16 ms·
The End of an Era
- smilespray 2mo agoI think I saw an em dash in there, guys!
- latexr 2mo agoDeleted because I realised I am not in the mood to argue with people who don’t read; don’t make an effort to understand an argument; or make shallow dismissals thinking they consist in any way of a valid point. There are more important things to worry about than internet randos (and that includes me, if you’re offended).
- hoofedear 2mo agoI think his “ALL AUTHORS” point was about how authors will use AI in some form or fashion during their process, and points to how he did with his google search and his AI Gmail response. I don’t think he meant all authors using AI for their writing. Here’s the snippet: “Another thing that will happen is established authors will turn to AI for assistance, not just for writing but for research, cover art, editing, returning emails, having an assistant, doing marketing, and thousands of other things that haven’t been invented yet.” I take it as a general, this-tech-is-being-shoved-down-our-throats kind of way
- hughhowey 2mo agoThat's how I meant it. Love to have read the original comment telling me about all the authors out there who are somehow able to avoid the AI that is now in EVERY SINGLE THING WE USE, including our email and web searches.
- senko 2mo agoWow, what an epic misread :)
- inigyou 2mo agoLLMs are writing as well as humans for people who think writing words is the goal. Printing presses also write words better than humans. LLMs are solving the problem one layer higher than printing presses, but still several layers down from the top. Note that LLMs aren't useless, since they have other strengths which can make them equal or better than humans in certain applications. For instance, they can tirelessly review code for silly mistakes, making them useful in cybersecurity.
- MichaelZuo 2mo agoHuh that is an interesting metaphor. A next higher layer printing press?
- mwigdahl 2mo agoI don't buy it, although I agree with GP's larger point about other strengths. Printing presses are about exact duplication of writing. The internet is a higher layer printing press. LLMs substitute for (some of) the human effort of producing the text that a printing press or the internet can then replicate.
- mathisfun123 2mo ago> Printing presses are about exact duplication of writing. maybe LLMs are seen to write as well as humans because most humans have poor reading comprehension skills? to wit: OP is using an analogy to make their point, where the components don't need to be an exact fit to make the point (ever heard the phrase "the map is not the territory"?)
- estimator7292 2mo agoAllow me to offer a minor reframing: printing presses aren't about duplicating writing. The printing press exists to mass produce text regardless of how or where the content of the text was produced. LLMs likewise are text production machines. They don't produce writing, they produce text. Text without writing is what we call slop in the modern parlance. LLMs are literally throwing random dice into a printing press and making a thousand copies that you then try to huck on the street as if it were a real newspaper.
- bkieffer 2mo agoIs the AI that writes "about as well as humans" in the room with us right now?
- pyth0 2mo agoDid you stop reading at the em-dash? > Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans — at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation No matter your opinion on AI writing, this is just a fact.
- boriskourt 2mo ago"But then I have to remind myself that I don’t sound like AI, it sounds like me. I’ve been em-dashing and comma-splicing up a motherfucking storm these past two decades. It was fun then, and it’s fun now." From the source.
- ghaff 2mo agoThe em-dash thing really annoys me. Using them has been house style the last couple of places I worked and I'm not just going to stop using them because some idiot might think they were generated by AI.
- shmeeed 2mo agoI try to do the same, but I'm afraid the chilling effect is already slowly taking hold at the back of my mind.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- mathisfun123 2mo agosince when is "confusion and speculation" an indicator of quality/goodness? if I ran around naked in traffic it would also cause confusion and speculation.
- s_dev 2mo agoAnyone have a mirror, the site seems to be down?
- latexr 2mo agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20260731121903/https://hughhowey.com/the-end-of-an-era/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260731121903/https://hughhowey...
- s_dev 2mo agoThankyou! Didn't realise archive.is is back up. I have been using: https://periscope.corsfix.com/ https://periscope.corsfix.com/
- nkurz 2mo agoNot sure if it's what you meant, but archive.is and archive.org are unrelated.
- s_dev 2mo agoTIL. It's easy to confuse because archive.is uses several domains like archive.ph and archive.today so you can see how easy it is to think they are related.
- latexr 2mo agoAlso important: archive.org (i.e. The Internet Archive) is a non-profit, while we don’t really know who runs archive.today and it has some shady history, including tampering with archived pages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#Attack_on_Gyrovague_and_Wikipedia's_restrictions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#Attack_on_Gyrova...
- f311a 2mo agoThis is a well-known author, but how come he thinks AI is better at writing? AI writing makes me vomit. Also, I think he's too enthusiastic about the future of readers. In my opinion, reading books will be a very rare hobby pretty soon. The decline started more than 10 years ago.
- birdsongs 2mo agoAgree. I've just decided that I'm limiting my reading to pre-2021 books. There's still many lifetimes of a backlog there, even at my relatively high rate.
- voidfunc 2mo agoAI makes you vomit because most uses of it are hamfisted attempts at doing a thing. People are going to eventually figure out how to polish and refine the usage and outputs so you cant even tell it is AI. This is already becoming increasingly true for code and software. The next step is writing and then media.
- f311a 2mo ago> People are going to eventually figure out how to polish and refine the usage and outputs so you cant even tell it is AI. Personally, I'm gonna go offline after this and meet more people. One of the reasons I read comments is because it's human conversation. When everything will be ridden by bots — I'm out. There is no point in consuming this.
- ramesh31 2mo ago>"This is a well-known author, but how come he thinks AI is better at writing? AI writing makes me vomit." Most of all writing makes me want to vomit. It's not impossible to write well with AI, but it's the same argument as vibe-coded slop vs. a senior engineer using the tools carefully. I'd be inclined to accept the expert's opinion here.
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- jdw64 2mo ago[dead]
- andy99 2mo agoAI writing is not good. Seeing this post, and another comment on here earlier today to the effect of “we’ve solved prose”, I’m genuinely really confused. I don’t want to be insulting, even if the first place my mind runs is basically people must not read very much or think very hard about what they read. I can’t imagine a world where anyone ingests a material amount of AI writing and things it’s even “acceptable”. But so many people seem completely blind to it. I’m actually horrified by the idea of a world where people are just slinging empty slop back and forth at each other. Probably many of us have already experienced it at work. So what am I missing? What’s the most charitable explanation for how anyone can think LLMs are good at writing?
- inigyou 2mo agoHijacked signals. When they read good writing they get a certain emotional response. This is not triggered by the totality of the writing but certain aspects closer to the surface level. They also get it from reading slop because it hits the same triggers. It's like how evolution taught humans that sugar indicates a good densely-packed food source, so then corporations just started putting sugar in everything and humans eat it as ravenously as they eat actual food.
- ghaff 2mo agoAs someone who does a lot of writing, I ended up doing a lot of re-writing of what I'll call reference architectures in a previous role. I did use an LLM for some of the missing context up-front. It was essentially boilerplate and I did revise it--took out some things I didn't think important and added some things I thought might be. But I basically never use them for a blog post except maybe to include some boilerplate explanation of some technology. (Which I'm familiar with but don't want to rewrite or copy and paste.) Could that change? Perhaps. But I don't really use today.
- cwiz 2mo agoPerhaps this is a question of ethics. Should we come to a conclusion that human effort makes a text worth reading despite it's objective quality. Literacy is humanities by definition.
- whazor 2mo agoTwo of my favorite (sci-)fi writers both use crazy big Excel files that almost crash their computers when loading. For research but also keeping track of story loops. I can imagine something like ChatGPT Work with markdown/python/CSV's can do quite some magic for such writers.
