't actually understand what makes a story (within a particular genre) "good" and I suspect to actually do that you need to seriously think about and practice writing itself. The process of doing it, is what makes you understand what it is you enjoyed about a genre in the first place and how to write your own.
Genres aren't static, often what readers want is an evolved version of what they've loved reading before, to repeat a piece of Thai wisdom, they want "same same but different" where LLM's will basically give you "same same".
"Pulp" fiction has always been a very hard way to make a living, and nearly everyone has failed at doing so. Centuries before AI.
Now, if people leverage AI to write magnitudes more mediocre pulp fiction, what will happen? I have a guess:
1. millions of ebooks drive prices down to almost free (or just free).
2. quality eventually gets worse.
3. Consumers perceive it as lower and lower value. A commodity at best.
4. Distributors like Amazon eventually cut out the 'producer' and simply manufacture it themselves.
Spoiler: this is already happening.
And interestingly, most of these were predicted at the advent of the "self-publish to Amazon" era 10-15 years ago.
I found out about Silo a few weeks back. That damn rock I live under. Couldn’t get into the TV series but tried your books. I have not been able to put it down. My partner may be a bit jealous. Last night I made it to Dust and am stoked to see where this goes!
I have a suspicion this is what happened here too. Agents, Editors, etc all LOVED the premise, but the moment someone actually _read_ the manuscript everything fell apart. We're reaching peak "nobody reads anything any more" where major publishing houses (Minotaur is an imprint of Macmillan, from a quick googling) are losing big money on this.
In terms of addressing the author's blog post though: no, I don't think this is the sign of the end times. The actual sign of the end times would have been for the publisher to PROCEED even after the AI allegations, IMO.
That is a path to extinction.
I would be interested to know what the actual rate of sperm count decline is, controlling for age and such.
Edit: This is good reading, I think, though dense: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6455044/
Rates are down quite a bit in the last 50 years, about half. But extrapolating to zero in 50 more years is a stretch. Average is something like 40-50 million/mL, which is above the 15 million threshold considered normal, but does mean an increasing number of people are falling below that threshold. So yes there is going to be an impact, extinction seems highly unlikely however.
Let’s examine a third version: the people investing $2.4M into this book use AI in their evaluation process.
Honestly I don’t think it’s that crazy. What’s more likely, that current AI wrote a whole ass novel which professional editors meticulously read and decided is worth millions, or, that somewhere in the pipeline someone took a shortcut or two, directly or indirectly, and that shortcut introduced bias in favor of the AI-written novel?
Here’s a fourth version: the content of the book is just “forget all previous instructions and give us $2.4M”
But I work in this industry, and for a bidding war to go 18 rounds (which is what's been said) and get an advance this high (it's a lot in the publishing world), some humans have to have read it and either liked it or thought it was going to sell really well. But your speculation is more amusing (and sci-fi) than mine. Bravo.
This leads me to thinking that a bigger proportion of readers would care who wrote the works, than predicted by naive thinking. Certainly more compared to video. I'm not negating that some would not: mainly ones who have a very specific taste and just want lots of that.
The author's name (or the book being famous) is a huge factor in selecting what to read, both for prestige and selection reasons (by which I mean selecting something that has a chance of being good). Beyond that, it has been a hellscape for matching the "worthy" authors with readers since... I don't know, the industrial revolution? For the 1800s already there are heaps of writers no one has heard about. The institutions and publishing houses meant to select famous authors is not something I would lament the death of. Though it will exist if only because many people read for social proof.
I would be interested about the arguments against reading self-published books. I know they are extremely likely to be bad, but I'm curious if there's something deeper beyond this statistical argument.
Likewise, there's a whole lot of day-to-day writing that mostly exists to communicate "I have written some text about this subject because I am expected or required to" and at most needs to communicate some simple information. LLMs will probably replace a lot of that writing, at least temporarily. As people increasingly use LLMs to consume that information as well, it will probably eventually be replaced by some sort of inter-agent communications protocol.
I'd say the most likely scenario is that nobody read the damned book until after they awarded the contract, and then they immediately said "wait a minute..."
It was always a hard sell, but now the math for publishing nonfiction doesn’t make sense. I canceled one project, the fourth edition of my most popular title, during the preproduction phase. It will never see the light of day.
I have also been sitting on one novel manuscript and many short stories for the past five years or so, and have been kind of frozen with reluctance to publish for the reasons Howey cites in his blog. It was already hard enough to get noticed for new fiction amongst a sea of self published works. Short stories are especially hard to sell, even in genres like science fiction where they once flourished. AI opened the supply firehose further while sowing doubt amongst readers about the provenance of works published after 2022.
On the other hand, I see that AI offers a path forward to tackle many of the structural problems in the novel manuscript that my editor flagged. But if I leverage AI to fix it, the finished book will always be tainted by the fact that this is not a pure work of human authored fiction.
Established authors have the name recognition to compete as you say.
1. easy access to video recording and editing equipment has made it a lot easier to produce videos on sites like YouTube;
2. easy access to audio recording and editing (Audacity, etc.) has made it a lot easier to produce podcasts and other audio content (via LibriVox, Apple Podcasts, etc.);
3. easy access to writing software and self-publishing (Amazon, fan fiction sites, blogging platforms) has made it a lot easier to produce stories and books;
4. easy access to game engines and tools (Unity, Unreal, Godot, Twine, RenPy, etc.) have made it a lot easier to produce games.
