Hacker News Reader

Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

> These writers can use AI and there will be no difference. Another category is autobiographies written by celebrities with no writing skills

I would argue this is a common fallacy: I can't do something but I can use automation to do it. But chances are, being unable to do it also means you're unable to judge the result and understand what is right/wrong.

This is the standard thing if you try to put together a UI without any design skills, you will use existing components and styles, and it will still look crap.

AI will make it easier for people who know how to write to do automated ghost writing, but it won't allow people who can't to do it.

View on HN

That kind of was my point as well. If you are a good author, sure you can probably write a book faster with AI - maybe even faster than without using it.

But this fantasy of “people will just dump a prompt into GPT and it will produce a masterpiece (or at least something that a reasonably big audience perceives as good)” is just that: a fantasy.

I am open to change my mind of course once I see a good story written mostly or completely by AI. Sure “good” is subjective but I think no one can argue that the stories produced by AI today are good by any measure - at best they are a passable mimicry of a story that already existed.

> I would argue this is a common fallacy: I can't do something but I can use automation to do it. But chances are, being unable to do it also means you're unable to judge the result and understand what is right/wrong

While in general it's true, reality can be different. I'm using GPT-4 for coding thing that I don't know much about. I have only ideas what I want, but not how exactly to code it. Simple offloading to AI works fine. I can learn libraries and APIs it's using, but that isn't my goal. I want the working product. This semi-automated approach saves a lot of time.

That was just a practical example. We can argue that in some cases it doesn't work. Yes, and may never work. But there is an area where it works. And this area at least is not going to shrink.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com