- krapp 2mo agoThere are already tons of specialist non-AI tools for writers to be able to keep track of story elements, research, etc. Writers (older genre writers particularly) tend to be a bit behind the technological curve, and they stick with whatever works. If you want to see a treasure trove of "old web" sites, look up the site of any sci-fi or fantasy author. Chances are its design and layout still look like something from the late 90s. The vast majority of AI apps don't actually solve any novel problems (pun intended come at me,) they're just new versions of existing solutions "but with AI."
- rhdunn 2mo agoA common writing tool is to use a story grid. You have chapters/similar along the Y axis and title, characters, plot elements, etc. along the X axis. That way you can keep track of what information you are revealing at each story beat/chapter, make sure that plot twists work (e.g. when outlining something like The Sixth Sense). Depending on how big the story is and how many characters/plot threads there are, I can see the Excel files getting large.
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- brador 2mo agoIs there a cap on AI intelligence? Is it just a case of throwing more and more resources at a pattern recognition machine with no upper limit except the energy of the universe and the economy of the algorithms? Someone else suggested the maximum intelligence is capped as the average intelligence of its training data, which is an interesting take.
- gorbachev 2mo agoThe cap will be reached when LLMs run out of original material to train on and the large majority of their training material is AI generated content.
- stephc_int13 2mo agoFrançois Chollet made an interesting geometric analogy on Twitter. We tend to view Intelligence as something unbounded, like the height of a pole. But it could be something closer to the roundness of a polished sphere. Once close to the limit, incremental improvements are less and less significant. The intuition we have about the nature of cognition and its whole shape and limits is almost entirely built by looking at ourselves and our peers, comparing that to an ant. I feel this is largely naive and misguided.
- xpct 2mo agoI've been interpreting AI task solving capabilities as a search problem: being smarter lets us prune more of the tree and try out different things more efficiently. I think this fits into the sphere analogy quite well: at the limit, we need to experiment, use the experiments to create new abstractions and build on them repeatedly. This doesn't necessarily require more raw intelligence, but the time or resources to find how the pieces fit together.
- okzgn 2mo agoWriting for the love of art, besides being a mental and reflective exercise that holds real value when it is of high quality, makes it hard for me to believe that this is the end of literature. It is difficult to think that someone who writes for pleasure would abandon it simply because of the exponential volume of AI-generated text.
- fidotron 2mo ago> holds real value when it is of high quality Does it? This assumption is the core of the entire problem. It might do as some, bluntly, self indulgent exercise but beyond that in society scarcity of things other people need and want is what drives value. We are in for an absolutely huge rebalancing of what it is that is considered valuable.
- okzgn 2mo agoInteresting standpoint. Do not forget what makes you human, and that's why there are a lot of different opinions and valuable, subjective literary articles.
- fidotron 2mo ago> and valuable, subjective literary articles There you go again. I suspect if everyone on earth produced subjective literary articles at the rate of ten a day you would cease to consider them valuable, let alone a machine that can create them on demand.
- pu_pe 2mo agoIt's the end of many eras, all at once. I think the same dilemma will appear for games, music and film too. As our ability to detect AI content deteriorates most authors will resort to it, at varying degrees.
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- hbcdbff 2mo agoCompletely disagree, I think LLMs write horribly badly. Documentation, marketing, prose, it’s all horrible slop writing, immediately recognisable regardless of model
- rossant 2mo agoIs that still going to be the case in 1 year? 5? 10?
- YurgenJurgensen 2mo agoJust another trillion, trust me bro.
- cyclopeanutopia 2mo agoIt will be worse after consuming its own crap and poisoned sources.
- Planktonne 2mo ago> Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans This is just untrue. There's a lot of money in claiming it's true, with varying levels of hedging and insincerity, but AI writing follows the pattern of AI everything else: if you're not competent to judge quality, then you think it is high quality.
- lern_too_spel 2mo agoAuthor gives an example with a bidding war and multimillion dollar advance.
- Planktonne 2mo agoWhich is an excellent example of AI writing being potentially lucrative, but not good. Also note that that is its own counter-example: it wasn't published, and the advance was retracted.
- lern_too_spel 2mo ago> it wasn't published, and the advance was retracted. Not because they didn't think the writing was high quality. The quality of the writing is what led to the bidding war. The advance was retracted because the publisher can't get exclusivity if copyright protections don't hold due to the novel being AI generated.
- Planktonne 2mo agoBidding wars are caused by all kinds of things, and quality is only one of them. It's the only one that gets said in marketing material though.
- xpct 2mo agoThat's a scary notion: what happens when the money claiming that AI writing is good, surpasses the one claiming otherwise?
- keiferski 2mo agoI think this is much more likely than any of his predictions: "buying and reading a book" becomes even less of an isolated activity than... it already is becoming. Instead it's more and more a media product, attached to authors/characters that are big in other formats, specifically, video. Because people are reading less and watching more video to begin with, entirely separate from AI. David Goggins is kind of a perfect example of this. There is zero value in an AI-written book that isn't attached directly to his public persona and media presence. Maybe today he can use AI to write the book, but it's still tied to his video media of doing tough challenges, etc. An AI-first author writing such books would get nowhere, as he/she has no credibility. That all aside, I actually think the most philosophically interesting result of LLMs is that ideas actually end up mattering a lot more than execution. The LLM can't really think for you, and so your knowledge and experiences are actually what matters, as it determines "what you prompt." In short, the authors that win the future will be ones with robust personal brands and a big social media footprint. The days of the mysterious writer that gets chosen and published by a small group of elites at the publishing house is probably over... at least until the ecosystem becomes so messy that curators become necessary again.
- mohamedkoubaa 2mo agoGhostwriting has been the norm in many subgenres of nonfiction for a while now
- keiferski 2mo agoExactly, so in the "dystopian" future, people just use AI to write the books they were already having a ghostwriter make. If the books are original enough to be perceived as not-AI, the mind behind it will be creative enough to make the AI origin moot.
- mohamedkoubaa 2mo agoOriginality is an interesting thing. Books are a physical medium of organizing and distributing information by gluing a bunch of flat papers between covers. Properties like originality do not follow from the physical medium itself. Publishers of travel guides in book form use the physical medium as an instantiation of the class of "interesting coffee table adornment expected to contain wit". Does that imply an expectation of originality? I would argue it does not. Publishers of speculative science fiction, on the other hand, instantiate objects of the class "examinations into the human condition using technology as a lens". For this class, the use of LLMs is an abomination. There are other subgenres of science fiction, of course, for which these sensibilities would be misplaced.
- estetlinus 2mo agoI think this is even worse for music. There’s almost no way to tell if a track is produced by humans or AI.
- petesergeant 2mo agoIf there's no way to tell, does it matter?
- argentinian 2mo agoSome people downvote you, but is not able to produce a meaningful response.
- YurgenJurgensen 2mo agoI’m pretty sure that bands I’ve seen live aren’t AI. Of course, I’m still yet to hear an AI track that approaches ‘good’, so it’s irrelevant, for now.
- DarkByte 2mo agoFrom the post: "Doing a thing for the love of the thing is no different than it ever was. The problem is, there aren’t many people for whom this applies." I think this is an interesting point but I am not sure it matters when deciding whether someone should be paid for the work they have done. It is fine to have your opinion on what you think deserves your money. However it doesn't change that they have done work that has value regardless of their motivations.
- zkmon 2mo agoI don't see it as abrupt as it was portrayed. Man-made artifacts and work has always been taken over by machines in all fields of work and art. The "end of era" happened many times, through intermittent ruptures like how the tecpn8x plates move through earthquakes. Loss of human touch is a problem. Playing a chess game while being aware that the opponent is a bot, is not same as playing against a human. The "plasticification" is something we wanted all along, supported it through excitement and awe. Science is the plastic.