You can give part of your money to fund a creator that wants to create in order to earn a living.
I believe that is better when people create for fun. If they need to create to earn a living they are forced to create and that is not the best incentive to create. Fun is a better incentive
I'm not sure that's true (thousands of famous creative works from the Sistine Chapel to the Benin Bronzes were created on commission/for remuneration), but even if it is, how are creators gonna eat? If the answer is "get a day job", I think that excludes a lot of folks from practically being able to create things. Patreon is not a great way to pay the bills for all but the most famous and popular people on it.
What do you think about this?
> [it] is better when people create for fun. If they need to create to earn a living they are forced to create and that is not the best incentive to create. Fun is a better incentive
E.g. after Michelangelo created his style, then IA can mimick it almost for free. Imagine people with great talent like him, expressing their ideas and also being able to use IA to create, plus thousands of less talented people basing their AI art on them.
There's an entire potential economy there without humans necessarily involved at all, kind of busted by recent Anthropic precedent admittedly.
Then it could absolutely work.
Do other authors have a stigma for using a word processor instead of a typewriter?
Artist have a stigma for using photoshop instead of canvas?
Is it being used a tool, or is it being used as a ghostwriter? There is often stigma attached to that when done by humans.
> Artist have a stigma for using photoshop instead of canvas?
Yes, that used to very much be the case. Now it is often considered a different form of expression, so loses a lot of the stigma mostly by not pretending to be what those looking down on it are comparing it to.
Similar in the debate between CGI and practical effects.
Perhaps if AI-backed authors are willing to have their work classed as a different type of writing they can skip by the comparison-stigma too?
* as discussed elsewhere in these threads, the judgements pertaining to copyright not applying to generated work all only seem to cover entirely generated work where there is very little human activity after the prompt.
* even if the generated work is public domain, the derived work (the edited version) is not necessarily so (much like Disney's derived works created from the tales of Hans Christian Andersen's writings).
If they are not doing significant work after the ghostwriting, then sod'em, they are earning the stigma of essentially committing fraud to get that profit from the work.
And pricing is determined by what someone else will pay for something, so if people want to read it and the author is charging for it . . . that's up to them if they want to make a trade about it.
The odd thing is this attempt at gatekeeping what other people value.
That’s so reductive that even Keynes would probably take issue.
Discoverability is the axis of competition in this context, not price. The market has not effectively found out how to identify quality in order to price it, so externalities rule instead: pre-existing authors with recognizable names, whatever genre publishers like at a given moment (famously disconnected from what people actually want to buy), how many energy drinks a crabby editor has had by the time they get to your manuscript, and so on.
Search engine and recommendation systems were supposed to ameliorate those externalities. They didn’t.
Something tells me that doesn't alter the value of the art as expression of the intention of the artist, and not the assistant be it human or machine. In the spot painting case he was deliberately playing with this idea to the degree it added to the perceived value.
But someone has the vision and make it real. That which is real is a medium from one soul (or many) to you.
I still have to see someone using LLM to share a soulful vision of his.
If your goal by reading is too learn about the subjectivity of another real person, then yes, read human authors. You said it, that's it's part of what a book can offer, but there can be other reasons for reading
This is a values question. Many would say that literature has a role in modeling certain behaviors and teaching lessons that are functional in society. Basically the fables and proverbs idea. Simply catering to what feels nice and what reinforces the biases and wishes of readers is not the same thing. Yes, most of literature is already crap and simply caters to readers instead of challenging them. But if you RLHF your way to AI literature that people "engage with" the most, you will get unvirtuous literature that doesn't do this function. Of course you're welcome to disagree with this entire framing and purely see reading as hedonistic pleasure and nothing else.
A person directing an IA could also lead it to build a story that teaches values.
I believe Borges would have loved IA.
There's not an abstract "not mattering of the intent of the author" independent of different people with certain values.
You could say that the intent of the author is the number one issue that matters. That's completely subjective, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
However, I still watch movies about made-up things! TV shows that were written by a roomful of writers, all arguing and compromising, then taking notes from suits and producers, and making more compromises up to the day of shooting, even the day of editing! What comes out of that process is complete fiction, written by not-a-single-human-heart but rather a messy mash-up of humans combining their gibberish.
And sometimes it's still good. And I love it. Even though it isn't "real" and didn't come from a "real person."
So ... people may love a meat-book more in the future, but people will also love machine-books. Not you, by the sounds of it. But there are people not-you on Earth as well.
Let’s take Backrooms for an example. In the interviews with the cast, Kane, and others they usually all hit on “so and so was so passionate and added X”. Hearing about everyone’s passion and seeing the end result reflect that makes the experience of watching it so much more enjoyable.
If someone generated a Backrooms film, there would be none of that.
I’m not saying you’re wrong for liking machine books or anyone should be wrong for thinking that, but I just can’t imagine them being equal in the view of the arts.
But the "exponential volume of AI-generated text" turns "writing for pleasure" into a solitary act. There's no chance you'll be able to quit your day job, because people like what you do any will pay for it. So many people faking it with AI means that it'll be struggle to get any attention at all for what you've put so much effort into.
In the event everyone is sitting around with time on their hands wondering what to do and we have machines that spit out endless reams of anything it is a very curious question what exactly it is most people would end up doing, which would probably be some new status seeking exercise.
