I wouldn't interpret the chart as indicative of the gains in the quality of AI writing; it's more that it's a fairly new phenomenon and there is a dramatic increase in people who try to smuggle AI stories into contests (be it for personal gratification or to "show" human writers), and an increase in the scrutiny that submissions receive.

Fundamentally, I know that HN has plenty of people who will react with "ha-ha, human authors should pack their bags", just like what we keep telling mathematicians, because we see the discipline as just another market that can be conquered by automation or another benchmark to track. But literature, similarly to most other forms of higher-brow entertainment, isn't just about reducing unit-cost or hacking engagement metrics. For the same reason why a genuine van Gogh painting is worth a lot more than a nearly-perfect replica, people who care about the craft usually care about it telling genuine human stories and celebrating the author as much as the result.

Now, the mass consumer may not care; if you have an infinite Harry Potter sequel machine, many will partake. But then, I guess the question is, if you build the sequel machine, are you leaving the world better off or not? Do you want to be interacting exclusively with machines down the line? And if there's no inherent value to humanity, why should the machines be compelled to interact with you?

The post is about ai literature winning awards. Since an award is supposed to be a measure of quality, not unit-cost, a trend of ai winning awards is either indicative of the quality of the writing or of a systemic flaw in how these awards are judged (which seems plausible too).

A van gogh painting is more valuable than a replica because 1. it is scarce and 2. owning one conveys prestige. A perfect replica of a van gogh painting conveys the same artistic expression as the original.

>Fundamentally, I know that HN has plenty of people who will react with "ha-ha, human authors should pack their bags", just like what we keep telling mathematicians, because we see the discipline as just another market that can be conquered by automation or another benchmark to track.

I think it's a bit more nuanced than that, at least some of us are going: "ha-ha, people derive their value from their outputs instead of understanding existence is itself valuable"

Why does everyone value themselves based on their economic output? Why do blood diamonds compete at all with lab grown - one often involves sacrifices to the minors, and the other is cheaper and by all metrics better? (hint: because the narrative of "effort" is what drives that particular example... the blood makes the diamonds shinier in some people's minds... that's not a good look, morally)

My optimistic take on literature, compared to code, is that what writers produce is what is exactly consumed. The medium stays the same. The implementation choices of writers, like syntax, matter deeply to how the text resonates with a reader.

Code, on the other hand, is not consumed by end users in the same way. It compiles and turns into applications, which are then used. So users of applications are less scrupulous about what the code looks like, what language was used, and so on.

For that matter, these first major examples of AI literature—like the first passable Stable Diffusion images, and the first halfway-hummable Suno jingle—have the advantage of cultural novelty. I feel like the shine is likely to come off quickly as subsequent AI works multiply.

The first spatter canvas was a new conceptual move and valued more for that than for the paint and canvas; subsequent derivative works didn’t ring nearly as valuable. The first “ChatGPT, reword this like a pirate shanty” was worth a laugh, now it’s worth an eyeroll.

For that matter, as artists and writers incorporate these new tools into their practice, there’s still a difference between low-effort slop and the products of artistic obsession. AI image gen is commoditized right into the ground, yet Midjourney’s explore tab is still a thing where interesting things can be found.

> An AI reading machine uses computer vision, OCR, and language processing to find short poetic combinations in physical books, erase the surrounding words, pair them with images, and publish new volumes.

That sure sounds like an artistically interesting endeavor to me, independently of their choice to execute their concept through AI models.