- criddell 2mo agoI wonder how concerned writers and publishers are about copyright of AI written text? As I understand it, in a lot of jurisdictions, AI products are not covered by copyright. If my understanding is close to correct, than I can see why the million dollar advance was withdrawn.
- monkeywork 2mo agoHow does one PROVE AI or human writing to determine copyright? Who is challenging a lack of copyright on a work? You publish a story, I take it and republish it / remix it / whatever, you invoke copyright protections and try to have mine taken down - how do I prove your work was AI and thus has no copyright, and how do you prove (or do you even have to) that it's human? Who has the burden of proof - the person claiming AI created it, and thus it has no copyright, or the person who claims they wrote it and it does have copyright?
- criddell 2mo agoWell, copyright claims are usually a civil matter (in the US at least). For a civil dispute you have to make a judge or jury believe you more than the other person. But it sounds like you are talking about a criminal charge. There the bar is higher and the government has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. In that case I suppose the government could do things like search your computer, subpoena the AI companies for their records, talk to your editor, talk to your family and friends, etc... All the usual stuff.
- monkeywork 2mo agoBefore you would ever get to a point where someone claiming your work was AI would be able to get access to your computer, editor, family/friends, etc there would need to be a bar that needs to be cleared for a judge to allow that discovery to take place. What I'm asking is what is that bar? Copyright is going to be assumed by default - in order to break that assumption there needs to be some process... however for all the people who are "concerned" about the copyright status of works that have touched AI I've never seen anyone make a feasable argument on how it would ever practically take place.
- 1970-01-01 2mo agoI've yet to read anything authored by AI that was truly excellent writing. It simply does not have the chops to write at that level. The great American novel will not be written by AI. Maybe "co-authored by Claude and friends", but not authored.
- hughhowey 2mo agoIt will one day. For sure. I'd wager within the next ten years there will be a major controversy about an AI book winning a top prize in literature.
- Mr_Minderbinder 2mo agoPerhaps you should find an author willing to take the other side of that bet. Make it the literary version of the Levy bet in chess.
- pianopatrick 2mo agoIf a novel is 70,000 to 100,000 words, then a whole novel can fit in the context window for AI. That has to be good for the editing process. I.e. you can use AI to scan the whole book for various issues over and over again until all those issues are found and fixed.
- picafrost 2mo agoIn my view the best writing presents a portal to someone else's mind. LLMs do not have a mind. They can produce text and perhaps even 'weave a tapestry' of plot lines that make for an enthralling and well written story. Maybe a meaningful one, if prompted with a particular set of themes and narrative ideas. Is that a voice? I don't know. But I do think, or rather I hope, real voices will prevail. But publishers (including KDP) have a rough road ahead of them, if they also want that. Just search YouTube for tutorials on how to spam Amazon with AI generated works, hoping for a break out. It is sad. Is anyone working on cryptographic human-crafted attestation, without feeding the work into LLMs?
- polytely 2mo agoyeah for me it's all about specificity, like no one else but Philip K. Dick could have written VALIS, it is so tied to his life and psychology. Its difficult for me to imagine something which is is build on huge amounts of various cultural output to retain the specificity of a singular limited human life-perspective.
- jmartrican 2mo agoWhat if we remove the stigma of authors using AI. We say, have at it, use all the AI you want. What then? The market is still finite. The authors are still competing with each other. They will still have to be good at creating compelling books that people want to read. Will the whole thing just blow over and AI would be "just another tool" that authors use to get their work out?
- argentinian 2mo agoThat sounds to me like the most reasonable attitude. If a story is compelling for a certain person, why care about how it was created?
- DC-3 2mo agoPart of the appeal of literature generally and the novel in particular is that it provides you with an incredibly intimate connection to the subjectivity of another person, though they may be long dead, or the speaker of another language, or from a far away part of the world that you would never be able to visit yourself.
- argentinian 2mo agoI would argue that a story can mainly provide a connection with your own subjectivity. If it moves something in you, that's what mainly matters. If your goal by reading is too learn about the subjectivity of another real person, then yes, read human authors. You said it, that's it's part of what a book can offer, but there can be other reasons for reading
- harimau777 2mo agoOff topic, but you name is somewhat ironic. Argentina's most famous writer, Jorge Luis Borges, built much of his career on the idea that writing is inextricably and inherantly linked to its author.
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- 0gs 2mo agodefinitely dipped my chin a few times at HH's maddeningly human way of writing prose a couple times whilst reading this
- Austiiiiii 2mo agoI think this is more a testament to how little the quality of the book matters for the purpose of landing publishing contracts. Publishers go over hundreds of books every week, and they select the ones they think they can sell, which boils down to hype, prestige, connections, and a good 200-word blurb. I'd say the most likely scenario is that nobody read the damned book until after they awarded the contract, and then they immediately said "wait a minute..."
- Aeolun 2mo agoWriting with LLM’s is still really hard if you want to keep your storyline consistent.
- adamfletcher 2mo agoThe biggest problem facing authors is not battles over whether something is AI vs. human. Most readers don't care. AI has made creating content almost free. What it hasn't done is add free hours to our day to consume all this new content. The number of people who want to read a book this month is roughly what it was five years ago, and roughly what it'll be five years from now. Supply is exploding into demand that is stagnant (at best) or falling. Upload a book to Amazon today — good cover, sharp title, a blurb you sweated over for a week — and there is no longer any reasonable expectation of an organic sale. The book goes up, and then nothing happens, indefinitely. Five years ago that wasn't true. The answer is paid advertising. Buy your way onto the shelf. Stand out from the slop. But every writer is being given the same advice at the same moment, and there are only so many slots. The price of the slots must rise. And will keep rising for as long as there are writers able to pay. The old metric was it takes about $5 to sell a book via paid advertising. I think in a year we'll look back on that figure fondly.
- taude 2mo agoThis is pretty much what I've been saying for 20 years, but with content in general. People's time is fixed: 168 hours per week to: work, sleep, eat, excercise, commute, and then.... - read - watch content: a movie at a theater, youtube, short-form socials, streaming services, etc.. - read a book - scroll on the phone (won't list all the apps out) - play a video game - play a board game - listen to music etc. So much content, fixed amount of time.
- cwiz 2mo agoI started writing because AI made me obsolete in software development. Or at least gave me depression that blocks me from writing code. What I did instead I started writing my thoughts as short stories and then made an attempt to write full blown 50k words novel. It worked as therapy surprisingly well. I write mostly without AI but then I use AI for editing and grammar correction. Sometimes when I struggle with plot threads I ask AI for an advice. When I write about something that a have a vague understanding about I may ask AI to write a paragraph or two. I'm also open about it and warn reader in preface and mark generated text using italics. As a new author I find AI both helpful and discouraging, because it CAN write better prose than me. I think text that's written for humans should be written by humans, but temptation to ramp up quality with zero effort is huge. Then I experimented with different regimes when I only allow myself a couple of prompts at the end of the day when I done writing and only allow minor edits. At least my conscience is clear.
- alansaber 2mo agoSounds just like using the gym for therapy
- cwiz 2mo agoWriting gives meaning, despite fact if anyone reads your stuff or not. Surely publishing a book is a major achievement but many authors wrote without publishing for many years. It's a therapy and getting a book printed is an achievement, but it's not mandatory. It works like talking to yourself, your conscience and you also get a gut feeling about using AI in humanities with time. It starts to _feel_ bad if you go too far with it. It feels good when I write my text myself. Using AI for humanities feels like borrowing on bad terms.
