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This 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
by f311a 2mo ago
This 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.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- michaeld123 2mo agothat's not how I interpreted the whole article.
- 1dom 2mo ago> AI writing makes me vomit. I think this was fairly obvious and fair 1 - 2 years ago. Now though, I have to wonder if people who think this with such conviction are falling for the toupee fallacy. You said it yourself: someone you consider a well known (and presumably accomplished?) author thinks AI is pretty good at writing.
- stanac 2mo ago> I think this was fairly obvious and fair 1 - 2 years ago. And that's mostly for us, developers who use it all the time and maybe for other office employees. Not sure if random person would recognize LLM-isms.
- cubefox 2mo agoNot even the random HN user detects LLM-isms. You regularly get downvoted for pointing it out. E.g. here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49087955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49087955
- fzeroracer 2mo agoThere's been multiple 'unslop' contests [1] with a focus on AI 'writing' and I agree with the OP that AI writing makes me want to vomit. It's all hollow, bland writing that has zero zest to it. [1] https://www.hyperstitionai.com/unslop-results https://www.hyperstitionai.com/unslop-results
- strken 2mo agoI haven't tried using an AI to write prose, but I use Claude to write code daily and it spits out the worst comments I've ever seen, along with some surprisingly good ones. Would we not expect AI fiction to be the same? A stream of poor and excellent taste, not particularly original or surprising, samey in hard-to-define ways, but capable of being hammered into a good story by an editor.
- dspillett 2mo ago> Would we not expect AI fiction to be the same? A stream of poor and excellent taste, not particularly original or surprising, samey in hard-to-define ways, but capable of being hammered into a good story by an editor. That could also describe many human writers… AI writing seems to have a quality ceiling, or an ick floor if you prefer to think about it that way around, but is OK compare to bad human writers. I'm still committed to the career suicide that is refusing to touch generative AI beyond the supped-up auto-correct/-suggest that has replaced the older method in my IDE (replaced, such that if I turn it off I also lose what I had before), but seeing results others around me have pulled out of the hat I have to admit the tech can produce serviceable work if properly fettled by a person afterwards.
- p-e-w 2mo ago[flagged]
- aaa_aaa 2mo agoA small puke comes close in the times I noticed.
- f311a 2mo agoThat's true, but I can still tell if a big article was mostly written by AI. The author talks about writing cheap stories, but right now, you can't do this. Cheap stories are pretty bad, because there is very little human effort to polish them. The more effort you put into AI written stories, the better they become, but it's not cheap at all. You have to rewrite and review them.
- petesergeant 2mo agoHow do you know the ones you don't think are written by AI, actually aren't?
- dkh 2mo agoAnd you don’t expect it to improve? At the rate things are going?
- f311a 2mo agoIt will, there is no doubt. But look at the first paragraph of the article: > The writing was on the wall, and now the writing is everywhere. Literally. Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans — at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation — and that’s creating an existential crisis among authors, confusion among readers, and legal action within the industry. He talks about the current state.
- jibal 2mo ago"how come" makes me want to vomit. (That "It’s a common idiom" is completely irrelevant. And note that it doesn't actually make me vomit.) Also, here's another thought. In my opinion, here's my opinion.
- elestor 2mo agoIt’s a common idiom
- tossandthrow 2mo ago> AI writing makes me vomit. There is likely a non empty set of writings that are AI written and that you don't recognize to be AI written. I agree that the Ai-isms are ugly. Butni also acknowledge that I am likely reading huge amounts of Ai text I don't attribute Ai.
- dartharva 2mo agoDefault unspecifically-prompted AI writing makes you vomit, because it has a specific pattern. But with enough well-defined prompts AI can be made to write in practically any style, often with results unrecognizable as AI-generated.
- YurgenJurgensen 2mo agoShow me. AIvangelists love to say what AI can do, but never bother to provide any examples.
- f311a 2mo agoIt does not matter which prompt you use. Even a long article with a small input (of what to write) will include weird details and structure. People tried to fool Pangram by using custom prompts and instant feedback (rewrite until it passes). After hundreds of rounds, the text was still detected. Although it's harder to detect such text by humans, there will be clues if you want to write a whole book based on a few pages of input.
- senordevnyc 2mo agohow come he thinks AI is better at writing? He talks about this in the article, did you read it? Reasons include AI winning writing contests, AI hitting bestseller lists, and now apparently an AI-written book inspiring a bidding war between publishers that resulted in the supposed "author" getting a $2.4M advance (until it was revealed that the book was written by AI).
- efields 2mo agoThis is happening in every creative industry. The creators on the edge of this space in every medium have seen it from both sides. AI creative is easy to spot _right now_. It will not always be that way.
- hughhowey 2mo agoThe full sentence I wrote: "Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans — at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation — and that’s creating an existential crisis among authors, confusion among readers, and legal action within the industry" "About as well as" doesn't mean "better." Wild that you jumped from one to the other. I continue: "-- at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation --" This is factual. One thing I am sure of is that computers are better at reading than people. The way some people read makes me want to vomit.