Well, FWIW, LLMs are specified to infer and fill in the blanks of books. It makes the headlines now and again that publishers put AI companies on the hook for unauthorized use, The New Yorker included.

It's a major bummer. When I first read the story (a few days ago, maybe?) I thought it was an interesting metaphor that didn't quite line up with the observed details of software development with AI. 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.

Without the inferred writer, it's much less interesting to me, except as a reminder that models change and I can't rely on the old tics to spot LLM prose consistently any more.

Humans build friendships and relationships on shared experiences. There is an element of relationship-through-experiencing-a-thing. Whether it's going for a walk together or the classic first date template of dinner and a movie. The shared experience is the thing.

With stories that shared experience is between author and reader. Book clubs etc will try to extend that "shared experience" but primarily it is author <-> reader relationship.

Remove that "shared feeling with the author" and what meaning does it have?

There is an interesting dichotomy where we express an uncanny-valley revulsion to AI-generated text, art, video and music; yet we seemingly go with the AI-generated code.

Personally I have an uneasiness with it and are correspondingly cautious. Often after a review and edits it loses that "smell". I kind-of felt the same about NPM and package managers for a long time before using it became obligatory (for lack of a better word).

Are we conditioned to use other people's code unthinkingly, or is it something else?

I had a similar experience a few days ago with some music on Spotify. It was an Irish Pub song, rendering some political satire that seemed pretty consistent with what I figure is a predominant Irish viewpoint. Since I holidayed in Ireland a while ago and adored the public there, I really liked it. I reveled in the fact that somewhere in Ireland, there was a band singing messages in pubs that resonated strongly with me. And then it was pointed out that it was AI. I was crushed. I went from feeling connected to some people across the pond, to feeling lonely.

And yet, in ironic counterpoint, there is a different artist I follow on Spotify that does EDM-fusion-various-world-genres. And it’s very clearly prompt generated. And that doesn’t bother me.

My hypothesis is that it has to do with how we connect/resonate with the creations. If they are merely for entertainment, then we care less. But if the creation inspired an emotion/reasoning that connects us to other humans, we feel betrayed, nay, abandoned, when it comes up being synthetic.

It's full of AI generated imagery. Why would it not be AI generated?

Whether people know it or not, when they engage with art they are assuming a person not just made it but experienced it. I'm going to blow past the discussion of "what is art" here, but where something came from and how it was made has always mattered to me (you could draw parallels to food here if you wanted). One thing that has been on my mind a lot is a particular photograph I saw in the past few years (and I'm sure it's easy to find online): it's a POV shot taken by a person sitting atop a skyscraper with their feet dangling over the edge. There is just no way that anyone could in good faith claim that the same photo produced by "AI" could possibly have the same emotional impact as knowing someone actually went and did that. I think that for a lot of people they may not even realize that when hey see a painting or even a photo as innocuous as a tree, their mind goes to that the person who produced this went to this that place the tree was in an had an experience and chose to document that particular perspective. If they were to see a painting or drawing of something that is clearly "fantasy," they know that a person made this up in their crazy mind and experience their feelings on it (good or bad). "AI" (heavy quotes) is trying to trick us and rob of us this basic knowledge. Some see this as progress. I personally think it's fucking disgusting, but I've been wrong before.

Of course this has always been a bit of a problem with digital art trying to mascarade as the real thing... I always think of programmed drums using real drum samples. In my adult life I found out that an album I loved as a teenager that listed a real drummer as the performer was actually 100% programmed (this was an otherwise very "organic" sounding heavy guitar album). I always had my suspicions since it was so perfect but I experienced exactly what you are describing. I also never got over it.

The duality of generated content.

It feels great to use.

It feels terrible to have it used on you.

I think its a valid emotion to feel. I genuinely resonated with the story, but when I learned it was written by Claude it kind of left me feeling ... betrayed?

One of the many things I love about art is when I encounter something that speaks to emotions I've yet to articulate into words. Few things are more tiring than being overwhelmed with emotion and lacking the ability to unpack what you're feeling.

So when I encounter art that's in conversation with these nebulous feelings, suddenly that which escaped my understanding can be given form. That formulation is like a lightning bolt of catharsis.

But I can't help but feel a piece of that catharsis is lost when I discover that it wasn't a humans hand who made the art, but a ball of linear algebra.

If I had to explain, I guess I would say that it's life affirming to know someone else out there in the world was feeling that unique blend of the human experience that I was. But now that AI is capable of generating text, images, music, etc. I can no longer tell if those emotions were shared by the author or if it was an artifact of the AI.