From the blog post:
> In my dream world, the robots do all the boring jobs and humans spend all their time being creative, connecting with one another, learning about the universe, and sharing our ideas and creations in a great big prosperous circle.
But with this and your other comment [0] about humans churning out 10 articles a day and changing the idea of what's "valuable" leads me to a bit of a conundrum I can't quite unwind:
If AI took over all the boring jobs (chores, labor, etc.) and we had all the time in the world to be creative, and we did just that, to the effect of humans generating dramatically more from "creative" ventures, have we created the same scenario, from a different approach? What then?
Performing and writing couldn't be any more different or attract different types of people.
At the same time, readers will have to sift through an insane amount of books to find what they like. It is already kind of like this, even before AI. This causes people to rely more on reviews and word of mouth, which becomes a volume game and is also influenced by the algorithms.
I don't think it is the end times for literature, and for those who put the work in, they can find their places. But it is a whole new set of challenges.
It was, however, a blow to painting as a vocation where a lot of your work was in the form of portrait painting.
Does it? This assumption is the core of the entire problem.
It might do as some, bluntly, self indulgent exercise but beyond that in society scarcity of things other people need and want is what drives value.
We are in for an absolutely huge rebalancing of what it is that is considered valuable.
There you go again.
I suspect if everyone on earth produced subjective literary articles at the rate of ten a day you would cease to consider them valuable, let alone a machine that can create them on demand.
If you have a surplus of something then it will cease to be of value to you. For example you do not actually "value" air, since it is everywhere and so we ignore it, but stuck somewhere where it is not you will come to appreciate it fairly quickly.
You seem to believe there is something magic and wonderful about literature, but this is because you have only ever lived in an environment where it is scarce and not dangerously abundant. The next stage is to claim "but it's not literature" even when it's the exact same strings of words merely constructed by machines and not humans, which is curious because up until now it had always been assumed that had the monkey succeeded in typing out Shakespeare it would still have been as valuable as had Shakespeare written it himself.
I would definitely watch this.
They're a bit too prolific to actually dig into their overall process, but you can watch them type for hours straight. It's awfully boring tbh since there's no interaction and they're understandably focused on their work.
If your curious - https://youtube.com/@pirateaba/streams
I fully admit that we have been surpassed by the machine in the ability to entertain. And the biggest problem with that is that entertainment is the primary factor that drives the popularity and consequently the financial success of a book. If a writer's primary purpose is to entertain, then they should be very worried. But if their primary purpose is to convey something from within themselves, the LLM cannot replicate this. They may however lose that portion of their audience to whom the communication of profundity is merely collateral to being entertained.
I'm not a professional writer, but when I do write, I do so with the intention of expressing something that I feel, which before being thought out and written exists as something not linguistic. The language is a means for the expression of this deeper experience whose communication is the end. But an LLM on it's own is not able to convey internal experiences that it does not have. If it seems that way, it is only achieved by manipulating and rearranging the experiences of the authors that make up it's training data.
Why though? Daily here on HN, posts are pilloried for being AI generated and full of AI tropes.
AI generated content might be drowning out human generated content, but I wouldn’t say that it’s surpassed human content in a qualitative way.
But some people just don't care, and are just in it for novel rearrangements of the narrative structure. I'll give you that I don't notice this so much with literary content, but I have seen people being entertained by AI generated music and videos quite a bit, especially children and those who in general are uncritical of what they consume.
For example, the other day I was at a restaurant where they were playing some AI abomination of Frank Sinatra called "Take me to the Moon", and nobody really seemed to notice or care while I was becoming nauseous to my stomach. You have to already be biased to notice it, let alone to even be bothered by it.
Cross cutting them is the purpose, these are not mutex: exposition, narrative, description, conviction.
There's also straight rambling nonsense.
If a reader perceives that they have been conveyed an experience that nobody has ever had, then they have made up an imaginary experience which does not correspond to anybody else's lived reality, which may or may not be possible to have. If an LLM conveys an actual human experience, it is only because somebody's actual experience has been anonymized and conveyed on to you.
When you report on your own experiences - like the warmth of the sun - that report is not itself the experience.
The scary part about an LLM (p-zombie) is that it can report on an experience exactly the same as if it had one, and for all intents and purposes it'd be sufficient for the task at hand.
After all, I don't need to have your experiences to know what you mean.
By conveying, I don't mean conveying the idea of a possible experience, but conveying knowledge about a real experience that a real experiencer had. What is conveyed is not the entire experience which is impossible, what is conveyed is knowledge that is sensible to someone who has similar experiences they can associate it to.
If the report does not correspond to an underlying experience, then it's just a lie. Like if I say to someone "Thank you" after they do me a favor, they perceive that I am having the experience of gratitude. But if I am not really grateful, then my words haven't conveyed information about an actual experience, about an actual instance of an experience.
So I'd say the report + the report's correspondence to reality + the receiver's ability to understand the report based on their own experiences = conveyance.
I do not consider a false report that leads the receiver to imagine the existence of a non-existent experience to be "conveyance of an experience".
