6 ms·

Don't Fall for AI: Reasons for Writers to Reject Slop

77 points by BerislavLopac 1y ago

Aeolun 1y ago
Hmm, I don’t think using the AI is all that different from using grammarly. The big problem is that it won’t make terrible stories good. It can still make good stories terrible though.
lexandstuff 1y ago
It used to be that if I saw a typo or grammatical error in someone's writing, I'd switch off, thinking the author really didn't care that much about the text they're writing to proofread it. Now, the complete opposite. Leaving in typos and such shows a clear signal that the author cared enough about what they're writing not to out source to AI. Related to that, I saw a local band posting marketing material online, that was this kind of amateurish typography with a collage of photos decorated with coloured markers. 2 years ago I'd be laughing at what a terrible job it was, today, it's a breath of fresh human air from all the slop we're subjected to all over the internet. It caught my attention, so much that I'm going to see the band this weekend.
- analog31 1y ago
  I have a rule that if something seems more literate than the person who wrote it, they probably didn't write it. Also, the vast majority of stuff ever written isn't worth reading, so filtering your feed for stuff that's worth reading isn't new to the AI age.
- boznz 1y ago
  Any spelling or grammar mistake is enough for me to re-publish one of my e-books (which usually takes about 20 minutes). The reason is that even a simple error may be enough to pull your reader out of their fantasy space and back into the real world, and as an avid reader myself I would prefer that did not happen.
  - dsign 1y ago
    I remember with fondness the typos in one of Terry Pratchett books, left there not by him but by one in his army of editors :-) .
- gerdesj 1y ago
  "It used to be that if I saw a typo or grammatical error in someone's writing," It's not quite that simple. Many moons ago I taught RSA IT skills levels 2 and three. Hmmm I used a plural for levels and a literal 2 and spelt out three. You are probably not 50+ years old and have not had to run anti spam email systems for several decades! When you are deciding whether something is created by something other than is claimed, you need way more "rules" than typos and that. Look at the language in use: A fair sign of AI is banality, verbosity and obsequiousness. Please don't look upon lazy spelling and grammar as a sign of authenticity: "Its how real people work" - it isn't. That will be mercilessly abused by the baddies. Unfortunately we will all have to raise our game and be proactive in spotting baddies. Also, please don't become too worried about all this stuff. The bubble will eventually burst. You be you and look after yourself. Take care.
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    Sage
- ben_w 1y ago
  Zig when others zag. This too shall pass, and will be forgotten. Flash websites no one watched. Carousels. Consultants saying "we need a viral". Every product needed a MySpace page, to be prefixed with an "i", or to have most vowels removed. Blue-and-orange film posters. All those trends will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
- barbarr 1y ago
  Same, ever since AI got big I've started to see typos and signs of amateurism in a positive light. I wonder how long it will be before people start generating slop with typos on purpose so that we think a human wrote it. Maybe we're already there.
n42 1y ago
why do I get so annoyed every time I read the word "slop" used like this? I have the same reaction with "enshittification". am I just getting grumpy and old? it triggers the same eye roll as the schoolyard bully nicknames so popular in politics right now. bite sized, zero effort, fashionable take downs that suffocate any attempt at genuine discourse. but I am probably just grumpy and old.
- throwawayoldie 1y ago
  It's easy to be grumpy in a world full of enshittified slop.
- Labov 1y ago
  "Slop" is a bit snappier than "artificial cultural homogenization." Now that'd get some eye rolls.
- maxbond 1y ago
  I think these words are useful because they convey a feeling of disenchantment people are experiencing with technology. "You say this is progress, but the experience keeps getting shittier. You say this model's output is the next big thing, but my plate is filled with indistinguishable slop." I would point out what they're criticizing is also lazy and driven by trends, the reflexive acceptance that whatever is new is inevitable and must be embraced. To me "slop" especially feels splashing someone with a bucket of water to try and wake them up from a stupor.
- lexandstuff 1y ago
  Personally, I think it's a perfect word for what it is: carelessly created content that no one wants.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    Except you also see people complain about how many likes or views they get on social media. There is signal that people like a subset of "slop".
abtinf 1y ago
It doesn’t mention the number one most important reason: the output is absolute garbage. I can spot AI writing very quickly now, after just a few sentences or paragraphs. It became a lot easier to spot after I tried to use it in my own writing. Calling it “slop” is far too generous. If you know what you want to say, you might think to yourself “I’ll have this write an outline or a first draft that I will then thoroughly edit.” And every time, what you’ll find is that the LLM output is fundamentally unusable. Points a subtly missing. Points are subtly repeated. Points are miscategorized. Points don’t make sense at all. Points don’t flow in a logical order. If you try to use an LLM and you don’t know what you want to say, then it’s hopeless. You absolutely will not see the defects. If anyone who knows the subjects reads it, they will instantly know you are a lying piece of shit.
