| > Additionally, not all writing serves the same purpose. I think this is a really important point and to add on, there is a lot of writing that is really good, but only in a way that a niche audience can appreciate. Today's AI can basically compete with the low quality stuff that makes up most of social media, it can't really compete with higher quality stuff targeted to a general audience, and it's still nowhere close to some more niche classics. An interesting thought experiment is whether it's possible that AI tools could write a novel that's better than War and Peace. A quick google shows a lot of (poorly written) articles about how "AI is just a machine, so it can never be creative," which strikes me as a weak argument way too focused on a physical detail instead of the result. War and Peace and/or other great novels are certainly in the training set of some or all models, and there is some real consensus about which ones are great, not just random subjective opinions. I kind of think... there is still something fundamental that would get in the way, but that it is still totally achievable to overcome that some day? I don't think it's impossible for an AI to be creative in a humanlike way, they don't seem optimized for it because they are completely optimized for the sort of analytical mode of reading and writing, not the creative/immersive one. |
| > Today's AI can basically compete with the low quality stuff that makes up most of social media, it can't really compete with higher quality stuff But compete in what sense? It already wins on volume alone, because LLM writing is much cheaper than human writing. If you search for an explanation of a concept in science, engineering, philosophy, or art, the first result is an AI summary, probably followed by five AI-generated pages that crowded out the source material. If you get your news on HN, a significant proportion of stories that make it to the top are LLM-generated. If you open a newspaper... a lot of them are using LLMs too. LLM-generated books are ubiquitous on Amazon. So what kind of competition / victory are we talking about? The satisfaction of writing better for an audience of none? |
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| ▲ | apsurd 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > if you get your news on HN, significant portion that make it to the top are LLM-generated. You mean this anecdotally I assume. This makes me think of the split between people who read the article and people who _only_ read the comments. I'm in the second group. I'd say we were preemptive in seeking the ideas and discussion, less so achieving "the point" of the article. FWIW, AI infiltrates everything, i get that, but there's a difference between engagement with people around ideas and engagement with the content. it's blurry i know, but helps to be clear on what we're talking about. edit: in this way, reading something a particular human wrote is both content engagement and engagement with people around an idea. lovely. engaging with content only, is something else. something less satisfying. | | |
| ▲ | shimman an hour ago | parent [-] | | There are very few things worth reading submitted to this site. The only meaningful thing I'm glad to have read was the "I sell onions on the internet" blog post. Everything else I've forgotten, mostly VC marketing fluff or dev infighting in open source; hardly anything worth noting. This place is up there with reddit, it's all lowish calorie info; 90% forgettable, 10% meaningful but you have to dig quite quite deep to find it. | | |
| ▲ | iugtmkbdfil834 an hour ago | parent [-] | | To be fair, it has gotten harder, but when the meaningful stuff does happen, it is hard to beat. Some of the audience can have rather pointed takes. And if it is then somehow topped by 'off the beaten path' guy, it really makes it for me ( in the sense that maybe not all is lost quite yet ). I still sometimes reel from 'manifest bananas' guy. |
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| ▲ | aaaasmile an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >The satisfaction of writing better for an audience of none? The satisfaction of writing for an engine. The last of what could still be recognized as a real human being writing. There’s no competition with AI, but also no resignation and no fear of being limited compared to the vast knowledge of an LLM. Even in a context of an "audience of none", somewhere there will be a scraper tool interested in my writing. And if it gets hallucinated... wow! | |
| ▲ | fdefitte an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is the part nobody wants to say out loud: most writing was already bad before LLMs. AI didn't kill good writing, it just made bad writing free. The people who were reading AI-generated slop on Amazon are the same people who were reading ghostwritten garbage before. Good writers still have audiences, they're just not competing in the SEO content farm game anymore. And honestly they never should have been. | | |
| ▲ | iugtmkbdfil834 an hour ago | parent [-] | | << most writing was already bad before LLMs. I am not sure this is the problem. The problem, as it were, is that writing muscles will atrophy and in a year or two we will be looking at those tiktok reels as long lost havens of enlightenment. Personally, if anything, I write a lot more now, but then I am fascinated by llms and how they work, so .. I test and that requires writing. I might be bad, but there is hope I won't need ugh to English llm translator. |
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| ▲ | nonameiguess 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Tens of millions of people, if not hundreds now thanks to the popularity of the television adaptation, have been waiting 15 years now for Winds of Winter to get published. If AI is such a good writer and can replace anything, write Winds of Winter for George. I don't really give a shit what's ubiquitous on Amazon. Nobody will remember any of it in a century the way we remember War and Peace. People will remember the Song of Ice and Fire books. I think it's fine. As said above, most reading isn't done because people are looking for thought-provoking, deeply emotional multi-decade experiences with nearly parasocial relationships to major characters. They're just looking to avoid the existential dread of being alone with their thoughts for more than a few minutes. There's room for both twinkies and filet mignon in the world and filet mignon alone can't feed the entire world anyway. By the same token, if we expected all journalists to write like H.L. Menken, a lot of people wouldn't get any news, but the world still deserves to have at least a few H.L. Menkens and I don't think they'll have an audience of "none" even if their audience is smaller than Stephanie Meyer or whoever is popular today. If it were me, I don't know man, does nobody on Hacker News still care about actually being good at anything as opposed to just making sales and having reach? Personally, I'd rather be Anthony Joshua than Jake Paul, even though Jake Paul is richer. Shit, I think Jake Paul himself would rather be Anthony Joshua |
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