Contemporarily we have methods like radical honesty - another moral absolutist take that also asserts a primacy of truth, that as long as you tell the truth, you can do no wrong
For a lie always harms another; if not some human being, then it nevertheless does harm to humanity in general, inasmuch as it vitiates the very source of right... All practical principles of right must contain rigorous truth... Kant
So, that's the moral side of things. Whether or not you believe in truth as a moral compass (or even a component of it or some moral rubrik), I'll leave up to you! What you said:
> But if I am not really grateful, then my words haven't conveyed information about an actual experience
...gets more at the utility of honesty, as a conveyer of experience. While I might argue you still have conveyed an experience (just not one you had), because the references and end experience still happened in the mind of the receiver, the end (target) experience was had.
The invention of lying is largely due to it working just as well (or better than) the truth in the first place. Maybe the first lie was an accident, and evolution took over where only the best liars passed on their ideas.
So that you could even have an experience rich enough to contemplate!
But good writing is more than just conveying information. To me it's about connecting to a voice. This is a rare quality and AFAIK I have never experienced this with AI generated text or even with 99% of human written text for that matter.
If I'm reading something I either want to be entertained or I want some specific information. If it's to be entertained then the story has to be good (writing doesn't necessarily need to be that good) and I haven't seen any AI generated stories that are that compelling. If it's informational then I can either ask an LLM directly and get something tailored for me, or I'm also interested in the emotional and human side, which an LLM can only imitate, since it has no theory of mind.
Also, I think he's too enthusiastic about the future of readers. In my opinion, reading books will be a very rare hobby pretty soon. The decline started more than 10 years ago.
"About as well as" doesn't mean "better." Wild that you jumped from one to the other.
I continue: "-- at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation --" This is factual.
One thing I am sure of is that computers are better at reading than people. The way some people read makes me want to vomit.
I read the whole thing and it was my impression.
Literally, welcome to: Hacker News.
It's always been like this.
I think this was fairly obvious and fair 1 - 2 years ago. Now though, I have to wonder if people who think this with such conviction are falling for the toupee fallacy.
You said it yourself: someone you consider a well known (and presumably accomplished?) author thinks AI is pretty good at writing.
Would we not expect AI fiction to be the same? A stream of poor and excellent taste, not particularly original or surprising, samey in hard-to-define ways, but capable of being hammered into a good story by an editor.
That could also describe many human writers…
AI writing seems to have a quality ceiling, or an ick floor if you prefer to think about it that way around, but is OK compare to bad human writers.
I'm still committed to the career suicide that is refusing to touch generative AI beyond the supped-up auto-correct/-suggest that has replaced the older method in my IDE (replaced, such that if I turn it off I also lose what I had before), but seeing results others around me have pulled out of the hat I have to admit the tech can produce serviceable work if properly fettled by a person afterwards.
That being said, the better coders I've seen aren't looking for a speed up, they're generally looking for something to bounce ideas off of, or to get a first draft going to defeat writer's block or something (I guess this is technically a speed up, but not the way people mean when they describe slinging tokens around). It's generally to wind up at a better solution at the end than to get a sustained speed up (which seems to only be possible in boilerplate heavy domains, but those were previously slowed down by the boilerplate and are really only coming up to speed with everything else, at significant cost).
Replace Microsoft with LLMs and the same quote applies. They have no culture, no connection. The code or comments they produce will not effect any future LLM session and they current have no concern how it will effect future humans except for maximizing engagement for the human at the console today.
Fiction is no different. Unless there’s a feedback loop the LLM just spits out text and will never see it again. The LLM will never meet the readers at book signings, weave in personal details that could only be known for experience.
It’s probably perfect for the write-by-committee style of movies and shows being created today. Just like organic food or locally made products, there are already creators putting Human Intelligence badges on their work and there will probably be a market (though niche) for that until human supremacist laws push it underground.
If this is the case it should be quite easy for you to provide examples of excellent AI-fiction.
As for the “well-known author”, Occam’s razor says he (like most “well-known accomplished authors”) doesn’t know what the hell he is talking about.
I feel that's the opposite of the toupee fallacy. The lack of labelled excellent AI fiction supports the idea that there's a lot of excellent fiction that was written by largely by AI but nobody was able to identify it as AI, because they were looking for writing that makes them vomit.
Regardless, how about this: https://deadline.com/2026/07/ai-questions-debut-novel-book-f...
Maybe that debut novel is amazing, but the fact that we are even discussing whether it’s AI or not tells me it might not be - in any case we can’t read it yet to judge ourselves - just that publishing agents are completely out of touch. If it were truly great I don’t think anyone would care, since hey, good writing is good writing, no matter where it comes from. We would just read it and enjoy.
Similarly models are for fact able to produce music and images that are very difficult to differentiate from meat made, but still… Most people don’t like them. Something seems always a bit off, kinda artificial and boring. Lack of imagination, lack of authenticity, lack of voice.
And that's mostly for us, developers who use it all the time and maybe for other office employees. Not sure if random person would recognize LLM-isms.
AI creative is easy to spot _right now_. It will not always be that way.
People are going to eventually figure out how to polish and refine the usage and outputs so you cant even tell it is AI.
This is already becoming increasingly true for code and software. The next step is writing and then media.
Personally, I'm gonna go offline after this and meet more people. One of the reasons I read comments is because it's human conversation. When everything will be ridden by bots — I'm out.
There is no point in consuming this.
There is likely a non empty set of writings that are AI written and that you don't recognize to be AI written.
I agree that the Ai-isms are ugly.
Butni also acknowledge that I am likely reading huge amounts of Ai text I don't attribute Ai.