- JulieHenne 1y ago
  you can check this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44598695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44598695
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  > I can spot AI writing very quickly now, after just a few sentences or paragraphs. Not denying this is true — but like a lot of what we've seen with AI, lets see how you feel in two years time when the models have improved as much. I think it was actually Brian Eno that said it (essentially): whatever you laugh about with regard to LLMs today, watch out, because next year that funny thing they did will no longer be present.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    > like a lot of what we've seen with AI, lets see how you feel in two years time when the models have improved as much People have been saying this for years now though
    - JKCalhoun 1y ago
      And I think every year they have improved? I can say I am certainly much more impressed now than I was a year ago.
spijdar 1y ago
I find this sort of thing discouraging, as a guy who dreamt of being a novel writer long before becoming a “computer person”. The last few days, I let the intrusive thoughts win, and I played around with automating the process of building themes, characters, outlining, drafting, and revising a novel with the Gemini API, pausing between steps to manually edit each document. It’s crude, but with enough cycles of “read the last draft, write instructions for improving it, redo everything with those instructions” the end result is shockingly not terrible. It’s not great. Good might even be too far. It’s derivative, and still feels like the embodiment of all the negative connotations of the term “genre fiction”. Yet, I can’t escape the fact that it’s better reading than what I write. It is objectively less intellectually “interesting”, and it doesn’t have my “voice”, my artistic fingerprint. But it’s entertaining enough that I could see myself reading it at bedtime for fun, a sentiment I’ve never felt for my own writing. And all that for a pittance of the effort it takes to write a long story. I’m still not sure how to feel about it. It’s sapping my willpower to continue writing “for real”, in the face of being able to “give life” to the characters and story ideas I’ve had languishing for a decade. I know that it’s not “real”, that the stories are superficial, and that the existence of these models is at best ethically questionable. But for stories that, either way, I’ll probably never share with anyone else, it’s hard to feel that principled about it, in the face of a miserable comparison between my prose and an LLM’s prose. I’m sure if I wrote fiction for a living, I’d feel as passionate as the article’s author, but in my case, it’s just the melancholy of mediocrity. Ah well :-)
- twilight-code 1y ago
  AI can generate text, but it cannot truly 'create' - it remixes.
  - lucyjojo 1y ago
    we human remix too... for me the difference is simply that AI writing has no author, nobody thought those words, and that is big to me.
- canpan 1y ago
  > Yet, I can’t escape the fact that it’s better reading than what I write I worry we will have a lot less good writers or artists in the future. Everyone starts bad, without the skill. The hurdle is, why should I put in effort to learn, if AI is already somewhat good. Someone mentioned here before, we learn to judge skill before we can learn the skill itself. The drive to jump the gap is what creates the genius. Please don't give up, you can do it!
_def 1y ago
I think it is possible to create art with so called AI. Just not in the way people usually tend to think or expect. Imitating what already exists gives you slop. But used as tools, you can try to create pieces of art that are genuinely valuable. It's just not making it easier. It's more difficult if anything. But not impossible. And some people trailblaze with it.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  I'm still haunted by the "AI slop" called "Jodorowsky's Tron" [example 1] that went viral a bit ago. If an art director had taken those to represent sketches and then created costumed based on them, it would have made for a mind-blowing film. (Come to think of it, sounds like a good cosplay opportunity. Go as "Jodorowsky's Tron AI Slop".) [1] https://static.wixstatic.com/media/9414a3_977e028d2ca64722949de03457610631~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_1536,h_1024,al_c,q_90,enc_auto/9414a3_977e028d2ca64722949de03457610631~mv2.png https://static.wixstatic.com/media/9414a3_977e028d2ca6472294...
  - codpiece 1y ago
    There were beautiful posters in that slop series too. GenAI and creativity — this doesn't have to be a dichotomy.
- cobbal 1y ago
  Probably possible. But if I see something that is AI, I won't bother to engage with it. I'm happier to engage with a human-written piece of bad writing, because it's a meeting of two human minds. There's some innate value to that. Me trying to understand an AI's mind? Not a worthwhile endeavor. It gets more complicated by the fact that many people don't mark what's AI and what's not, and harder to be certain every day. Many people putting out the slop will have different priorities, and don't care if they're wasting my time. Meandering back to your point, I would be happy to look at AI-co-created art as long as I knew in advance that it significantly expressed the mind of the human who created it. Since I can't get people to mark what is AI, I've instead considered signing off all my writing with: (The above was written by a human without assistance from AI)
roadside_picnic 1y ago
