Comment by briga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by briga | Hacker News Reader

One day an AI will write a brilliant book. It will write something as good as the most competent and insightful human writer out there. And it will write a thousand more. The problem is that for every good book there will be a thousand bad books. What good is a good book if no one has time to discover it and read it? No one has time to get through all the good books written by humans, why are we worried about books written by AI?

Since the Gutenberg days there has never been a shortage of written material to be digested. For hundreds of years there has been way more written material than any one person could read in a lifetime. So the problem has been to pick out what is most worth reading out of the millions of books you could be reading instead. The situation now is no different, except that we should have stricter standards on what information we allow into our heads. There will always be value in a well-curated library (will AIs curate the libraries too?)

Who will curate though. Before the internet you'd read a book based on a recommendation from a friend, a sibling, a trusted figure. Now, in this increasingly isolating world, we get recommendations from small subreddits, maybe a HN post, and of course the subconscious prompting of adverts that seep through our filters.

An AI could be the writer and recommender in all those modern scenarios. Will this mean we revert back to listening to our friends and family over online opinion? Probably not, because they're no less exposed than we are to online recomendation creep.

What is needed is a ChatGPT-based editor!

And maybe some ChatGPT readers so we have an audience that can read at scale.

The situation now is different, in that AIs are capable of flooding the market with more exponentially more material than human beings could possibly ever produce or sort through. Also that AI provides a market incentive to prefer machine generated content over human generated content, as the presence of humans in the loop at all reduces profit margins (this includes having AIs curate the libraries,) as humans can't work 24/7/365 for free.

So the inevitable end result of this will be that all content will be AI generated as soon as the quality becomes - not great, competent or insightful, but just good enough to make money in the immediate short term. And this will be the case for all forms of media.

> The situation now is different, in that AIs are capable of flooding the market with more exponentially more material than human beings could possibly ever produce or sort through.

The situation is exactly the same as it was before as far as you or I are concerned.

More books are released every day than any of us can keep up with. More books have been published (and lost to time) than we can even account for.

There's more competition now, but the amount of attention you or I have to give to discovery has not changed. Like when competing restaurants open across the street from yours, it just means authors need to work harder to entice people to buy from them instead of Jimmy Pesto.

(In the case of Amazon, they're doing it through astroturfed reviews...)

There was a recent episode of the "The Last Leg" here in the UK where they announced they would be slipping in an AI produced joke in to the show, and revealed it at the end.

Not going to lie, i didn't spot it.

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