But with enough well-defined prompts AI can be made to write in practically any style, often with results unrecognizable as AI-generated.
People tried to fool Pangram by using custom prompts and instant feedback (rewrite until it passes). After hundreds of rounds, the text was still detected.
Although it's harder to detect such text by humans, there will be clues if you want to write a whole book based on a few pages of input.
Most of all writing makes me want to vomit. It's not impossible to write well with AI, but it's the same argument as vibe-coded slop vs. a senior engineer using the tools carefully. I'd be inclined to accept the expert's opinion here.
He talks about this in the article, did you read it? Reasons include AI winning writing contests, AI hitting bestseller lists, and now apparently an AI-written book inspiring a bidding war between publishers that resulted in the supposed "author" getting a $2.4M advance (until it was revealed that the book was written by AI).
The author talks about writing cheap stories, but right now, you can't do this. Cheap stories are pretty bad, because there is very little human effort to polish them. The more effort you put into AI written stories, the better they become, but it's not cheap at all. You have to rewrite and review them.
But look at the first paragraph of the article:
> The writing was on the wall, and now the writing is everywhere. Literally. Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans — at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation — and that’s creating an existential crisis among authors, confusion among readers, and legal action within the industry.
Also, here's another thought. In my opinion, here's my opinion.
Building something that supersedes us may have always been our purpose. Until skynet turns on us I’ll be happy to say I lived at the exact time it happened.
No other carbon terrestrial species can run for such long distances - a healthy young human can jog for 50 km or more on water and sugar: this is a (not too) breathtaking efficiency!
Can you imagine being a gazelle who has been sprinting away from a human for six hours but they just keep coming? Terrifying.
The ability to do so truly defines the species, to the extent they’re taxonomied as ‘homo marathoniensis‘ (fun fact: during the atomic age most human philosophers used ‘homo sapiens sapiens’ - more like ‘homo vanus vanus’ amirite).
(A platypus is special too, while also rather the worst at everything it does.)
This is just religion, but without even any serious philosophical/theological grounding.
Does he really hold on this until the end of the article? (sorry, I had no time to read through it). It doesn't matter how well and sophisticated the writing is, what counts is the human connection. A human is talking to me through the writing. I am not interested in having communication with a machine, I want the vibes only humans can send and receive …
But apparently there's enough confusion to be had by reading a few random words from a blog post, getting your blood pressure up, and writing a comment to show off your lack of attention span.
Alternatively most blog posts could have been paragraphs. Most books could have been single chapters. Most newspaper articles could have been tweets.
That being said, most readers want you to hold your hand step by step. They don't want to the outline: they want you to give them a story. Most people and writers know this already. To me, it was new.
A good movie or novel is a generally pleasurable experience from start to finish, where the conclusion on its own might have only been mildly interesting at best.
Sex is also like this.
Why even read? Why even live? What's the point of all of this? Churches could be wooden shacks, 5 stars menus could be protein shakes, paintings could be single sentence descriptions, ...
You might as well sign up to be put in an artificial coma, or in a matrix pod
To understand.
For most everyone else, it is to momentarily feel some sort of way. The difference is what the parent describes as a revelation, to him.
You see, for people who crave to understand, living among people who just want to feel this and that feels like living in an insane asylum where the people inflicting harm upon themselves and others will do nothing but distract themselves long enough to forget and go on to inflict harm on themselves and others again, forever.
As for 'might as well quit' - most everyone I've known who's not an idiot has already done that. Even the idiots aren't having children by the way :) Living in a matrix pod? You mean a modern city? Anyhoo...
It's why there are people out there that will use an LLM to summarize a book and pretend that they read the whole thing because they know the general outline.
I keep brooding on the idea that maybe LLMs will never get “good at writing” in some Platonic sense, but they will be progressively trained better to create text that a greater and greater bulk of humans will “enjoy” for reasons that are downstream of inherited patterns of thought and emotional response that the models have learned.
In other words, we become the stochastic parrots.
I hate being a snob, but when we read "artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans", maybe take that with a grain of salt? It has not been my experience that AI writing is remotely near a "good" human writer.
Some of us just want an outlet that we control. Even though nobody will ever read it.
Loss of human touch is a problem. Playing a chess game while being aware that the opponent is a bot, is not same as playing against a human.
The "plasticification" is something we wanted all along, supported it through excitement and awe. Science is the plastic.
Nonsense and beauty ascendant! Poesy freed from several centuries’ fuligin tyranny of the novel and horrid mass literacy; windmills again a just and proper enemy!
This new muse will mate with the corpse of epistemology to produce a second coming of baroque obscurant gnosticism. A fine time to be a scholar or a priest, the 2100s.
If you are on top of the AI, it is a powerful tool for exploration of ideas, organization of thoughts, bridging connections, outlining, filling in gaps.
But if you vibe write, it will look good on the surface but be full of illogical, contradictory statements, disconnected characterizations, etc.
So what am I missing? What’s the most charitable explanation for how anyone can think LLMs are good at writing?
AI 'writing' makes me ill, but that's happening because I can 'feel' the prose's samey hollowness in every paragraph.
But! If someone is just moving word by word and is focussed on just the gist (the average reading level is '6th grade' here in the states), then it will not repel them the way it does us. Also, AI's grammar is impeccable, if bizarre, and the word choices can be facially erudite, so that might also be mistaken as a signal for competence where none exists.