What's unfortunate is that there aren't enough people pushing LLMs to assist in writing in creative ways that really involve messing with the model. I'm a huge William S. Burroughs fan, and, for those unfamiliar, he and a few others invented an algorithmic technique, the "Cut-up technique" [0], to basically remix their writing. It's a major part of the reason that much of Burroughs' work as a magically confusing aspect to it. "Prompt and pasting" from LLMs is dull, but awhile back I was experimenting with token-explorer [1] to see what would happen if I started with a prompt and explored the "high-entropy" states of the LLM. By controlling the sample path to stay in a high-entropy state you start getting very different types of responses that feel like nothing that normally comes from an LLM. You could argue it's a form of "statistical automatic writing" [2] There is tremendous potential for genuinely interesting writing to be created with an LLM but it's going to require popping open the box and playing around. In the Stable Diffusion world there's lots of people trying all sorts of odd experiments to create things and, while not the mainstay of generative AI images, they are able to create really interesting things. I would love to see more people ripping open local LLMs and seeing just what the real posibilities are. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique 1. https://github.com/willkurt/token-explorer https://github.com/willkurt/token-explorer 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_writing
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  I have a set of "chord dice" that you roll and then write a song around those chords. I have a set of "story telling dice" that you toss and use the result as a writing prompt. High entropy has existed in other forms (as you point out) before LLMs.
  - viccis 1y ago
    Aleatoric music is mostly just "neat". I've never encountered any of it that is interesting or moving, with the exception of situations in which it is very carefully integrated as one small element of a composition. That includes the likes of Xenakis, who I think writes music whose main form of enjoyment is reading how it was composed. After doing that, listening is an unnecessary and often off putting step.
JKCalhoun 1y ago
I've never been convinced by point 2 (AI Outputs Are Stolen From People Like You). Every artist has stolen. I mean, that's probably putting too fine a point on things, but you'd have to show me a painting someone has created where they never saw another artist's work before. Or a book written by someone who never read a book before. I drew all the time as a kid — making a point at age 12 to learn to draw the human figure. I started with the standard proportions that every decent book on drawing the human figure puts forth. I started with shapes representing the hips, the rib cage, the skull — you sketch lines determined by muscles over those hard structures. You draw the clavicle, divot defining the knee caps, suggest the inverted triangle over the figures back-side, shoulder blades protruding.... And in time I started looking at how Mort Drucker drew mouths. How another MAD artist did pockets on short-sleeve shirts. How Angelo Torres draws the ears.... In time you become an amalgam of your favorite bits and pieces of your favorite artists. (And then you find out that R. Crumb was lifting styles from Warner Brothers, etc. when he was ramping up his craft. But of course he did.)
- nkrisc 1y ago
  Conflating this to humans learning is missing the point. Everyone is very aware of what you’re talking about, and no one cares, that’s not the problem. Humans learning from art and copying is not the problem. They care when it’s AI done by corporations at an industrial scale. The fact it’s AI is the issue.
protocolture 1y ago
Its weird to me that I see so many of these posts that dont seem to have any reference to LLMs that have been purpose built for narrative. I guess if you had the correct information, you wouldnt make proudly incorrect blog posts.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
GMoromisato 1y ago
If it's true that "AI Doesn’t Understand Stories" and "People Don’t Want to Buy AI Writing", then there's no reason to worry: no one will buy AI stories, which means no one will want to sell AI stories, which means no one will want to write AI stories. But the scary part is that maybe AI will be able to write stories people want to read. In that case, yes, writers will suffer, just as performing musicians suffered when records/radios appeared, and recording musicians suffered when MP3/streaming appeared. Even worse, we won't know which future will happen until it actually does. And by then, of course, it will be too late.
- justlikereddit 1y ago
  People DO want to read stories that AI write. They just don't want to know it's AI that wrote it because it's high fashion to hate AI.
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    I've yet to see an AI story that even competes with a human. Some percentage of people have always read whatever was set in front of them. That hasn't stopped good writing from being read and widely consumed.
spwa4 1y ago
"Dear John Q. Average and Suzy R. Median: To your left, you see a door with quality writing. With engaging, beautiful topics, interesting writers. You have to pay a very small amount to enter. To your right, you see a door with AI slop. Repetitive writing, everything is totally fake, no humans involved, and not really very interesting. EVERYTHING tries to sell you stuff. Slop and enshittification are a constant. It is also free to enter." ... there was such a stampede a the right door the door needs replacing, in fact, the floor leading to the door needs repairing.