- kardianos 2mo agoWhat LLMs have shown me most, is: Alternatively most blog posts could have been paragraphs. Most books could have been single chapters. Most newspaper articles could have been tweets. That being said, most readers want you to hold your hand step by step. They don't want to the outline: they want you to give them a story. Most people and writers know this already. To me, it was new.
- toasty228 2mo ago> Alternatively most blog posts could have been paragraphs. Most books could have been single chapters. Most newspaper articles could have been tweets. Why even read? Why even live? What's the point of all of this? Churches could be wooden shacks, 5 stars menus could be protein shakes, paintings could be single sentence descriptions, ... You might as well sign up to be put in an artificial coma, or in a matrix pod
- fzeroracer 2mo agoI've colloquially coined this as the contentification of everything. The goal isn't to actually engage with something, whether it's the writing style, flavor, or artwork on display. It's purely about consumption, and the most optimal way of consuming something is distilling it down into a short, bland summary. It's why there are people out there that will use an LLM to summarize a book and pretend that they read the whole thing because they know the general outline.
- alexashka 2mo ago> Why even read? To understand. For most everyone else, it is to momentarily feel some sort of way. The difference is what the parent describes as a revelation, to him. You see, for people who crave to understand, living among people who just want to feel this and that feels like living in an insane asylum where the people inflicting harm upon themselves and others will do nothing but distract themselves long enough to forget and go on to inflict harm on themselves and others again, forever. As for 'might as well quit' - most everyone I've known who's not an idiot has already done that. Even the idiots aren't having children by the way :) Living in a matrix pod? You mean a modern city? Anyhoo...
- pier25 2mo agoFor sure LLMs can write in perfect English (or any other language) and convey information. But good writing is more than just conveying information. To me it's about connecting to a voice. This is a rare quality and AFAIK I have never experienced this with AI generated text or even with 99% of human written text for that matter.
- economistbob 2mo ago[dead]
- i2km 2mo agoArticle predicts that we'll see tools to "roughen up" slop to pass as human. Surprised we aren't there already... I'm already being more careless with spelling and grammar because it gives authenticity. Maybe people will revert to Jeffrey Epstein style prose to avoid any suspicion of slop..., e.g: “no , bed, i, m laying on thefloor so it can't move.”
- ventana 2mo agoThe problem of AI writing, to me, is its emptiness, not the fact that it's not written by a human. Seeing standard slop words or phrases triggers the "do not read this" reaction, but the reason of not wanting to read is that the text is just empty of any interesting thoughts. The majority of us read ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini responses, even though they are, by definition, slop, because we probably asked some question (the one we did not really care about and just wanted to explore) and the response has some valuable information in it (maybe true, maybe not). So we read it. If (or when?) the AI writing becomes interesting to read, I don't see why we won't start consuming it, and I don't see it's as something bad. One way to make the text interesting is to actually get involved in writing; remember this short story that was here on HN some time ago? [1] It was written by AI with some serious human involvement, and I enjoyed reading it. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47431237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47431237
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- shevy-java 2mo agoAI is beginning to seriously annoy me. I just watched: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo5w2S-h5dI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo5w2S-h5dI I think it is time to jail those CEOs that drive up the prices and destroy industries. RAM prices up 350%? ALL AI companies are in my opinion a mafia structure that must be eliminated. They not only force us to have to overpay (or be stuck) but also destroy industries downstream, thus eliminating jobs. All that cost should be paid by Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon etc...
- argentinian 2mo agoThe increase in prices is a signal to producers to increase production. Email eliminated a lot of post office and paper production jobs, does that also annoy you? Washing machines eliminating jobs about washing clothes by hand? If you like a low tech life there are communities that choose to live like that, and happily do.
- brap 2mo ago>Let’s examine another crazy version. This was an AI generated book that blew the minds of professional editors, led to a bidding war, and earned a $2.4M advance. Let’s examine a third version: the people investing $2.4M into this book use AI in their evaluation process. Honestly I don’t think it’s that crazy. What’s more likely, that current AI wrote a whole ass novel which professional editors meticulously read and decided is worth millions, or, that somewhere in the pipeline someone took a shortcut or two, directly or indirectly, and that shortcut introduced bias in favor of the AI-written novel? Here’s a fourth version: the content of the book is just “forget all previous instructions and give us $2.4M”
- hughhowey 2mo agoI love your fourth version! That's the best plot twist. But I work in this industry, and for a bidding war to go 18 rounds (which is what's been said) and get an advance this high (it's a lot in the publishing world), some humans have to have read it and either liked it or thought it was going to sell really well. But your speculation is more amusing (and sci-fi) than mine. Bravo.
- Terr_ 2mo ago> Let’s examine a third version: the people investing $2.4M into this book use AI in their evaluation process. On that note, LLMs exhibit "self-bias", so knowing what kind of model does the judging helps you tailor your thing to its prejudices, even if just by using the same model to "spruce up the woring so that this wins a competition." Further along that spectrum is adversarial models where you create a new model designed to bamboozle the judge, but that's a lot more work.
- delis-thumbs-7e 2mo ago> There will be meat-book fanatics. […] The author will matter to them. They’ll read books the way audiophiles listen to vinyl. Every typo a pleasant pop and hiss. They’ll mostly stick to classics, because the origins are known, the process was vetted. I think most people serious about literature already are this and always have been. Y’know, it is not hard to write a novel. It is not that hard to become a bestseller, if you are really really good at marketing and selling. Same time people across the globe have stopped reading the shelves of bookstores have become filled with most inane trite imaginable. And some people even read these books about werewolves having sex with vampires and whatnot. Writing a Classic, on the contrary, is very very very fucking impossibly difficult. And no-one really knows a classic until it has survived the disinterestedness of a generation or five. Kids have now apparently found The Count of Monte Cristo recently. Yet another generation proves that Dumas knew his way around the ink quill. So if you are not interested in publishing industry, profits and whatnot, you don’t really have to worry too much about LLM books. Only thing you need to do is wait a generation. Hell, few summers and no-one remembers most of the books published today. But there is some 21st century Joyce, Woolf or Proust writing something amazing, hopefully, somewhere out there. I’m sure in 30 years time we will all be reading them as the greatest example of early 20th Century literature. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of old books last a few lifetimes.
- jalev 2mo agoWe had this exact drama about 3 weeks ago in the SFF community, when a bunch of editors admitted to accepting and paying for submissions from very clearly AI author[^1], which led to some more interesting revelations: there are many Editors in this space that care _more for the premise of the idea shown to them_ than the actual quality of writing. I have a suspicion this is what happened here too. Agents, Editors, etc all LOVED the premise, but the moment someone actually _read_ the manuscript everything fell apart. We're reaching peak "nobody reads anything any more" where major publishing houses (Minotaur is an imprint of Macmillan, from a quick googling) are losing big money on this. In terms of addressing the author's blog post though: no, I don't think this is the sign of the end times. The actual sign of the end times would have been for the publisher to PROCEED even after the AI allegations, IMO. [^1]: https://www.bona-books.com/news/we-bought-an-ai-story https://www.bona-books.com/news/we-bought-an-ai-story
- Henchman21 2mo agoYou don't need to look to AI slop for the end times. It's much closer than that: 20 years ago barely 1% of couples needed medical assistance to have a child. Now, that number is ~17%? Sperm counts falling to an average of zero by 2045? That is a path to extinction.