In this way, AI generated art seems more isolating? You can never be sure if what you're feeling is a genuine human experience or not.

I suspect (but don't know) that this had to be edited somewhat heavily or generated in isolated chunks: I've generated a lot of fiction with Claude and it has a chronic issue of overusing any literary device one might associate with good writing once it appears in the context window

I think if you left it to its own devices, some of the narrative exposition stuff that humanized it would go off the rails

I also did not gin to the fact that it was AI, but I did have the distinct feeling that I was reading something not that great. It bothered me because the message was something I could appreciate but the delivery felt anathema to the message.

It felt like it was written by someone trying to quit an addiction to Corporate Memphis content spam. Like it came from some weird timeline where qntm was a LinkedIn influencer. It straddles an uncanny valley of being a criticism of the domination of The Corporation over human culture while at the same time wallowing in The Corporate Eunuch Voice, not because it's a subversion of form, but because it knows no other way.

I then came to the comments section and found the piece that brought the picture into focus.

It's just... hard to explain the specific kind of disappointment. Perhaps there is a German phrase-with-all-the-spaces-removed kind of word that describes it succinctly. I feel like I exist in this Truman Show kind of world where everyone is trying to gaslight me into thinking LLMs are important, but they aren't very good at it and whenever I try to find out how or why, it all evaporates away. I was very reluctant to say that because I'm sure it's going to come with a heaping side of Extremely Earnest Walruses ready to Have A Debate about it and I just don't have the energy for it anymore. That's the baseline existence right now. It's like a really boring version of Gamergate.

And then this thing comes along. And yeah, it's a thing. You got me. Ha. Ha. Joke's on me. I lost the shitty, fake version of the Turing Test that I didn't even ask to be a part of. And it reminds me of the Microsoft Hololens: a massively impressive technological achievement that was ultimately a terrible consumer experience. Like if you figured out Fusion Power but it could only power Guy Fieri restaurants.

Ever since the pandemic I've been keenly aware of the complete destruction of every enjoyable social structure around me. The meetups that evaporated. The offices we essentially squatted in that suddenly turned Extremely Concerned about what people were doing. The complete lack of any social interaction at work because we're all so busy because we're running at half-workforce and pretty sure the executive suite is salivating at the bit to lay the rest of us off. The lack of care about how this is impacting open source software. The lack of concern for people.

I feel like my entire adult life was this slow, agonizing, but at least constant push forward into recognizing the humanity in others and creating a kind and diverse world and then over night it's all been destroyed and half the people I see online are cheering it on like it's Technojesus coming to absolve them of their sins of never learning to invert a binary tree. Where the blogs and books and startups of the early 2000s were about finding the hidden potential in people--the college dropout working as a barista who just needs someone to give them a chance to be a programmer or a graphic designer or an artist or whatever--the modern era seems to all be about the useless middle management guy who never had any creative bone in his body no longer having to write status reports to his equally mendacious boss on his own anymore.

We might be restarting old coal plants, but at least Kevin in middle management gets to enjoy "programming" again.

Thanks! Yeah there were a couple I decided to leave in rather than try to rework as I wasn't trying to hide that it was written with AI, more trying to add more variety to the storytelling. I'm sure as I do more of these I'll be able to recognize them a lot easier. I have been toying with the idea of working them more into character's dialogue in the future, as I've already noticed some people I know speaking in LLMisms.

I think it serves even better as a metaphor for software engineering's future than as a forecast for the future of farming. As you suggest, farmers already had to make the "transition" over the course of the 20th century. A farmer from 1926 wouldn't recognize his counterpart today. They would have nothing to talk about. Software people, though, are still twentieth-century programmers at heart, who are just starting to feel their way through the Kubler-Ross process.

Really a great story, and to the extent it was AI-written, well... even greater.

The entire story is AI slop. Tasty and enjoyable slop, but slop nonetheless.

You're not missing something — the chain is internally inconsistent as written.

The per-head vs. per-hundredweight swap is actually plausible for inflating apparent costs: a dairy cow weighs 12-15 hundredweights, so a $5/head daily feed cost misread as $5/hundredweight would balloon to $60-75/head. So "feed expenses look much higher" checks out.

But then the pricing logic goes the wrong direction. Higher perceived costs -> lower calculated margin -> the rational response is to raise prices to restore margin, or at minimum flag the squeeze. Dropping prices when you think you're losing money on every unit is only coherent if the tool is running some kind of volume/elasticity model where it reasons "margins are tight, compete on price" — which is a legitimately dangerous default for spot milk contracts.