77 points by BerislavLopac 1y ago

Hmm, I don’t think using the AI is all that different from using grammarly. The big problem is that it won’t make terrible stories good. It can still make good stories terrible though.

lexandstuff 1y ago

It used to be that if I saw a typo or grammatical error in someone's writing, I'd switch off, thinking the author really didn't care that much about the text they're writing to proofread it. Now, the complete opposite. Leaving in typos and such shows a clear signal that the author cared enough about what they're writing not to out source to AI. Related to that, I saw a local band posting marketing material online, that was this kind of amateurish typography with a collage of photos decorated with coloured markers. 2 years ago I'd be laughing at what a terrible job it was, today, it's a breath of fresh human air from all the slop we're subjected to all over the internet. It caught my attention, so much that I'm going to see the band this weekend.

analog31 1y ago
I have a rule that if something seems more literate than the person who wrote it, they probably didn't write it. Also, the vast majority of stuff ever written isn't worth reading, so filtering your feed for stuff that's worth reading isn't new to the AI age.
boznz 1y ago
Any spelling or grammar mistake is enough for me to re-publish one of my e-books (which usually takes about 20 minutes). The reason is that even a simple error may be enough to pull your reader out of their fantasy space and back into the real world, and as an avid reader myself I would prefer that did not happen.
- dsign 1y ago
  I remember with fondness the typos in one of Terry Pratchett books, left there not by him but by one in his army of editors :-) .
gerdesj 1y ago
"It used to be that if I saw a typo or grammatical error in someone's writing," It's not quite that simple. Many moons ago I taught RSA IT skills levels 2 and three. Hmmm I used a plural for levels and a literal 2 and spelt out three. You are probably not 50+ years old and have not had to run anti spam email systems for several decades! When you are deciding whether something is created by something other than is claimed, you need way more "rules" than typos and that. Look at the language in use: A fair sign of AI is banality, verbosity and obsequiousness. Please don't look upon lazy spelling and grammar as a sign of authenticity: "Its how real people work" - it isn't. That will be mercilessly abused by the baddies. Unfortunately we will all have to raise our game and be proactive in spotting baddies. Also, please don't become too worried about all this stuff. The bubble will eventually burst. You be you and look after yourself. Take care.
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  Sage
ben_w 1y ago
Zig when others zag. This too shall pass, and will be forgotten. Flash websites no one watched. Carousels. Consultants saying "we need a viral". Every product needed a MySpace page, to be prefixed with an "i", or to have most vowels removed. Blue-and-orange film posters. All those trends will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
barbarr 1y ago
Same, ever since AI got big I've started to see typos and signs of amateurism in a positive light. I wonder how long it will be before people start generating slop with typos on purpose so that we think a human wrote it. Maybe we're already there.