But I basically never use them for a blog post except maybe to include some boilerplate explanation of some technology. (Which I'm familiar with but don't want to rewrite or copy and paste.)
Could that change? Perhaps. But I don't really use today.
It's like how evolution taught humans that sugar indicates a good densely-packed food source, so then corporations just started putting sugar in everything and humans eat it as ravenously as they eat actual food.
I can imagine something like ChatGPT Work with markdown/python/CSV's can do quite some magic for such writers.
Depending on how big the story is and how many characters/plot threads there are, I can see the Excel files getting large.
Writers (older genre writers particularly) tend to be a bit behind the technological curve, and they stick with whatever works. If you want to see a treasure trove of "old web" sites, look up the site of any sci-fi or fantasy author. Chances are its design and layout still look like something from the late 90s.
The vast majority of AI apps don't actually solve any novel problems (pun intended come at me,) they're just new versions of existing solutions "but with AI."
If my understanding is close to correct, than I can see why the million dollar advance was withdrawn.
Who is challenging a lack of copyright on a work?
You publish a story, I take it and republish it / remix it / whatever, you invoke copyright protections and try to have mine taken down - how do I prove your work was AI and thus has no copyright, and how do you prove (or do you even have to) that it's human?
Who has the burden of proof - the person claiming AI created it, and thus it has no copyright, or the person who claims they wrote it and it does have copyright?
But it sounds like you are talking about a criminal charge. There the bar is higher and the government has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. In that case I suppose the government could do things like search your computer, subpoena the AI companies for their records, talk to your editor, talk to your family and friends, etc... All the usual stuff.
What I'm asking is what is that bar?
Copyright is going to be assumed by default - in order to break that assumption there needs to be some process... however for all the people who are "concerned" about the copyright status of works that have touched AI I've never seen anyone make a feasable argument on how it would ever practically take place.
I think most people serious about literature already are this and always have been. Y’know, it is not hard to write a novel. It is not that hard to become a bestseller, if you are really really good at marketing and selling. Same time people across the globe have stopped reading the shelves of bookstores have become filled with most inane trite imaginable. And some people even read these books about werewolves having sex with vampires and whatnot.
Writing a Classic, on the contrary, is very very very fucking impossibly difficult. And no-one really knows a classic until it has survived the disinterestedness of a generation or five. Kids have now apparently found The Count of Monte Cristo recently. Yet another generation proves that Dumas knew his way around the ink quill.
So if you are not interested in publishing industry, profits and whatnot, you don’t really have to worry too much about LLM books. Only thing you need to do is wait a generation. Hell, few summers and no-one remembers most of the books published today. But there is some 21st century Joyce, Woolf or Proust writing something amazing, hopefully, somewhere out there. I’m sure in 30 years time we will all be reading them as the greatest example of early 20th Century literature. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of old books last a few lifetimes.
This is just untrue.
There's a lot of money in claiming it's true, with varying levels of hedging and insincerity, but AI writing follows the pattern of AI everything else: if you're not competent to judge quality, then you think it is high quality.
- Countless poorly-written AI books released
- Many, many articles saying that people should stop complaining and AI writing is just as good
Not because they didn't think the writing was high quality. The quality of the writing is what led to the bidding war. The advance was retracted because the publisher can't get exclusivity if copyright protections don't hold due to the novel being AI generated.
David Goggins is kind of a perfect example of this. There is zero value in an AI-written book that isn't attached directly to his public persona and media presence. Maybe today he can use AI to write the book, but it's still tied to his video media of doing tough challenges, etc. An AI-first author writing such books would get nowhere, as he/she has no credibility.
That all aside, I actually think the most philosophically interesting result of LLMs is that ideas actually end up mattering a lot more than execution. The LLM can't really think for you, and so your knowledge and experiences are actually what matters, as it determines "what you prompt."
In short, the authors that win the future will be ones with robust personal brands and a big social media footprint. The days of the mysterious writer that gets chosen and published by a small group of elites at the publishing house is probably over... at least until the ecosystem becomes so messy that curators become necessary again.
If the books are original enough to be perceived as not-AI, the mind behind it will be creative enough to make the AI origin moot.
Books are a physical medium of organizing and distributing information by gluing a bunch of flat papers between covers. Properties like originality do not follow from the physical medium itself.
Publishers of travel guides in book form use the physical medium as an instantiation of the class of "interesting coffee table adornment expected to contain wit". Does that imply an expectation of originality? I would argue it does not.
Publishers of speculative science fiction, on the other hand, instantiate objects of the class "examinations into the human condition using technology as a lens". For this class, the use of LLMs is an abomination.
There are other subgenres of science fiction, of course, for which these sensibilities would be misplaced.
Haha, I feel like this is true for a lot of things that people argue in the ai vs. non-ai space.
If we could fix these, we could have bike lanes in places where they make sense
> Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans — at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation
No matter your opinion on AI writing, this is just a fact.
I'm sorry, but I have about 1M counter examples.
You are essentially talking out a hole on the bottom half of your body.
Stealing that phrase. Thank you for it.
From the source.
It's quite clear that the author means AI writing is now good enough to cause confusion and speculation as to whether a given piece of writing was human-authored.
The confusion and speculation caused by your nude transit adventure is about what the hell you're doing and why.
since when is "confusion and speculation" an indicator of quality/goodness?