Most likely it's just a logic inversion in the story. Either the misparse inflated costs and the tool correctly raised prices (locking in above-market rates Ethan didn't notice because he was happy), or the misparse deflated costs and the tool undercut on price thinking it had headroom. Both are realistic failure modes. The version in the story mixes the two.

Fittingly, a specification error in a story about specification errors.

I think this passes the sniff test only if you're not too familiar with this neighborhood of the training set. Not that the writing is bad but it's just derivative. I listen to stuff like "Lost Scifi" podcast almost daily for example, but there are many similar ones which are focused on reading classic stuff from the golden-age zines because it's all public domain.

The premise/structure/flavor of TFA is an almost pitch-perfect imitation of that kind of voice, to the point that I immediately flagged it as probably generated. I actually think a modern person would have some difficulty even in consciously mimicking it. There's an "aw shucks" yokel-thrown-into-the-future aspect to it. Plot-wise you have rural bicycle repair shop that expands operations to support nuclear reactors and that sort of thing. Substitute any of the more atomic-age stuff for AI stuff and you're mostly there. If you have some Amazing Stories from the 1920s on your shelf then you kind of know what I mean.

It was pretty obvious to me, but the train of thought was something like this:

* this is a good attempt at a work of art, but written in a generic style that detracts from it * nobody making genuinely good attempts at art like this would also write so generically * and if they were making it generic on purpose, they wouldn't be able to do it so flawlessly * oh, it must be AI

I guess I can discern the presence of a human artist, but only in the idea, which just means it was a good prompt.

I continue to resonate with the Oxide take when I hear this kind of sentiment expressed about AI prose

"... LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.

If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?"

https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576#_llms_as_writers

I sadly agree with this sentiment. But to add my own thoughts, I wonder if our “human generation” (all consciously existing today) are just plainly dinosaurs. Like in three decades we’ll have a society that knew LLMs from birth.

As such, we can’t comprehend the world they live in. A world in which you ask your device to give you any story and it gives you an entire book to read. I’d like to think that as humans we inevitably want whatever is next. So I’d like to think this future generation will learn to not only control, but be beyond more creative than current people can even imagine.

Did people who used typewriters imagine a world with iPhones? Did people flying planes imagine self landing rockets? Did people riding horses imagine electric cars? Did people living in caves imagine ocean crossing ships?

The story didn't mention what had happened to inflation in the meantime. A dozen eggs costs $32.

> The prose is like every other work of science fiction I've read.

Well, then, you gotta move on to reading better science fiction. Because this is pretty damn bland. I gave up after 2 minutes because of it. Kinda feel vindicated after coming to the comments.

I can see it working for casual readers, which is why it's already an editorial problem. Imagine having to sift through a growing number of faux writers sending publishers AI generated prose.

Huh, I got cottage core, not dystopia!

It's speculative fiction.

It's worth reading. It's about AI.

I appreciate the question and I think the answer is much longer and more nuanced than can really effectively fit into this form factor. I think this question is getting asked right now about all art forms because of AI and from a lot of different people.

My short answer to “why should I care about the mathematical model output from the human artistic input” is “I think we’re all figuring that out right now!” And I’m pretty sure the answer isn’t “you shouldn’t care at all”. Especially if the mathematical model output from the human artistic input expresses what the human wants to express at a quality level that passes that human’s “Taste Gap” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91FQKciKfHI)

I’m sure we could go back and forth about this a lot (and happy to keep this conversation going, I truly do feel like exploring and discussing, this is very interesting to me!) so happy to dig into any aspect with you :)

I will say that I think what’s happening is that we’re seeing more people explore art forms that couldn’t before because of mechanical skill gaps, and that’s interesting in the same way that synthesizers and sampling and software instruments did to music or I imagine digital art tools did to physical art, and I imagine digital photography did to photography which did the same to painting. It’s an interesting time to be alive!

FWIW, I read it before I learned that it was AI-generated, and I enjoyed it and thought it's possibly insightful.

Yes, which is why some of the comments are from a day ago but the post is only a couple of hours old. We originally downranked it due to being AI-generated.

But on reflection and discussion with the author, we decided that enough HN users may find that it gratifies intellectual curiosity, because it's interesting to see how a human and an AI bot can collaborate to create writing like this.

We just asked the author to write an introduction to make it clear it's AI-generated and explain their process.