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Comment by jamager | Hacker News Reader

Mundane writing jobs might be automated soon, perhaps. But truly creative jobs?

Do you honestly, really would want to read a 1000 novel written by an AI even if I assure you that is as good as what an average human could do?

Now we are all wowed with Stable Diffusion and what not, ok. But give me a library stand with 999 decent AI books and 1 human book, I pick the human.

I want to talk to the human behind the pages, feel the human behind the pages. I don't want a random number very efficiently generated by a machine. Who cares!

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If something is entertaining enough to capture people’s attention, and is also infinitely abundant, it will probably undermine the market for higher quality, higher cost alternatives. AI doesn’t have to be as good as traditional media to destroy it - it’s more likely to be competing with Tik-Tok for attention.

But in the long run it probably _will_ be as good as traditional media, and instantly customisable to your tastes to boot. I suspect it will be a difficult pill to swallow, but we are likely over-estimating the depth and complexity of our souls, just like every other AI task. Some people will still insist on human-authored works and swear they can tell the difference. Money will still be made putting humans on stage to perform. Older generations will insist everything is worse and will possibly be right. I’m sure there will be several billion deprecatingly self-referential AI retellings of Prometheus and Pandora to show us what a bad idea it all was.

So I am also very torn about this. A big part of art is actually knowing the "history" of the author? (Just for this I am not quite lumping coding into Art just yet as I still code to solve hard problems - bit like fixing up a car - than having to impress others).

I am big into Carnatic music (a form of south indian classical music with a ton of intricacies and improvisation). The actual songs that most performers perform on stage had actualy been written by a handful of folks 3-5 centuries ago. And without any judgement, the style has a lot of homogenity to it and several folks have created compositions (in the past 50-100 years) which mimic a lot of the original style and yet acceptance of them in public performances is limited ("oh its another X wanna be").

Now imagine the same if created by AI.

You can confidently bet that James Patterson's team is already using GPT3. For better or worse, he has been the Henry Ford of novel production and modern technology like GPT3 is exactly the force multiplier the team would want to adopt.

"Who cares!" Most people ?

Its the content of the book that matters, not how or who made it.

The human behind the pages is a nessecery evil to get to the book, same as food or furniture.

Are you confident that you will be able to identify a book written by a human among 999 written by AI? Give it a few years, and you won't be able to.

Plot twist: In the future we will can talk to the computer behind the pages...

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