The real thing being said here is that the author can tell good writing from bad, and assumes everyone can... I'm a visual artist and at generative art is blindingly obvious.... To me.... But not to many folks around me! Including a few artists and art adjacent folks.

▲ 99954bb63ccc a day ago | parent | next [-]

It extends well beyond creative stuff too. It makes me think of Gell-Man amnesia [1].

People can tell when something they are experts in is being done poorly, but others can't, and it frustrates the experts. Then, those same people think something completely different is being done well despite what experts in that respective field say. It's like when someone from your family reads an article about your profession and then proceeds to tell you how your job works. lol

It's a really pervasive issue in society IMO. And a few prompts in someone's favorite LLM just reinforces it to people that don't know (any better|what they don't know).

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect

▲ david-gpu a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> generative art is blindingly obvious.... To me

Have you tested this systematically, or is it possible that you are experiencing survivorship bias? If there were any generative art pieces that you didn't notice, you would have thought that they were human-made. Therefore, all the pieces you identified were "obvious" to you. Not to mention false positives.

	▲	glimshe a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I imagine that they haven't done a peer-reviewed scientific study of their ability to notice generative art. We can replace their statement by "I'm a visual artist and at generative art is often blindingly obvious.... To me....". In other words, they can notice some or most generative art but other people familiar with art can't, or at least can't as often as they do. I think what they are trying to say isn't too changed by that.
	▲	mc32 a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Even if it’s obvious to some at this time, as time passes artificially generated writing will become mainstream and what becomes the normal writing style. If you read IX century literature, it reads differently, the vocab is different, the sentences are built differently. It was totally normal back then. It’s not normal now. In ten years the new artificial style will become commonplace and accepted -I mean unless we artificially always make it deviate.

▲ dakolli a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

LLM prose has degraded with each model update, the models are now being RL'd into wall of texts that only makes sense to other agents. I think its going to become more obvious as we move forward that is llm generated because labs seem to only be focused on tool-calling/agentic-coding environments, as that's the only thing that drives revenue.

There may come players who focus on models that are good at writing for technical writing/docs , copyrighting ect but I think people will lean towards not using them and will rather have the "human touch" for the things that directly impact brand perception.

Keep in mind, every single AI company that is selling the idea that you don't need to hire designers and web design is "solved" have $100k retainer designers crafting their landing pages.

▲ spijdar a day ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, this tracks with my experiments. About every 6 months or so for the past year-and-a-half I've tried using the "frontier" LLMs to as-near-as-possible autonomously write novel length stories, because I find it fascinating.

When I had Gemini 2.5 write a novel, it wasn't really objectively "good" by any stretch of the imagination, but while the prose was very purple and full of cliches and, well, bad writing I guess, it still felt ... subjectively good, at least for what it was.

Last week I did a run with GPT-5.6, and wow. On the one hand, it managed to produce 110,000 words that were "shockingly" coherent. The model was able to maintain state and plot lines and background details extremely well, much better than older models.

But I just don't like the prose. I haven't really liked _any_ prose that GPT-5.6 produces. It's significantly better at "instruction following" and keeping track of things, but, wow.

> “The sequence is consistent with their voluntary choices.” Mara enlarged the uncertainty field rather than the result. “It does not prove what happened to anyone we can’t observe. It does not prove contact did this. And it does not turn the Shard into treatment.”

GPT-5.6 in particular becomes so fixated on certain ideas like "consent" and epistemology, that by the end of the narrative, the prose and dialogue are all just "agent speech", despite the prompt/harness specifying that it's a _novel_ with narrative prose and such.

Interestingly, the model itself produces an accurate critique of its own output:

> The draft has become a *consent-centered medical, legal, and logistical procedural*. The important drift is therefore not that many events were omitted. It is that the retained events now prove a different thesis.

Which begs the question of if it would do better with a couple rounds of output -> critique -> revision. But I think I've had enough LLM prose for a bit...

▲ BoredomIsFun 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> write novel length stories

This would never work. Anything longer than 1500 words gonna be bad. To get proper quality you should generate piece by piece then stitch.