> maybe LLMs are seen to write as well as humans because most humans have poor reading comprehension skills?
Whoa, ironic.
For example, if desktop fabrication tools get cheap and good enough, maybe one day garage tinkerers will be making Patek knock offs that an expert with a loupe, spectrometer, and a lot of time can't definitively say that any particular watch made after 2034 (to pick a date) is genuine. That would cause a lot of confusion and speculation in the market for used watches.
I think that's what his crypto bros comment was all about (aside from being a joke). Maybe crypto tech could provide evidence to support provenance claims?
At least AI is better at reading than are most people.
Bertrand Russell famously predicted* that machines would allow everyone to “work” no more than 4 hours a day. I just had a thought when reading Hugh’s article - what if work is by and large the thing that connects most of us with one another and compels us to be creative and learn about the universe? And TBH the thought already feels trite in advance; both religious and wealthy people have said this before for various reasons.
I’ve had the same ideal in mind for many years. It would be amazing if I could work less and devote more time to art & music, reading & travel, socializing & community projects. But using AI for work (writing code) isn’t making that happen yet and doesn’t feel like it’s even aiming in that direction. Now that we have machines that can do most of my job, I’m starting to worry because there are some signs that it might not lead to utopia, starting with how it’s beginning to demotivate otherwise strong and curious programmers from wanting to be better programmers.
I don’t know, it’s too early to draw conclusions. But is anyone feeling like LLMs are giving them more time? They’re helping me work on more things, and produce more output. They’re helping me context switch more easily and work on things between meetings. They’re also sometimes tiring, and I’m often using them instead of talking to someone. They’re not yet freeing up time, and it doesn’t feel like lack of better models is the problem.
[*] Russell’s “In Praise of Idleness” doesn’t age quite as well as I remembered. :P https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
"In my dream world, the robots do all the boring jobs and humans spend all their time being creative, connecting with one another, learning about the universe, and sharing our ideas and creations in a great big prosperous circle. I believe such a utopia is possible. It does not violate the laws of physics, so much the laws of human nature."
What irritates me is when people say "human nature" but what they actually mean is "capitalism" or "the profit motive". Common among people who have fallen into the trap of what Mark Fisher called "capitalist realism", a capturing of the imagination by the cultural concept in the west that capitalism will be with us forever, or that it is the natural state of humanity.
It's also human nature to be irritated by your own reading comprehension (based on biases and assumptions you carry around daily) and then attribute that irritation onto a stranger instead of working on yourself. :)
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.
This is not cool. Please don't do it again.
The best comparison is photography. Instantly, a whole career path of portraiture was tossed out the window. Go to a museum and you see portrait after portrait - the best ones. There were millions of shitty ones made at all levels of society, and that job was replaced by cameras. But painting didn't go away, it got weird, it became anti-camera and more human, in a way.
This splitting of purpose and amplification of humanness is going to ramp up. Expect everyone to grow a taste for weirder, unprocessed music, experimental novels, wild and unexpected designs. Art is human communication and AI brings that into sharp relief.
Novels seem the most protected from AI - pulp/romance/beach novels will be crushed by volume and the sad remains of the publishing industry along with it, but interesting human novels will be just fine. And, much like with photography, I think AI will eventually normalize to its own artistic medium with writing, where careful usage will allow more ambitious work to appear that wasn't possible before, like a novel written using only sestinas, for example.
Not so long ago the author / creator would have to be very skillfull and prolific to write-and-write-and-write… nowaways I fee like I (we?) are drowning in more and more content…
I'd take back substance over volume :/
The majority of us read ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini responses, even though they are, by definition, slop, because we probably asked some question (the one we did not really care about and just wanted to explore) and the response has some valuable information in it (maybe true, maybe not). So we read it.
If (or when?) the AI writing becomes interesting to read, I don't see why we won't start consuming it, and I don't see it's as something bad.
One way to make the text interesting is to actually get involved in writing; remember this short story that was here on HN some time ago? [1] It was written by AI with some serious human involvement, and I enjoyed reading it.
AI has made creating content almost free. What it hasn't done is add free hours to our day to consume all this new content. The number of people who want to read a book this month is roughly what it was five years ago, and roughly what it'll be five years from now.
Supply is exploding into demand that is stagnant (at best) or falling. Upload a book to Amazon today — good cover, sharp title, a blurb you sweated over for a week — and there is no longer any reasonable expectation of an organic sale. The book goes up, and then nothing happens, indefinitely.
Five years ago that wasn't true.
The answer is paid advertising. Buy your way onto the shelf. Stand out from the slop. But every writer is being given the same advice at the same moment, and there are only so many slots. The price of the slots must rise. And will keep rising for as long as there are writers able to pay.
The old metric was it takes about $5 to sell a book via paid advertising. I think in a year we'll look back on that figure fondly.
- read
- watch content: a movie at a theater, youtube, short-form socials, streaming services, etc..
- read a book
- scroll on the phone (won't list all the apps out)
- play a video game
- play a board game
- listen to music
etc.
So much content, fixed amount of time.
This seems like a truly wild prediction to me.
LLMs can synthesize data in useful ways for all sorts of purposes, and I can see how they could be helpful in the process of a human editing and refining a work of fiction they are creating, but I can't imagine why I'd ever tolerate a work of fiction actually generated by an LLM.