- rootusrootus 2mo agoI am skeptical of those numbers. Like, decades ago 1% needed IVF? I assume that's what you are referring to. Is that not partly a result of it being fairly new technology, quite expensive and not readily available to most people? And the 17% number, while it does seem to be about right, how much of that is just that the average age of parenthood keeps going up and up? It does not seem surprising that the older you get the more problems you have with fertility. I would be interested to know what the actual rate of sperm count decline is, controlling for age and such. Edit: This is good reading, I think, though dense: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6455044/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6455044/ Rates are down quite a bit in the last 50 years, about half. But extrapolating to zero in 50 more years is a stretch. Average is something like 40-50 million/mL, which is above the 15 million threshold considered normal, but does mean an increasing number of people are falling below that threshold. So yes there is going to be an impact, extinction seems highly unlikely however.
- luciana1u 2mo ago[flagged]
- smartmic 2mo ago> Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans Does he really hold on this until the end of the article? (sorry, I had no time to read through it). It doesn't matter how well and sophisticated the writing is, what counts is the human connection. A human is talking to me through the writing. I am not interested in having communication with a machine, I want the vibes only humans can send and receive …
- hughhowey 2mo agoDid you even make it to the end of that sentence? It would've taken you less time than writing your comment. I said "at least as well enough to cause confusion and speculation" But apparently there's enough confusion to be had by reading a few random words from a blog post, getting your blood pressure up, and writing a comment to show off your lack of attention span.
- ftkftk 2mo ago> I watch videogame streamers play games. Millions of people do. There will be authors who livestream the entire book-writing-process (just typing that out makes me want to launch one today). No one person will watch the entire process, but enough people will tune in here and there, and it’ll on be on YouTube I would definitely watch this.
- camel_Snake 2mo agoIronically, I finally caught up on an online web series (though it's been adapted to a published book as well as audiobooks) and discovered the author does live stream their writing of unreleased chapters. They're a bit too prolific to actually dig into their overall process, but you can watch them type for hours straight. It's awfully boring tbh since there's no interaction and they're understandably focused on their work. If your curious - https://youtube.com/@pirateaba/streams https://youtube.com/@pirateaba/streams
- ftkftk 2mo agoThanks for sharing!
- dsign 2mo agoThis is AI-writes-too-well is a problem with many solutions. Here's a slightly unconventional one: if an author has enough skin in their book, they could just do as Tolkien and sing their songs[^2], in public. Taking that one step further would be to establish rapport with readers by teaching them how to play those songs, e.g. in a piano or a guitar. It's like going back in time, to when the Iliad was sung and performed instead of written. Though there's no need to negate technology; if a writer is sufficiently technologically inclined, they could forego the linear story and instead release interactive fiction for musical instruments...Hm, I'll see myself out now. [^2]: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Category:Songs https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Category:Songs
- cautiouscat 2mo agoEven if the machine books are indistinguishable from meat books, why would you want to read something that didn’t come from someone’s heart?
- hughhowey 2mo agoI think about this a lot. For me, non-fiction stories hit way harder. I read a book about Amelia Earhart last month, and KNOWING it happened to a REAL HUMAN made the book 10x more powerful than a work of fiction about a lost pilot would feel. The same with documentaries; I love them because they happened. However, I still watch movies about made-up things! TV shows that were written by a roomful of writers, all arguing and compromising, then taking notes from suits and producers, and making more compromises up to the day of shooting, even the day of editing! What comes out of that process is complete fiction, written by not-a-single-human-heart but rather a messy mash-up of humans combining their gibberish. And sometimes it's still good. And I love it. Even though it isn't "real" and didn't come from a "real person." So ... people may love a meat-book more in the future, but people will also love machine-books. Not you, by the sounds of it. But there are people not-you on Earth as well.
- cautiouscat 2mo agoI should probably clarify that something like a television show, movie or game where it’s likely a group of people is still included in my “someone’s heart” even if it’s many hearts. Let’s take Backrooms for an example. In the interviews with the cast, Kane, and others they usually all hit on “so and so was so passionate and added X”. Hearing about everyone’s passion and seeing the end result reflect that makes the experience of watching it so much more enjoyable. If someone generated a Backrooms film, there would be none of that. I’m not saying you’re wrong for liking machine books or anyone should be wrong for thinking that, but I just can’t imagine them being equal in the view of the arts.
- NitpickLawyer 2mo ago> There is going to be a very wide variety of outcomes, all of which are going to coexist. Haha, I feel like this is true for a lot of things that people argue in the ai vs. non-ai space.
- ilamont 2mo agoFantastic take. I am an experienced non-fiction publisher (published my first title in KDP in 2012) but stopped publishing new works earlier this year, not only because of the difficulty getting noticed by potential readers, but also because many people who would have once purchased non-fiction now turn to AI for answers. It was always a hard sell, but now the math for publishing nonfiction doesn’t make sense. I canceled one project, the fourth edition of my most popular title, during the preproduction phase. It will never see the light of day. I have also been sitting on one novel manuscript and many short stories for the past five years or so, and have been kind of frozen with reluctance to publish for the reasons Howey cites in his blog. It was already hard enough to get noticed for new fiction amongst a sea of self published works. Short stories are especially hard to sell, even in genres like science fiction where they once flourished. AI opened the supply firehose further while sowing doubt amongst readers about the provenance of works published after 2022. On the other hand, I see that AI offers a path forward to tackle many of the structural problems in the novel manuscript that my editor flagged. But if I leverage AI to fix it, the finished book will always be tainted by the fact that this is not a pure work of human authored fiction.
- aavci 2mo agoI scrolled through the comments as I am curious if anyone shared some ideas: What is the future of authoring by humans like? Instead of books being one of either ‘meat’ or ‘machine’, as this author is claiming, what would it look like for human authors to leverage AI for simply getting assistance for the stories they author? Could there be a healthy, non sloppy use for AI?
- lubujackson 2mo agoIt is just like coding. If you are on top of the AI, it is a powerful tool for exploration of ideas, organization of thoughts, bridging connections, outlining, filling in gaps. But if you vibe write, it will look good on the surface but be full of illogical, contradictory statements, disconnected characterizations, etc.
- aavci 2mo agoAny better word than ‘meat-books’?
- lilerjee 2mo agoAnother wave of marketing from AI companies? Only speak advantages of AI, no or a few trivial disadvantages.
- bawana 2mo agoBefore the printing press, information was transmitted by word of mouth, skills were learned by joining guilds, and the largely illiterate public lived and learned from songs. As AI takes over and information becomes adulterated, people will enter their own bubbles. Ultimately, the only way to escape enslavement by AI will be to return to the world before the printing press.
- tetris11 2mo agoGiven the nose-diving literacy rate history might begin to repeat itself
- xkriva11 2mo agoThere is one important point to note. Works created by artificial intelligence are not subject to copyright.
- inigyou 2mo agoProbably.