n42 1y ago

why do I get so annoyed every time I read the word "slop" used like this? I have the same reaction with "enshittification". am I just getting grumpy and old? it triggers the same eye roll as the schoolyard bully nicknames so popular in politics right now. bite sized, zero effort, fashionable take downs that suffocate any attempt at genuine discourse. but I am probably just grumpy and old.

throwawayoldie 1y ago
It's easy to be grumpy in a world full of enshittified slop.
Labov 1y ago
"Slop" is a bit snappier than "artificial cultural homogenization." Now that'd get some eye rolls.
maxbond 1y ago
I think these words are useful because they convey a feeling of disenchantment people are experiencing with technology. "You say this is progress, but the experience keeps getting shittier. You say this model's output is the next big thing, but my plate is filled with indistinguishable slop." I would point out what they're criticizing is also lazy and driven by trends, the reflexive acceptance that whatever is new is inevitable and must be embraced. To me "slop" especially feels splashing someone with a bucket of water to try and wake them up from a stupor.
lexandstuff 1y ago
Personally, I think it's a perfect word for what it is: carelessly created content that no one wants.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  Except you also see people complain about how many likes or views they get on social media. There is signal that people like a subset of "slop".

abtinf 1y ago

It doesn’t mention the number one most important reason: the output is absolute garbage. I can spot AI writing very quickly now, after just a few sentences or paragraphs. It became a lot easier to spot after I tried to use it in my own writing. Calling it “slop” is far too generous. If you know what you want to say, you might think to yourself “I’ll have this write an outline or a first draft that I will then thoroughly edit.” And every time, what you’ll find is that the LLM output is fundamentally unusable. Points a subtly missing. Points are subtly repeated. Points are miscategorized. Points don’t make sense at all. Points don’t flow in a logical order. If you try to use an LLM and you don’t know what you want to say, then it’s hopeless. You absolutely will not see the defects. If anyone who knows the subjects reads it, they will instantly know you are a lying piece of shit.

JulieHenne 1y ago
you can check this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44598695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44598695
JKCalhoun 1y ago
> I can spot AI writing very quickly now, after just a few sentences or paragraphs. Not denying this is true — but like a lot of what we've seen with AI, lets see how you feel in two years time when the models have improved as much. I think it was actually Brian Eno that said it (essentially): whatever you laugh about with regard to LLMs today, watch out, because next year that funny thing they did will no longer be present.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  > like a lot of what we've seen with AI, lets see how you feel in two years time when the models have improved as much People have been saying this for years now though
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    And I think every year they have improved? I can say I am certainly much more impressed now than I was a year ago.

