I haven't tried using an AI to write prose, but I use Claude to write code daily and it spits out the worst comments I've ever seen, along with some surprisingly good ones.

Would we not expect AI fiction to be the same? A stream of poor and excellent taste, not particularly original or surprising, samey in hard-to-define ways, but capable of being hammered into a good story by an editor.

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dspillett 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Would we not expect AI fiction to be the same? A stream of poor and excellent taste, not particularly original or surprising, samey in hard-to-define ways, but capable of being hammered into a good story by an editor.

That could also describe many human writers…

AI writing seems to have a quality ceiling, or an ick floor if you prefer to think about it that way around, but is OK compare to bad human writers.

I'm still committed to the career suicide that is refusing to touch generative AI beyond the supped-up auto-correct/-suggest that has replaced the older method in my IDE (replaced, such that if I turn it off I also lose what I had before), but seeing results others around me have pulled out of the hat I have to admit the tech can produce serviceable work if properly fettled by a person afterwards.

	▲	Kamq 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think you're committing career suicide. I've seen people get serviceable results out of it, and it always involves reading the code in depth. Reading the code being slower than writing it, they're almost never getting a speed up. That being said, the better coders I've seen aren't looking for a speed up, they're generally looking for something to bounce ideas off of, or to get a first draft going to defeat writer's block or something (I guess this is technically a speed up, but not the way people mean when they describe slinging tokens around). It's generally to wind up at a better solution at the end than to get a sustained speed up (which seems to only be possible in boilerplate heavy domains, but those were previously slowed down by the boilerplate and are really only coming up to speed with everything else, at significant cost).

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jonhohle 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think “taste” is probably the right word. Steve Jobs’ quote about Microsoft is very relevant: “The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.”

Replace Microsoft with LLMs and the same quote applies. They have no culture, no connection. The code or comments they produce will not effect any future LLM session and they current have no concern how it will effect future humans except for maximizing engagement for the human at the console today.

Fiction is no different. Unless there’s a feedback loop the LLM just spits out text and will never see it again. The LLM will never meet the readers at book signings, weave in personal details that could only be known for experience.

It’s probably perfect for the write-by-committee style of movies and shows being created today. Just like organic food or locally made products, there are already creators putting Human Intelligence badges on their work and there will probably be a market (though niche) for that until human supremacist laws push it underground.