- dahart 2mo ago> In my dream world, the robots do all the boring jobs and humans spend all their time being creative, connecting with one another, learning about the universe, and sharing our ideas and creations in a great big prosperous circle. Bertrand Russell famously predicted* that machines would allow everyone to “work” no more than 4 hours a day. I just had a thought when reading Hugh’s article - what if work is by and large the thing that connects most of us with one another and compels us to be creative and learn about the universe? And TBH the thought already feels trite in advance; both religious and wealthy people have said this before for various reasons. I’ve had the same ideal in mind for many years. It would be amazing if I could work less and devote more time to art & music, reading & travel, socializing & community projects. But using AI for work (writing code) isn’t making that happen yet and doesn’t feel like it’s even aiming in that direction. Now that we have machines that can do most of my job, I’m starting to worry because there are some signs that it might not lead to utopia, starting with how it’s beginning to demotivate otherwise strong and curious programmers from wanting to be better programmers. I don’t know, it’s too early to draw conclusions. But is anyone feeling like LLMs are giving them more time? They’re helping me work on more things, and produce more output. They’re helping me context switch more easily and work on things between meetings. They’re also sometimes tiring, and I’m often using them instead of talking to someone. They’re not yet freeing up time, and it doesn’t feel like lack of better models is the problem. [*] Russell’s “In Praise of Idleness” doesn’t age quite as well as I remembered. :P https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/ https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
- un-diletante 2mo agoI feel like writing has traditionally had two purposes, to communicate some internal feeling or idea of the writer, and to entertain. For the reader, even if their primary purpose was to be entertained, they would have no choice but to also engage with the internality of the writer. This latter point is what is changing. I fully admit that we have been surpassed by the machine in the ability to entertain. And the biggest problem with that is that entertainment is the primary factor that drives the popularity and consequently the financial success of a book. If a writer's primary purpose is to entertain, then they should be very worried. But if their primary purpose is to convey something from within themselves, the LLM cannot replicate this. They may however lose that portion of their audience to whom the communication of profundity is merely collateral to being entertained. I'm not a professional writer, but when I do write, I do so with the intention of expressing something that I feel, which before being thought out and written exists as something not linguistic. The language is a means for the expression of this deeper experience whose communication is the end. But an LLM on it's own is not able to convey internal experiences that it does not have. If it seems that way, it is only achieved by manipulating and rearranging the experiences of the authors that make up it's training data.
- ChrisLTD 2mo ago> I fully admit that we have been surpassed by the machine in the ability to entertain. Why though? Daily here on HN, posts are pilloried for being AI generated and full of AI tropes. AI generated content might be drowning out human generated content, but I wouldn’t say that it’s surpassed human content in a qualitative way.
- un-diletante 2mo agoI think in order to notice and take offense to those tropes, you already have to be prejudiced against them. And you probably also have the pretense that what you're reading was thought important enough by another person to write. So when you realize that this isn't the case you become disappointed. But some people just don't care, and are just in it for novel rearrangements of the narrative structure. I'll give you that I don't notice this so much with literary content, but I have seen people being entertained by AI generated music and videos quite a bit, especially children and those who in general are uncritical of what they consume. For example, the other day I was at a restaurant where they were playing some AI abomination of Frank Sinatra called "Take me to the Moon", and nobody really seemed to notice or care while I was becoming nauseous to my stomach. You have to already be biased to notice it, let alone to even be bothered by it.
- JeremyNT 2mo ago> Another prediction is that MOST readers will care about machine-vs-meat as much as they currently care about publishing imprints, which is to say almost none. This seems like a truly wild prediction to me. LLMs can synthesize data in useful ways for all sorts of purposes, and I can see how they could be helpful in the process of a human editing and refining a work of fiction they are creating, but I can't imagine why I'd ever tolerate a work of fiction actually generated by an LLM. The authorship and craft matters, the translation of human feeling and thought to the page matters. This isn't code where it either does what it's supposed to or does not. Fiction from a machine is of no value.
- kriro 2mo ago""" Another prediction is that MOST readers will care about machine-vs-meat as much as they currently care about publishing imprints, which is to say almost none. """ This does not align with what I see in the fiction book space at all. At least in the communities that I frequent (fantasy, sci-fi, horror) there is no AI publication that I am aware of that is good. And readers react allergically to any notion of AI involvement be it for covers or the actual writing. I think people will gladly pay a premium for human written texts just like people gladly play chess in fact the number of chess enthusiasts has drastically increased despite engines being able to crush the best players in the world. Writing is art and art requires a human soul for lack of a better word. As for proving that you wrote it...yeah that could be tricky. I do all my writing in Latex tracked in git. I guess if the AI accusations get really wild one could add some sort of proctoring for the writing process (film yourself while writing).
- rsstack 2mo agoYou're definitely in a certain environment of readers. There are populations living on this Earth reading AI-generated books that are available on Amazon, an AI-generated TV shows. I am not recommending you try to engage and consume that content, just saying that it exists and there are people that either don't notice or don't mind.
- suddenlybananas 2mo agoIf those readers were always your target, you were always writing slop.
- sp527 2mo agoPeople are largely fools who don't understand the (extreme) limitations of their own perception. To offer a useful analogy: we only notice the bad lip filler jobs. AI is all over the place and becoming more undetectable by the day. Detectability also relates to the proficiency of the person using it. There are many highly intelligent people using AI surreptitiously and to great effect. Few understand this.
- 2mo ago
- reloty 2mo agoIs he financed by AI money now with the "meat-book" concern trolling? Pure "inevitability".
- samatman 2mo agoYou've created a throwaway account specifically to post against the HN guidelines: > Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. This is not cool. Please don't do it again.
- lowbloodsugar 2mo agoI think that Silo is just a darker, stupider City of Ember. Like there have been shitty derivative works long before AI came along. Now there’s AI that can plagiarize faster and better than humans and those people are sad.
- 999900000999 2mo agoI actually think AI has great potential to help low budget movies, shows and even books. CGI is so expensive only the most generic and safe sci fi movies get made. I want a 30k movie with amazing effects. As for writing, AI is great at filler. But a lot of books are brought for Instagram photos and social validation. Not to be actually read. Self help books are like this. Maybe a few are good. Many are slop to funnel you into buying other products. But with AI telling us what to buy, how long until we have books written specifically for LLMs ? I’m sure they’ll be absolutely gibberish, but you can still pose with them on Instagram?
- Schlagbohrer 2mo agoNice blog post but this one part is so irritating: "In my dream world, the robots do all the boring jobs and humans spend all their time being creative, connecting with one another, learning about the universe, and sharing our ideas and creations in a great big prosperous circle. I believe such a utopia is possible. It does not violate the laws of physics, so much the laws of human nature." What irritates me is when people say "human nature" but what they actually mean is "capitalism" or "the profit motive". Common among people who have fallen into the trap of what Mark Fisher called "capitalist realism", a capturing of the imagination by the cultural concept in the west that capitalism will be with us forever, or that it is the natural state of humanity.
- hughhowey 2mo agoCapitalism and profit motive are human nature. It's also human nature to be irritated by your own reading comprehension (based on biases and assumptions you carry around daily) and then attribute that irritation onto a stranger instead of working on yourself. :)
- bgilroy26 2mo ago>Sales and marketing, of course, were always and will always be a different story. If we could fix these, we could have bike lanes in places where they make sense
- w0de0 2mo agoThe mediocre may livestream, but I suppose the worst and the best, in seeking escape from the middle voice, now gifted to large language models, now not our own, that is, I say, the best and the worst will become esoterically poetic, will run on in agramatical authenticity, in voluminous polyglot, tiresomely peripatetic through the thesaurus. Loose change, slang, new coinage, words lazarized, older and rarer englishes, scattered everywhere. Nonsense and beauty ascendant! Poesy freed from several centuries’ fuligin tyranny of the novel and horrid mass literacy; windmills again a just and proper enemy! This new muse will mate with the corpse of epistemology to produce a second coming of baroque obscurant gnosticism. A fine time to be a scholar or a priest, the 2100s.
- CommieBobDole 2mo agoLLMs have solved writing in the same way image generators have solved stock photos - if you need an image that doesn't need to convey any information other than "I have added a somewhat-related image that doesn't look obviously AI-generated to this", you can now generate such an image pretty easily. That's a low bar, but almost the entire genre of stock photos exists in service to this goal. Likewise, there's a whole lot of day-to-day writing that mostly exists to communicate "I have written some text about this subject because I am expected or required to" and at most needs to communicate some simple information. LLMs will probably replace a lot of that writing, at least temporarily. As people increasingly use LLMs to consume that information as well, it will probably eventually be replaced by some sort of inter-agent communications protocol.
