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Comment by bravesoul2 | Hacker News Reader

AI kills the fun here for me. Writing is fun. Writing using AI to help is horrible. Same with coding to some extent.

Same, kills the fun. It’s actually made it harder to get started on anything because I know the starting point and most of the work is just prompts which I don’t find fun at all. Handcrafting feels more tedious knowing that prompts could do it so much faster. So I end up just disengaging from the activity all together. This is the second year since about 1995 that my side projects folder has practically nothing new (I’ve built a few things with AI, but I lose interest very fast - like a day or two).

FWIW my context is coding as a hobby/entrepreneur. It’s not my job.

The mainstream writing assistants are dog-shite, but so is everything else! If your idea of writing with AI is ChatGPT and no harness, you're only making a statement about the largest common denominator of AI tooling—from a position of ignorance. I'd previously helped multiple pen-pals of mine to properly harness the AI tooling with low-code platforms such as Dify. I'm sure there's plenty more out there, but re: Dify specifically, they took to it rather well. When carefully prompted, some models excel in "editing" moreso than writing from scratch. Not having to rely on professional editors is a huge advantage for aspiring authors that would otherwise struggle with keeping on-form. In my experience, progressively refining ideas, maintaining notes on development of characters in long-winded stories, and soon enough, persistent agents with proactivity, interruptible work capabilities—would vastly reduce the cognitive load that has very little to do with "creativity," that writers have to deal with all the time.

You cannot blame "AI" for your own lack of trying...

Actually, the fact of the matter is that a lot of people derive joy of being the "sole creator" of what they do, or if they collaborate, to enrich human relationships when they do it. So, AI fundamentally takes away that joy because its outside the parameters of normal creation.

What you allude to is not so much "fact," as the "heart" of the matter. The availability of AI tooling takes away nothing; you elect to either use it, or not. I personally hate having to deal with human editors! Most of them typically fit in two broad categories: guns-for-hire and genuine collaborators. The "fact" of the matter is such that AI does not prevent me from collaborating with any of my peers, however, it does allow me to pseudo-collaborate with the writers long-dead! In fact, I happen to maintaib a collection of theatrical play-journals, riddled with conversations I've had at the time with various historical figures vis-à-vis AI. This is the single most valuable source of inspiration enabling my writing in ways that my peers never could. AI-assisted writing is a misnomer—it's not about writing as much as reading, and moreso playing, which is how we get creative.

Wittgenstein would absolutely love it!

It doesn't surprise me that those of us to have failed in keeping up with the constantly-evolving AI tooling, would also make it part of their newly-refined, all-human identity. IMHO, similarly to how hating popular things does not make you cool, not using AI does not make you a joyous independent creator to bravely hold post in the treacherous world of AI slop! It sounds more like a fantasy than coherent creative position. We're still in the early days when it comes to creative writing comprehension in AI. You may or may not be surprised that there's very little to show for in terms of evals when it comes to that. Unlike coding and maths, fiction is yet to be recognised as verifiable domain. (Probably due to probability distribution in fictional outputs not necessarily converging the way of related objective rewards!) However, some labs are working it! There's a huge market for creative writing aids, as it'a necessary to everything from education (as story-telling is what makes studying worthwhile) to political work.

I think that generalizes to 'creation is fun, using AI to help is horrible'.

I think that generalized to ‘AI killed the dopamine loop’ XD

AT is an amazing tool that can boost productivity and help with creative inspiration. If an app is making you feel sad stop using the app.

Can it really help with creative inspiration in the long term? I'd say the answer is no for most people.

And some people need a certain number of others who are also doing the same thing for the love of it. We are a social species after all. AI is taking that away.

I’m very dyslexic, so having AI in the loop is incredibly useful — especially for feedback.

But I have to guide it: “just list the changes,” “use English English,” and so on.

The fun’s still there — because the thinking is still mine.

I wrote a "funny" email to a colleague who asked for a formal request to do a task I asked him for. I took it seriously and wrote extremely formal ("Dearest Steven... " Etc). He laughed and said "did chatgpt write that?".

It made me irrationally angry, no, I spent two minutes of my own brain power to come up with those five sentences. This kind of thing happens constantly now, everyone assumes everyone else uses gpt's for everything and I find it a bit depressing to be honest.

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