Yeah. Even when it appears and feels thoughtful, there's still no real intent underlying it, and frankly even if there was, the problem with AI output is that it ultimately gravitates towards similar outputs in a way that real human thoughts don't.

> You wouldn't accept a random editor just because they're cheap or free.

If the alternative is no editor then yeah i would. Most of what i write receives no checks by anyone other than me. A very small percentage of my output gets a second set of eyes. And it is usually a coworker or a friend (depending on the context of what is being written.) Their qualification is usually that they were available and amenable.

> Unless you yourself don't care about your craft.

This is a tad bit elitist. I care about my craft and would love if a competent, and insightfull editor would go over every piece of writing i put out for others to read. It would cost too much, and would be to hard to arrange. I just simply can’t afford it. On the other hand I can afford to send my writings through an LLM, and improve it here and there occasionaly. Not because i don’t care about my craft, but precisely because I do.

I’m reading a book that went through a competent editor that cares about spelling, semantics, style, tone and a type of depth. I can tell it’s a human editor from a certain craft school, and also that this editor has been at their job for at least a decade. I can tell the author of the book has also been at their job for a decade or longer, churning out book after book. And I can tell that because despite the impeccable grammar and prose, the book has no soul.

Wait, I phrased that wrong. The story is a mashup of commercial themes and the plot would be 3 out of 5, or maybe a 5 out of 5 for young people who haven’t yet had time to read thousands of books. But then the grammar is that of a sixty years-old person who would rather spend more time at the garden but who has excellent dominion of their craft and needs the few bucks to do groceries. Their exhaustive practice takes the whole work one notch down.

> ...why should anyone else care or waste their time on it?

Sometimes we (I) might follow ideas over authority/authorship. e.g.: I'll happily read ai generated stuff all day long on topics I'm super into.

Do I have to be the instigator? Can someone else prompt/filter/etc. for me? I think so. They'll do it differently and perhaps better than me.

> Its the attention economy, you've demanded people's attention, and then you shove crap that even you didn't spend time reading in their face.

That’s the rudeness. But this takes care of itself— we just adjust trust accordingly

I wouldn't say so. I grew up without ABS but I trust it over my slow lizard brain. I just don't like being tricked into listening to a machine talking through a human. It's the same feeling as trusting a brand and learning it's just rebadged crap.

Sure, but also, curation is a service.

An author that does nothing but "plagiarize" and regurgitate the ideas of others is incredibly valuable... if they exercise their human judgement and only regurgitate the most interesting and useful ideas, saving the rest of us the trouble of sifting through their sources.

Even novel thoughts are rarely original.

Every time I come up with an algorithm idea, or a system idea, I'm always checking who has done it before, and I always find significant prior art.

Even for really niche things.

I think my name Aeonik Chaos might be one of the only original, never before done things. And even that was just an extension of established linguistic rules.

If you don’t have original thoughts and your response is not even your (but of a machine), why should anyone care about it? And if humans don’t produce their own thoughts and feelings anymore but merely a half effort of a probabilistic parrot, where should it end and what should all this mean? Besides the collapse of all AI, I’m pretty sure our society will collapse as well.

With code, I’m much more interested in it being correct and good rather than creative or novel. I see it is my job to be the arbiter of taste because the models are equally happy to create code I’d consider excellent and terrible on command.

Very few people do anything creative after the age of thirty-five. The reason is that very few people do anything creative before the age of thirty-five.