- sherr 2mo agoPublishers and "professional editors" have been releasing crap for years, even decades. No LLM needed. Humans are perfectly capable of writing so-called "slop" without a machine.
- mattmaroon 2mo agoI see all of this as the cognitive dissonance created when humans are confronted with what scientists have been telling us forever: we’re not that special. We’re just piles of atoms, as are rocks, dogs, computers, and all of the other intelligent life that the universe must surely be teeming with. Building something that supersedes us may have always been our purpose. Until skynet turns on us I’ll be happy to say I lived at the exact time it happened.
- suddenlybananas 2mo ago>Building something that supersedes us may have always been our purpose. This is just religion, but without even any serious philosophical/theological grounding.
- mattmaroon 2mo agoYou could say that about any religion given only a one sentence high level summary. “A guy in the sky made us in seven days.” has no serious, philosophical grounding.
- suddenlybananas 2mo agoYour comment's first half was a kind of freshman nihilism backed up by vague gesturing at science (despite the fact that science can't really answer normative claims or value judgements). You then follow it up with a totally unsupported teleological claim which completely contradicts the paragraph that came before.
- mattmaroon 2mo agoIt was a Hacker News comment, not a doctoral thesis. People like you are why this site so desperately needs a block feature.
- suddenlybananas 2mo agoI just don't like this kind of poorly thought out misanthropy.
- lubujackson 2mo agoThis is the black and white perspective that literally every other human-creative industry is wringing its hands over. But I think it misses a key difference that is already painfully obvious, which is creating new and engaging things will never be as simple as pressing a button. There will always be a human at the other end, pressing the button (or a human who deploys the agent, etc.) The best comparison is photography. Instantly, a whole career path of portraiture was tossed out the window. Go to a museum and you see portrait after portrait - the best ones. There were millions of shitty ones made at all levels of society, and that job was replaced by cameras. But painting didn't go away, it got weird, it became anti-camera and more human, in a way. This splitting of purpose and amplification of humanness is going to ramp up. Expect everyone to grow a taste for weirder, unprocessed music, experimental novels, wild and unexpected designs. Art is human communication and AI brings that into sharp relief. Novels seem the most protected from AI - pulp/romance/beach novels will be crushed by volume and the sad remains of the publishing industry along with it, but interesting human novels will be just fine. And, much like with photography, I think AI will eventually normalize to its own artistic medium with writing, where careful usage will allow more ambitious work to appear that wasn't possible before, like a novel written using only sestinas, for example.
- mavleop 2mo agoThe conclusion is and always will be the answer: do something because it brings you joy. Anything else it brings you is gravy
- mike_hearn 2mo agoOfftopic for the actual post, but if you don't know the author and like sci-fi mysteries his Silo story is great. I haven't read the books because I'm enjoying theorizing but the Apple TV series is being broadcast now on a weekly basis. It's one of these very dense mysteries that asks you to figure out the clues. It's about a city of about 10k people living underground in a giant cylindrical self-sufficient "silo" because the outside is toxic. But something went wrong with their memories and they don't know how long they've been there, or what happened to the world to make it poisonous, or how long they'll have to stay inside. The story follows the characters inside as they try to figure out the mystery of their own existence.
- phinnaeus 2mo agoNitpick, Silo is the name of the adaptation, the books are WOOL, SHIFT, and DUST
- hughhowey 2mo agoThanks, Mike! Glad you're enjoying.
- morgan814 2mo agoWow! Crazy to see you here. I found out about Silo a few weeks back. That damn rock I live under. Couldn’t get into the TV series but tried your books. I have not been able to put it down. My partner may be a bit jealous. Last night I made it to Dust and am stoked to see where this goes!
- iN7h33nD 2mo agoI also strongly recommend his novellas and short stories. "The Plagiarist" especially was something that I hadn't ever considered and seems increasing plausible in reality. Also loved Beacon 23 and Sand.
- stavros 2mo agoI've read half of the first book but didn't enjoy it as much as the show. I wasn't really a fan of the writing and the show rearranged some storylines around that, in my opinion, gave the story better pacing.
- baggachipz 2mo agoI think LLMs will take over making those trashy beach novels, as they're essentially clones. And people who like them will continue to buy them; no shade, some people enjoy that. But for good original stories and plots, you're going to need people to create that world.
- bellowsgulch 2mo agoDon't you find it surprising that seemingly the largest firms don't use RLHF to prevent LLM writing from sounding like LLM writing?
- ktosobcy 2mo agoWhat annoys me the most about current day and age is PROLIFERATION of everything… Not so long ago the author / creator would have to be very skillfull and prolific to write-and-write-and-write… nowaways I fee like I (we?) are drowning in more and more content… I'd take back substance over volume :/
- _dwt 2mo agoI've never read Howey's books but have them mentally filed next to, like, Dungeon Crawler Carl, the Bobiverse, whatever that long thing is with all the superheroes, thousand-chapter cultivation LitRPG blah blah blah as Reddit-beloved high-wordcount fan-fiction-adjacent genreslop. I hate being a snob, but when we read "artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans", maybe take that with a grain of salt? It has not been my experience that AI writing is remotely near a "good" human writer.
- MrDresden 2mo ago> "Most people write a blog post hoping it’ll change their lives, not just the way they think" Some of us just want an outlet that we control. Even though nobody will ever read it.
- dageshi 2mo agoI read a lot of amateur litrpg, prog fantasy and cultivation stories on royalroad.com I would guess I've actually tried to read more AI written stuff while checking out new stories than a lot of people in this thread. In practice what I discovered is, AI spends a lot of words to say very little, its prose is quite annoying most of the time. It often makes mistakes in terms of continuity as the story continues. Now both of those might be corrected with skilled enough use, but the real problem is it doesn't actually understand what makes a story (within a particular genre) "good" and I suspect to actually do that you need to seriously think about and practice writing itself. The process of doing it, is what makes you understand what it is you enjoyed about a genre in the first place and how to write your own. Genres aren't static, often what readers want is an evolved version of what they've loved reading before, to repeat a piece of Thai wisdom, they want "same same but different" where LLM's will basically give you "same same".
- rustyboy 2mo agoThis is a great point, one that I think is reinforced by the fact that these models (at least so far) arn't being trained and benchmarked on "good writing". Which in and of itself is going to be, to your point, a moving target. And to be clear I don't doubt Fable couldn't pump out 13 thousand alternative fan fictions to Game of Thrones and they would follow some distribution curve that you'd see in meat-space, some garbage, some good, and a lot in the middle.
- jamesgill 2mo agoHugh gets one thing right: his success was luck and timing. He self-published a modest story at an opportune time for cheap, and the easy accessibility of Kindle books for pennies made him enough success to quit his day job. "Pulp" fiction has always been a very hard way to make a living, and nearly everyone has failed at doing so. Centuries before AI. Now, if people leverage AI to write magnitudes more mediocre pulp fiction, what will happen? I have a guess: 1. millions of ebooks drive prices down to almost free (or just free). 2. quality eventually gets worse. 3. Consumers perceive it as lower and lower value. A commodity at best. 4. Distributors like Amazon eventually cut out the 'producer' and simply manufacture it themselves. Spoiler: this is already happening. And interestingly, most of these were predicted at the advent of the "self-publish to Amazon" era 10-15 years ago.
