I find it interesting to ponder. We look at the luddite movement as futile and somewhat fatalistic in a way. I feel like the current attitude towards AI generated art will suffer the same fate—but I'm really not quite sure.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/luddites-definition-wrong-la...
When AI can write convincingly enough, it is basically a honeypot for human readers. It looks well-written enough. The concept is interesting and we think it is going somewhere. The point is that AI cannot write anything good by itself, because writing is a form of communication. AI can't communicate, only generate output based on a prompt. At best, it produces an exploded version of a prompt, which is the only seed of interest that carries the whole thing.
Somebody had that nugget of an idea which is relevant for today's readers. They told the AI to write it up, with some tone or setting details, then probably edited it a bunch. If we enjoy any part of it, we are enjoying the bits of humanity peeking through the process, not the default text the AI wrote.
Or, I digress, it will be distinguishable from human work but because it's so much better than anything that a human could have ever created. These AI tools that we have now are as dumb as they will ever be. If we ever reach AGI or superintelligence or whatever—or even if not, even if these tools just advance for 10 more years on their current trajectory—it's easy for me to imagine some scenario where the machines can generate something so perfect to your liking that you just prefer it to anything a human ever would have created, storytelling and all.
You can take the general case where AI can just generate a better movie than a team of humans ever could plausibly generate. After all, AI doesn't have any of the physical constraints of a movie studio—the budget, the logistics of traveling from location to location, the catering, the fact that the crew has to sleep, has to coordinate schedules, all that. AI, with some human involvement or not, could just keep iterating on some script on a laptop overnight until its created an optimized version which is more satisfying to humans than any other human made movie ever created. Or in a narrow case it could create the perfect movie for you, given what it knows about you and your interests. All human movies would look inferior.
For my kids, who I'm sure are going to grow up in a world where this type of art is embedded everywhere—and where the human version is almost certainly going to be worse—I don't think the desperate cries to see the last scrap of human ingenuity will mean anything. All of these people throwing rocks at Waymos and others boycotting companies for generating ads rather than shooting one with a video studio; it's so obviously helpless, desperate and obviously futile in the face of what's coming.
I mourn the future that seems plausible here but I also welcome it as inevitable. The technology is coming, and people are going to have to adapt one way or another.
When I'm listening to music, looking at art, seeing a play or a short film I want to feel connection to the humans behind it. AI is by definition missing that connection. That's what makes me retrospectively vomit at AI writings like these. That connection requires that the humans behind it are imperfect, the solo can have one or two sloppy notes, but at least it's genuine interaction. We have seen this same yearning for connection with all the "Don't use LLM to comment, use your true style of writing with its flaws" rules.
I'm 100% certain mainstream studios will be producing "perfect" content with AIs just like current mainstream pop stars have 10 ghost writers working on each song to create "perfect" songs. The good stuff will exist in the fringes as always and I'm ok with that as I've already been for years.
And the future may not be as settled as you think it is. Leaders try to sell you their vision of the future by saying it is settled and that things are certain, but that is because they want you to believe that, because if you and the masses believe so, it's more certain for the future to settle the way the leaders want. But you can also actively refuse that future and find a different future that's worth believing in yourself.
But:
> readers are finding it a phenomenal story
is not true across the board.
I thought to myself, explicitly, and fairly early "This is a fun and thoughtful idea, but the writing is kinda crap" before I realized (maybe a third if the way through) "ah, right, this is genAI. That tracks."
Despite my deep-seated hatred of LLMs, I choose to finish the piece and see if I was being unfair to the actual work ("the output", in the soulless descriptor used by programmers who've never once written a real story or crafted a song).
As a longtime avid reader of fiction, lit nerd, and semi-pro musician, I understand writing and artistry better than the average HN poster, and couldn't help but see the flaws in this.
People who don't have deep knowledge of literature don't catch the tells or flaws as well, but are still understandably angry when they find out they burned their time reading clanker output, and are understandably depressed that they were suckered into it because they haven't spent a lifetime developing a deep understanding of the discipline.
It's possible that genAI approaches will surpass humans in every field we invented.
So far, though, in every field I understand deeply, I see the uncanny mediocrity of the average in every LLM output I have subjected myself to.
> I assumed the writer was a journalist or author with a non-technical background trying to explore a more "utopian" vision of where trends could go.
If you assume you're reading something from a person with intention and a perspective, who you could connect with or influence in some way, then that affects the experience of reading. It's not just the words on the page.
(* "Cat Person" honestly felt like the literary equivalent of Rickrolling; I would have stopped reading it after the first page if not for my friend's glowing endorsement.)
but if you knew it came from a human it would be interesting as a window to learning what the writer was thinking
since there is no writer such window doesn't exist either
But LLMs don't have potential. You can make an LLM write a thousand articles in the next hour and it will not get one iota better at writing because of it. A person would massively improve merely from the act of writing a dozen, but 100x that effort and the LLM is no better off than when it started.
Despite every model release every 6 months being hailed as a "game changer", we can see from the fact that LLMs are just as empty and dumb as they were when GPT-2 was new half a decade ago that there really is no long term potential here. Despite more and more power, larger and hotter and more expensive data centers, it's an asymptotic return where we've already broken over the diminishing returns point.
And you know, I wouldn't care all that much--hell, might even be enthusiastically involved--if folks could just be honest with themselves that this turd sandwich of a product is not going to bring about AGI.
You cannot even get angry or upset if you disagree with anything in the story, maybe the author’s despicable worldview permeating through the characters... because there's no author’s worldview, because there's no author. It's a window into nothing, except perhaps the myriad of stories in the model's training set.
I want to at least have to option of getting upset at the author.
It's kind of an abandonment of having a worldview, outsourcing it to the AI.
And if you've read literally any science fiction you will know the myriad ways that could be absolutely terrible for us
For me, the answer to this riddle is very easy: I want to engage with other human minds. A robot (or AI) doesn't have a human mind, so I'm not interested in its "artistic" output.
It was never about how good it was. Of course AI slop adds insult to injury by being also bad. Currently. But it'll get better. My position was never that AI art (shorts, pictures, music, text) is to be frowned up because it's bad. I don't like it because it's not the expression of a human mind.
It's a bit like how an AI boy/girlfriend is not the real deal, no matter how realistic -- and I'm sure they'll get uncannily realistic in the future. They aren't the real deal because there's no real human behind the facade of companionship.
But there was nobody there, and I'm only disappointed in myself for not noticing.
Read my comment below for a perspective.
