> suspicion that they have been written by AI

"By AI" or "with AI?" If I write the book and have AI proof read things as I go, or critique my ideas, or point out which points do I need to add more support for, is that written "by AI?"

When Big Corp says 30% of their code is now written "by AI," did they write the code by following thoughtful instruction from a human expert, who interpeted the work to be done, made decisions about the architectural impact, outlined those things and gave detailed instructions that the LLM could execute in small chunks?

This distinction I feel is going to become more important. AI tools are useful, and most people are using them for writing code, literature, papers, etc. I feel like, in some cases, it is not fair to say the thing was written by AI, even when sometimes it technically was.

I was listening to an interview (having a hard time remembering the name now). The guest was asked how he decides what to read, he replied that one easy way for him to filter is he only considers books published before the 70s. At the time, it sounded strange to me. It doesn't anymore, maybe he has a point

There's a YouTuber named Fil Henley (https://www.youtube.com/@WingsOfPegasus) who has been covering this for some years, now. Xe regularly comments on how universal application of pitch correction in post as an "industry standard" has dragged the great singers of yore down to the same level of mediocrity as everyone else.

Xe also occasionally reminds people that, equal temperament being what it is, this pitch correction is actually in a few cases making people less well in tune than they originally were.

It certainly removes unique tone. Yesterday's was a pitch corrected version of a performance by John Lennon from 1972, that definitely changed Lennon's sound.

> is what style guides that go into the minutiae of comma placement try do do

Eh. There might be a tacit presumption here that correctness isn't real, or that style cannot be better or worse. I would reject this notion. After all, what if something is uniquely crap?

The basic, most general purpose of writing is to communicate. Various kinds of writing have varying particular purposes. The style must be appropriate to the end in question so that it can serve the purpose of the text with respect to the particular audience.

Now, we may have disagreements about what constitutes good style for a particular purpose and for a particular audience. This will be a source of variation. And naturally, there can be stylistic differences between two pieces of writing that do not impact the clarity and success with which a piece of writing does its job.

People will have varying tastes when it comes to style, and part of that will be determined by what they're used to, what they expect, a desire for novelty, a desire for clarity and adequacy, affirmation of their own intuitions, and so on. We shouldn't obfuscate and sweep the causes of varying tastes under the rug of obfuscation, however.

In the case of AI-generated text, the uncanny, je ne said quoi character that makes it irritating to read seems to be that it has the quality of something produced by a zombie. The grammatical structure is obviously there, but at a pragmatic level, it lacks a certain cohesion, procession, and relevance that reads like something someone on amphetamines or The View might say. It's all surface.

If something needs editing, why would you care what tool they use?

It’s like saying you wouldn’t hire an engineer because you suspect they’d use computers rather than pencil and paper.

Most of the big LLMs have those restrictions, but not all.

How naive. Grok generates racism as a service, and Elon does his best to tune it that way.

> thoughtfully polished

> enhancing it with care

I get what you’re going for with this comment, but it seamlessly anthropomorphizes what’s happening in a way that has the opposite impact I think.

There is no thoughtfulness or care involved. Only algorithmic conformance to some non-human synthesis of the given style.

The issue is not just about the words that come out the other end. The issue is the loss of the transmission of human thoughts, emotions, preferences, style.

The end result is still just as suspect, and to whatever degree it appears “good”, even more soulless given the underlying reality.

> manuscripts arriving to editors already thoughtfully polished

except those editors will still make changes. that's there job. if they start passing manuscripts through without changes, they'd be nullifying their jobs.

you forgot to add "tapestry"!

I'm sure you can find people making arguments about a lack of quality from machines about textiles, woodworking, cinematography, etc., but digging holes? If you have a source of someone complaining about hole quality I'll be fascinated, but I moreso am thinking about a disconnecion here:

It looks like you see writing & editing as a menial task that we just do for it's extrinsic value, whereas these people who complain about quality see it as art we make for it's intrinsic value.

Where I think a lot of this "technophobia" actually comes from though are people who do/did this for a living and are not happy about their profession being obsolesced, and so try to justify their continued employment. And no, "there were new jobs after the cotton gin" will not comfort them, because that doesn't tell them what their next profession will be and presumes that the early industrial revolution was all peachy (it wasn't).

DDT has been banned, nuclear reactors have been banned in Germany, many people want to ban internal combustion engines, supersonic flight has been banned.

Moreover, most people have more attachment to their own thoughts or to reading the unaltered, genuine thoughts of other humans than to a hole in the ground. The comment you respond to literally talks about the Orwellian aspects of altering someone's works.

there is no way you aren't able to discern the obvious differences between physical labor such as digging a hole and something as innate to human nature as creativity. you realize just how hollow a set of matrix multiplications are when you try to "talk to it" for more than 3 minutes. the whole point of language is to talk to other people and to communicate ideas to them. that is something that requires a human factor, otherwise the ideas are simply regurgitations of whatever the training set happened to contain. there are no original ideas in there. a steam shovel, on the other hand, does not need to be creative or to have human factor, it's simply digging a hole in the ground

There is a difference.

Excavation is an inherently dangerous and physically strenuous job. Additionally, when precision or delicateness is required human diggers are still used.

If AI was being used to automate dangerous and physically strenuous jobs, I wouldn't mind.

Instead it is being used to make everything it touches worse.

Imagine an AI-powered excavator that fucked up every trench that it dug and techbros insisted you were wrong for criticizing the fucked up trench.

Reading leads to the actual thoughts in our brains. It's a form of self programming. So yeah, it's OK for people to care about what they consume.

When I see an argument like this I'm inclined to assume the author is motivated by jealousy or some strange kind of nihilism. Reminds me of the comment the other day expressing perplexity over why anyone would learn a new language instead of relying on machine translation.

No one ever wrote a song or erected a statue for a steam shovel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)

You realize that making an analogy doesn't make your argument correct, right? And comparing digging through the ground to human thought and creativity is an odd mix of self debasement and arrogance. I'm guessing there is an unspoken financial incentive guiding your point of view.

the /s is sarcastic right? Artisanal creativity isn't efficient enough.