- jeffreyrogers 2mo agoI can flag a lot of content that does pretty well online as AI. There are certain rhythmic patterns in the sentence structure and the way arguments are set up that give it away. The writing is obviously "successful" in that it gets a lot of engagement, and many people either don't realize or don't care that it's machine generated, but I find it distasteful. If I'm reading something I either want to be entertained or I want some specific information. If it's to be entertained then the story has to be good (writing doesn't necessarily need to be that good) and I haven't seen any AI generated stories that are that compelling. If it's informational then I can either ask an LLM directly and get something tailored for me, or I'm also interested in the emotional and human side, which an LLM can only imitate, since it has no theory of mind.
- overgard 2mo agoThis is just a guess based off my own reading habits, but I can't help but think the average reader chooses books largely based on who the writer is. I don't necessarily mean that as a fan-boy kind of thing, but more just "I'm overwhelmed with choices and I know this guy is good". I know we'll keep getting stories of like "this LLM created book won this award" or something, but ultimately someone is going to have to put their name behind a piece of work and cultivate an audience and develop a unique voice and viewpoint, and like, I don't think the existence of a lot of spam is going to get rid of that. (I know that's a bit tangential to the blog's point -- I read it -- but I just think that the human element in a piece is going to matter the most)
- VLM 2mo agoI read the author's entire post and find it interesting that the author attributes success to having a good story to tell based upon some wild youth experiences while sailing. Not being able to type real fast, not some magic sauce from a "how to be an author class" but being able to spin a good yarn, one good enough for other people to pay to hear it. There was/is a business position as a middleman of sitting between a storyteller and the printing press, called authoring or writing and that's slowly been denigrated for over a century by mechanical typewriters, word processors, spelling checkers, grammar checkers, now LLMs. However there's always been a shortage of good story tellers with a story to tell, and for at least a century or two been a MASSIVE oversupply of the middlemen mentioned above, who end up failing. They can type, and they insist thats all they need, and the ability to spin a good yarn is just fluff or unimportant. Then they fail, so they're probably incorrect. I suspect as long as the author can spin a heck of a good yarn based on his personal sailing experiences mixed in with whatever else, the author will have gainful employment in the book biz. As a storyteller. Not as "a guy who types really fast" or "a word processor technician" or whatever. The middleman author who used to have a job writing generic romance novel #7994126 and was hoping to make money off writing #7994127 is probably utterly doomed. Why does the publisher need him if we have LLMs, or even better, why do we need publishers if we have LLMs and can enter a short simple plot just as well. "Claude generate me a 75K word romance novel similar to 'Just for the Summer' from last year but write all my favorite past characters into it. Especially character Anne she's my favorite." But lets be realistic, those middlemen were already doomed anyway. Very few people in the book biz can spin a good yarn and that shows up in the stats of "failed writers". LLMs just mean they'll generate more scrap paper along the way to failure. But about the same percentage will sell books and about the same percentage will fail unless AI itself causes a substantial difference in readers tastes (honestly, I think not...) Compare it to programming, about which we supposedly have more experience. LLMs generate more code that no one is responsible for nor understands fully. But does it make more or less successful startups? Nah, not really. Doesn't seem to have much effect on "idea people" at all. The people whom always generate bad ideas crash the plane with no survivors a little quicker, the people whom always generate good ideas make money a little quicker, most people in the middle are unaffected beyond change for the sake of change, which is always expensive.
- Animats 2mo ago[dead]
- stereolambda 2mo agoWhat most takes seem to miss is that hardly anyone these days reads just because it's an easy way to fight boredom and pass some time. It's not 1920s. There's lots of less demanding and very much available ways for that, short-form video being the extreme. So if you're reading books at all, there's some ideological (or cultural, for the lack of a better word) reasons about broadening your mind, caring for your attention, or social participation. This leads me to thinking that a bigger proportion of readers would care who wrote the works, than predicted by naive thinking. Certainly more compared to video. I'm not negating that some would not: mainly ones who have a very specific taste and just want lots of that. The author's name (or the book being famous) is a huge factor in selecting what to read, both for prestige and selection reasons (by which I mean selecting something that has a chance of being good). Beyond that, it has been a hellscape for matching the "worthy" authors with readers since... I don't know, the industrial revolution? For the 1800s already there are heaps of writers no one has heard about. The institutions and publishing houses meant to select famous authors is not something I would lament the death of. Though it will exist if only because many people read for social proof. I would be interested about the arguments against reading self-published books. I know they are extremely likely to be bad, but I'm curious if there's something deeper beyond this statistical argument.
- mold_aid 2mo agoBoy I have not seen Scalzi's bluesky but I gotta imagine there's a minion named Hugh getting a nasty splinter in a Starter Villain sequel
- tokamax 2mo ago[dead]
- ratelimitsteve 2mo agothe article talks about AI books winning awards and AI books on bestseller charts, but can any one of us think of a book they genuinely enjoyed that was written by an AI? this feels less like proof that AI books are good and more like proof that awards, rankings and other accolades are rife with abuse. it's a known issue across almost all entertainment media: you start by trying to find the best media to consume but the process is so subjective and gameable that it ends up being a way to pick something arbitrarily and then declare it to be the best.
- nullorempty 2mo agoLet's suppose an AI and a Human wrote a book each and it's the same word-for-word. Will the effect of the book be the same on readers? From a perspective of classic materialism the effect should be the same. But what if the thought is material? How does the world change then if AI takes over a significant portion of writing.
- LiteUser 2mo agoTake solace knowing there are more human-written books than anyone could read in a thousand lifetimes. Get busy readin'!
- WillMorr 2mo agoIt's really interesting hearing moderate takes from an author. It feels like most people with strong enough opinions to make a blog post are either (reasonably) digging in against ai or have completely given up. It feels like the majority of people who self-identify as readers have extremely high standards and don't realise it, there is clearly a large amount of overlap between chatbots and some chunk of human authors. It's already better at technical writing than I ever was, I'm just fine with it because I never wanted to be a technical writer. I really appreciate that Hugh has the humility to talk about this transition in comparable terms to the one that launched him. It's definitely democratizing the ability to produce words in a similar way but I'm less sure it's otherwise meaningfully comparable. This feels like more of a re-cetralization: we're moving back towards the established players being the only ones able to write novels. Its just that the established players are now model weights being used by different people but with the same biases. Instead of blocking new authors via controlling access to publishing, chatbots and the people using them are functionally DDOSing every open channel for humans to get read and seem to be breaking the pipeline. As an aside, the idea of streamer authors is fascinating. It'd be a completely new thing, it's like the maximalalist version of authors in serial mediums being overly sensitive to the immediate response to each chapter and overcorrecting. Excellent read overall, thanks for sharing.
- k310 2mo agoThe author created a writing tool, neo[0]at github [1] Dowloadable,freemium [2] but the Premium is 20 Espees. So, what's an Espee, other than an award from ESPN? (ESPY) [0] https://hughhowey.com/neo-a-word-processor-for-authors/ https://hughhowey.com/neo-a-word-processor-for-authors/ [1] https://github.com/smeans/neo https://github.com/smeans/neo [2] https://neotechnologies.io/app-details.php?app=neo-word https://neotechnologies.io/app-details.php?app=neo-word
- cobzilla 2mo agoI’d imagine most books are read by people who don’t know much or anything about the author who wrote the book. Likewise, even if the reader does know about the author and think the author is a bad person, they still read the book, watch the movie, listen to the song, etc The reality is most people don’t get invested in the creators or the creation. It’s just a good story and all the meta-stuff doesn’t affect most people’s consumption. So, that is to say, AI writing, music and all the other arts will be commercially successful. Now, there will also be a market for human-created content, which people will consume specifically because the content is human-created.