	▲	spijdar 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, one shot generation doesn't work, you have to split into sections and generate each section independently, then usually do a "seam" pass to check continuity between two bits. Though, I'd also agree that if you're not providing feedback between each piece, the result is gonna suck, or at least, it's not really going to be "more than the sum of its prompt". I experimented with "introducing randomness" in the form of web search + using older LLMs like EleutherAI's GPT-{J,NeoX} to try and inject novelty into the generation, but I never really got that to work either.

▲ svachalek a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The entire output of an LLM is also part of its input. Appending to long stretches of LLM-generated text, it will continue to get more and more robotic as the style of the input gets replicated and enhanced in the output.

It's possible to work around by generating short passages at a time with carefully constructed setup. But it's a real pain.

	▲	spijdar a day ago \| parent [-]
		It's that, yeah, but coming from multiple orders of abstraction. In this case, part of the experiment was to see what "oh-my-pi", a "fat and feature rich" LLM harness, could do when coupled with modern GPT, given a 6k~ word overview of a story, and told to come up with a plan to write/review/audit it, making use of subagents and all the fun new groovy LLMisms... Part of the problem was just "it was basing its style off the last scene/chapter", but part of it was also that its instructions were constantly being "compressed" through repeated compactions. Even with the use of subagents, the "top level" agent's prompt was getting muddied, and in the "review" phase, it began to focus more and more on creating increasingly complex ledgers. You can see this happen in the "plan" files it created for each chapter, looking at word count: `1304 d1-ch-01.md 3701 d1-ch-02.md 5151 d1-ch-03.md 6462 d1-ch-04.md 9587 d1-ch-05.md 10605 d1-ch-06.md` So it wasn't just that the prose was being based on an increasingly compressed "style" of the prior context window, but the planning for writing each scene was, itself, becoming fixated on the "continuity error correction" process itself, to the point where by the end, it had mostly forgotten about the prose part, and was completely fixated on ensuring maximum state continuity. This could definitely be fixed, but honestly, I've about had my fill of the "autonomous writing agent" goal. The idea was to make a model that could generate sufficiently interesting stories based on "vague premises" for my personal entertainment, but, "surprise", getting LLMs to actually produce both "new" and "coherent" content beyond what you specify is _hard_. It seems like you really do need to just stay "in-the-loop" with every scene, and constantly provide correction/feedback, to correct the "semantic drift". Or, gasp, I could just try writing things by hand again... :-)

▲ jedberg a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm curious if you've tried Claude. Subjectively, I've always preferred Claude's writing over ChatGPT and Gemini.

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CuriouslyC a day ago | parent | next [-]

Claude was really far ahead of GPT in writing from 2-4, but the later models have started to get an overly distinctive style, wheras these days GPT tends to be coherent but fairly concise and dry.

	▲	HNDevsSuck a day ago \| parent [-]
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spijdar a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Claude is the one model family I've not really used. Which yeah, feels like a backwards thing to say in a world where seemingly everyone using LLMs is using Claude Code.

I've used some Opus 4.5/4.6 via Antigravity and Sonnet by the web chat. I'm torn because as far as LLMs go, it does feel more ... "literate".

But maybe too literate, judging by how many people are complaining about "Claudeisms". I suspect Claude would be just as susceptible, if not more, to the sort of ... "moralizing" that GPT seems to gravitate towards (for lack of a better term).

▲ BoredomIsFun 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Generally true, yes, but the absolutely best prose I ever got from a local model I can run on my PC (and I've used many, many of them last two years, explicitly for prose) was from a finetune of Qwen-3.6-27b from July 2026.

▲ polnoner 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think you are too close to the trees though to see the forest.

I have made digital art for 30 years and this all just sounds like what people use to say about digital art in general.

The main problem I see with generative art is not that you can tell it is generative. It is that most the art is shit. The same way if you gave a 1000 random people a blank canvas and paint, most the paintings would be shit too.

The counter example is there is a billboard that I see driving sometimes that is obviously AI generated graphics. It is so eye catching compared to any of the other billboards because most billboards are boring.

You are just puppeting the standard gate keeping bullshit to a new art form and personally I sick of reading this.

Who the fuck are you to say what art is or what art can be?