spijdar 1y ago

I find this sort of thing discouraging, as a guy who dreamt of being a novel writer long before becoming a “computer person”. The last few days, I let the intrusive thoughts win, and I played around with automating the process of building themes, characters, outlining, drafting, and revising a novel with the Gemini API, pausing between steps to manually edit each document. It’s crude, but with enough cycles of “read the last draft, write instructions for improving it, redo everything with those instructions” the end result is shockingly not terrible. It’s not great. Good might even be too far. It’s derivative, and still feels like the embodiment of all the negative connotations of the term “genre fiction”. Yet, I can’t escape the fact that it’s better reading than what I write. It is objectively less intellectually “interesting”, and it doesn’t have my “voice”, my artistic fingerprint. But it’s entertaining enough that I could see myself reading it at bedtime for fun, a sentiment I’ve never felt for my own writing. And all that for a pittance of the effort it takes to write a long story. I’m still not sure how to feel about it. It’s sapping my willpower to continue writing “for real”, in the face of being able to “give life” to the characters and story ideas I’ve had languishing for a decade. I know that it’s not “real”, that the stories are superficial, and that the existence of these models is at best ethically questionable. But for stories that, either way, I’ll probably never share with anyone else, it’s hard to feel that principled about it, in the face of a miserable comparison between my prose and an LLM’s prose. I’m sure if I wrote fiction for a living, I’d feel as passionate as the article’s author, but in my case, it’s just the melancholy of mediocrity. Ah well :-)

twilight-code 1y ago
AI can generate text, but it cannot truly 'create' - it remixes.
- lucyjojo 1y ago
  we human remix too... for me the difference is simply that AI writing has no author, nobody thought those words, and that is big to me.
canpan 1y ago
> Yet, I can’t escape the fact that it’s better reading than what I write I worry we will have a lot less good writers or artists in the future. Everyone starts bad, without the skill. The hurdle is, why should I put in effort to learn, if AI is already somewhat good. Someone mentioned here before, we learn to judge skill before we can learn the skill itself. The drive to jump the gap is what creates the genius. Please don't give up, you can do it!

_def 1y ago

I think it is possible to create art with so called AI. Just not in the way people usually tend to think or expect. Imitating what already exists gives you slop. But used as tools, you can try to create pieces of art that are genuinely valuable. It's just not making it easier. It's more difficult if anything. But not impossible. And some people trailblaze with it.

JKCalhoun 1y ago
I'm still haunted by the "AI slop" called "Jodorowsky's Tron" [example 1] that went viral a bit ago. If an art director had taken those to represent sketches and then created costumed based on them, it would have made for a mind-blowing film. (Come to think of it, sounds like a good cosplay opportunity. Go as "Jodorowsky's Tron AI Slop".) [1] https://static.wixstatic.com/media/9414a3_977e028d2ca64722949de03457610631~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_1536,h_1024,al_c,q_90,enc_auto/9414a3_977e028d2ca64722949de03457610631~mv2.png https://static.wixstatic.com/media/9414a3_977e028d2ca6472294...
- codpiece 1y ago
  There were beautiful posters in that slop series too. GenAI and creativity — this doesn't have to be a dichotomy.
cobbal 1y ago
Probably possible. But if I see something that is AI, I won't bother to engage with it. I'm happier to engage with a human-written piece of bad writing, because it's a meeting of two human minds. There's some innate value to that. Me trying to understand an AI's mind? Not a worthwhile endeavor. It gets more complicated by the fact that many people don't mark what's AI and what's not, and harder to be certain every day. Many people putting out the slop will have different priorities, and don't care if they're wasting my time. Meandering back to your point, I would be happy to look at AI-co-created art as long as I knew in advance that it significantly expressed the mind of the human who created it. Since I can't get people to mark what is AI, I've instead considered signing off all my writing with: (The above was written by a human without assistance from AI)

roadside_picnic 1y ago

What's unfortunate is that there aren't enough people pushing LLMs to assist in writing in creative ways that really involve messing with the model. I'm a huge William S. Burroughs fan, and, for those unfamiliar, he and a few others invented an algorithmic technique, the "Cut-up technique" [0], to basically remix their writing. It's a major part of the reason that much of Burroughs' work as a magically confusing aspect to it. "Prompt and pasting" from LLMs is dull, but awhile back I was experimenting with token-explorer [1] to see what would happen if I started with a prompt and explored the "high-entropy" states of the LLM. By controlling the sample path to stay in a high-entropy state you start getting very different types of responses that feel like nothing that normally comes from an LLM. You could argue it's a form of "statistical automatic writing" [2] There is tremendous potential for genuinely interesting writing to be created with an LLM but it's going to require popping open the box and playing around. In the Stable Diffusion world there's lots of people trying all sorts of odd experiments to create things and, while not the mainstay of generative AI images, they are able to create really interesting things. I would love to see more people ripping open local LLMs and seeing just what the real posibilities are. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique 1. https://github.com/willkurt/token-explorer https://github.com/willkurt/token-explorer 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_writing