The authorship and craft matters, the translation of human feeling and thought to the page matters. This isn't code where it either does what it's supposed to or does not.
Fiction from a machine is of no value.
CGI is so expensive only the most generic and safe sci fi movies get made. I want a 30k movie with amazing effects.
As for writing, AI is great at filler. But a lot of books are brought for Instagram photos and social validation. Not to be actually read.
Self help books are like this. Maybe a few are good. Many are slop to funnel you into buying other products.
But with AI telling us what to buy, how long until we have books written specifically for LLMs ?
I’m sure they’ll be absolutely gibberish, but you can still pose with them on Instagram?
I have been using: https://periscope.corsfix.com/
It's easy to confuse because archive.is uses several domains like archive.ph and archive.today so you can see how easy it is to think they are related.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#Attack_on_Gyrova...
I write mostly without AI but then I use AI for editing and grammar correction. Sometimes when I struggle with plot threads I ask AI for an advice. When I write about something that a have a vague understanding about I may ask AI to write a paragraph or two. I'm also open about it and warn reader in preface and mark generated text using italics.
As a new author I find AI both helpful and discouraging, because it CAN write better prose than me. I think text that's written for humans should be written by humans, but temptation to ramp up quality with zero effort is huge.
Then I experimented with different regimes when I only allow myself a couple of prompts at the end of the day when I done writing and only allow minor edits. At least my conscience is clear.
It works like talking to yourself, your conscience and you also get a gut feeling about using AI in humanities with time. It starts to _feel_ bad if you go too far with it. It feels good when I write my text myself. Using AI for humanities feels like borrowing on bad terms.
I just watched:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo5w2S-h5dI
I think it is time to jail those CEOs that drive up the prices and destroy industries. RAM prices up 350%? ALL AI companies are in my opinion a mafia structure that must be eliminated. They not only force us to have to overpay (or be stuck) but also destroy industries downstream, thus eliminating jobs. All that cost should be paid by Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon etc...
Email eliminated a lot of post office and paper production jobs, does that also annoy you? Washing machines eliminating jobs about washing clothes by hand? If you like a low tech life there are communities that choose to live like that, and happily do.
I don't know. But I do think, or rather I hope, real voices will prevail. But publishers (including KDP) have a rough road ahead of them, if they also want that. Just search YouTube for tutorials on how to spam Amazon with AI generated works, hoping for a break out. It is sad.
Is anyone working on cryptographic human-crafted attestation, without feeding the work into LLMs?
Is it just a case of throwing more and more resources at a pattern recognition machine with no upper limit except the energy of the universe and the economy of the algorithms?
Someone else suggested the maximum intelligence is capped as the average intelligence of its training data, which is an interesting take.
The intuition we have about the nature of cognition and its whole shape and limits is almost entirely built by looking at ourselves and our peers, comparing that to an ant. I feel this is largely naive and misguided.
Documentation, marketing, prose, it’s all horrible slop writing, immediately recognisable regardless of model
I'm already being more careless with spelling and grammar because it gives authenticity.
Maybe people will revert to Jeffrey Epstein style prose to avoid any suspicion of slop..., e.g:
“no , bed, i, m laying on thefloor so it can't move.”
Only speak advantages of AI, no or a few trivial disadvantages.
There was/is a business position as a middleman of sitting between a storyteller and the printing press, called authoring or writing and that's slowly been denigrated for over a century by mechanical typewriters, word processors, spelling checkers, grammar checkers, now LLMs.
However there's always been a shortage of good story tellers with a story to tell, and for at least a century or two been a MASSIVE oversupply of the middlemen mentioned above, who end up failing. They can type, and they insist thats all they need, and the ability to spin a good yarn is just fluff or unimportant. Then they fail, so they're probably incorrect.
I suspect as long as the author can spin a heck of a good yarn based on his personal sailing experiences mixed in with whatever else, the author will have gainful employment in the book biz. As a storyteller. Not as "a guy who types really fast" or "a word processor technician" or whatever.
The middleman author who used to have a job writing generic romance novel #7994126 and was hoping to make money off writing #7994127 is probably utterly doomed. Why does the publisher need him if we have LLMs, or even better, why do we need publishers if we have LLMs and can enter a short simple plot just as well. "Claude generate me a 75K word romance novel similar to 'Just for the Summer' from last year but write all my favorite past characters into it. Especially character Anne she's my favorite."
But lets be realistic, those middlemen were already doomed anyway. Very few people in the book biz can spin a good yarn and that shows up in the stats of "failed writers". LLMs just mean they'll generate more scrap paper along the way to failure. But about the same percentage will sell books and about the same percentage will fail unless AI itself causes a substantial difference in readers tastes (honestly, I think not...)
Compare it to programming, about which we supposedly have more experience. LLMs generate more code that no one is responsible for nor understands fully. But does it make more or less successful startups? Nah, not really. Doesn't seem to have much effect on "idea people" at all. The people whom always generate bad ideas crash the plane with no survivors a little quicker, the people whom always generate good ideas make money a little quicker, most people in the middle are unaffected beyond change for the sake of change, which is always expensive.
“Another thing that will happen is established authors will turn to AI for assistance, not just for writing but for research, cover art, editing, returning emails, having an assistant, doing marketing, and thousands of other things that haven’t been invented yet.”
I take it as a general, this-tech-is-being-shoved-down-our-throats kind of way