JKCalhoun 1y ago
I have a set of "chord dice" that you roll and then write a song around those chords. I have a set of "story telling dice" that you toss and use the result as a writing prompt. High entropy has existed in other forms (as you point out) before LLMs.
- viccis 1y ago
  Aleatoric music is mostly just "neat". I've never encountered any of it that is interesting or moving, with the exception of situations in which it is very carefully integrated as one small element of a composition. That includes the likes of Xenakis, who I think writes music whose main form of enjoyment is reading how it was composed. After doing that, listening is an unnecessary and often off putting step.

JKCalhoun 1y ago

I've never been convinced by point 2 (AI Outputs Are Stolen From People Like You). Every artist has stolen. I mean, that's probably putting too fine a point on things, but you'd have to show me a painting someone has created where they never saw another artist's work before. Or a book written by someone who never read a book before. I drew all the time as a kid — making a point at age 12 to learn to draw the human figure. I started with the standard proportions that every decent book on drawing the human figure puts forth. I started with shapes representing the hips, the rib cage, the skull — you sketch lines determined by muscles over those hard structures. You draw the clavicle, divot defining the knee caps, suggest the inverted triangle over the figures back-side, shoulder blades protruding.... And in time I started looking at how Mort Drucker drew mouths. How another MAD artist did pockets on short-sleeve shirts. How Angelo Torres draws the ears.... In time you become an amalgam of your favorite bits and pieces of your favorite artists. (And then you find out that R. Crumb was lifting styles from Warner Brothers, etc. when he was ramping up his craft. But of course he did.)

nkrisc 1y ago
Conflating this to humans learning is missing the point. Everyone is very aware of what you’re talking about, and no one cares, that’s not the problem. Humans learning from art and copying is not the problem. They care when it’s AI done by corporations at an industrial scale. The fact it’s AI is the issue.

protocolture 1y ago

Its weird to me that I see so many of these posts that dont seem to have any reference to LLMs that have been purpose built for narrative. I guess if you had the correct information, you wouldnt make proudly incorrect blog posts.

deleted 1y ago

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GMoromisato 1y ago

If it's true that "AI Doesn’t Understand Stories" and "People Don’t Want to Buy AI Writing", then there's no reason to worry: no one will buy AI stories, which means no one will want to sell AI stories, which means no one will want to write AI stories. But the scary part is that maybe AI will be able to write stories people want to read. In that case, yes, writers will suffer, just as performing musicians suffered when records/radios appeared, and recording musicians suffered when MP3/streaming appeared. Even worse, we won't know which future will happen until it actually does. And by then, of course, it will be too late.

justlikereddit 1y ago
People DO want to read stories that AI write. They just don't want to know it's AI that wrote it because it's high fashion to hate AI.
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  I've yet to see an AI story that even competes with a human. Some percentage of people have always read whatever was set in front of them. That hasn't stopped good writing from being read and widely consumed.

spwa4 1y ago

"Dear John Q. Average and Suzy R. Median: To your left, you see a door with quality writing. With engaging, beautiful topics, interesting writers. You have to pay a very small amount to enter. To your right, you see a door with AI slop. Repetitive writing, everything is totally fake, no humans involved, and not really very interesting. EVERYTHING tries to sell you stuff. Slop and enshittification are a constant. It is also free to enter." ... there was such a stampede a the right door the door needs replacing, in fact, the floor leading to the door needs repairing.