> preface explaining it was written by an LLM
why can't the quality of the works stand on its own? Whether there's LLM generation or not should be irrelevant.
why can't the quality of the works stand on its own? Whether there's LLM generation or not should be irrelevant.
Creative writing is the intent to convey feelings, thoughts, to create atmosphere. Here's a great example of the failure to do so here, in a way that even most terrible writers would avoid.
> “It just said harvest,” she told Tom. She was sitting in one of the plastic chairs, holding a cup of the adequate coffee.
The coffee in this story is conveyed as being 'perfectly adequate'. But how do you convey adequacy? When you simply just say 'the coffee is adequate' there's nothing there. It could be conveyed by establishing that the coffee is always perfectly room temperature, or with the mere hint of bitterness and sweetness, or that it tastes like every other brand out there. In many respects this story is the exact same as the 'perfectly adequate' coffee: functional, unexciting and ultimately flavorless.
This "flavorlessness" is all over the story, and paired with the obviously genAI images is how I realized as I read that this was either generated or at the least deeply driven by AI.
It constantly described facial expressions, tones of voice, and other emotional cues in generic, dry terms that communicated nothing but the abstract notion of "this person felt a particular way about what happened and it's up to you, the reader, to imagine what that feeling was."
It felt very much like it was prompted to "show, don't tell," by someone who has no idea what that phrase actually means.
As a professional programmer with a deep background in literature and music, this is yet another example that if you aren't an expert in a field, you will get mediocre results at best from an LLM, while being deceived into thinking they're great.
> obviously genAI images
You are correct that a previous era would have included a bunch of Fiverr images that would be in sort of that style, but it's not the style that's the problem. None of the images say more than the text that they're illustrating. It's subtle, but once you notice the lack of information density it becomes starkly apparent.
Obviously everyone's mileage may vary, but I didn't see this as a huge defect, and actually felt it worked pretty well.
In the hands of Douglas Adams or Kurt Vonnegut it could be spun into a whole recurring motif.
In this case it's merely...adequate. Almost captures the density of ideas packed into something like "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't" but doesn't quite manage the same effect.
every book you buy has an author credited. articles in newspapers and magazines have photographer and author attributions.
asking an ai to write you a story does not make you an author. if you ask someone to take a photo for you, you don’t magically get to say “look at this photograph, i’m a photographer.” if you ask someone to bake you a wedding cake, and then claim you baked it, you’re a fraud.
we deserve to know the actual writer.
Does the average person really do care all the time? Maybe the outlet it comes from as a whole (factuality, political lean) but more rarely the exact author. Many don’t even have the critical skills for any of it and consume whatever content is chosen for them by whatever algorithm is there. We probably should care, I just don’t think a lot of us do.
For me, needing to know that something’s written by AI serves threefold purposes:
1) acknowledging that it might be slop that someone threw together with no effort (important in regards to spam)
2) acknowledging that depending on the model the factuality might be low when it comes to anything niche (though people are wrong too, often enough)
3) mentally preparing myself for AI bullshit slop language, like “It’s not X, it’s Y.”, or just choose not to engage with it (it's the same disgust reaction as when I find a PDF and realize it's just scanned images, not proper text)
In general, unless the goal is either human interaction or a somewhat rare case of wanting to read a specific blog etc., most of the time I don’t categorically care whether something was lovingly created by a human or shoved out by a half baked version of Skynet - only that it’s good enough for whatever metrics I want to evaluate it by. I’m not ashamed of it and maybe that’s why I don’t take an issue with AI generated code either, as long as it’s good enough (sometimes better than what people write, other times quite shit when the models and harnesses are bad).
Reading LLM slop without warning makes me see their point of view.
I think there's useful ways to engage with LLM writing, but they are often very different than human writing.
A human writer, a good one, often has ideas that are denser than the words on the page, and close reading is rewarded by helping you unpack the many implications.
With AI writing, there's usually fewer ideas than words, and so it requires a different kind of engagement. Either the human prompter behind it didn't supply enough ideas, or they were noncommittal enough that their very indecision got baked in.
LLMs are very prone to hedging and circling around a point while not saying much of anything. Maybe it is the easiest way to respond to RLHF incentives and corporate-speak training data. Or maybe they're just intrinsically stuck on being unable to find the right next token so they just endlessly spiral around via all of the wrong ones. Either way, there's often a whole lot of cotton candy text that dissolves when you try to look at it more closely.
but you dodged the question i asked - why can't a piece stand on the contents, rather than its pedigree?
Would you care if a writer used a pen name? Does that in any way diminish their works? What about the unknown editors that contributed?
When you interact with art, you do so to interact with the author and the point they want to make. Writing is something where a skilled writer will be able to make a point tersely and have it stick, knowing where to embellish and where to keep it simple. Every decision in art tells you about the artist. Generative AI may be able to fake the composition process, but the point of composition is it reveals something about the human. All of those are artistic decisions that a machine apparently now "can do", but not with any coherency.
The holder of the reigns of slop is not an artist, this is plain to see because they do not interact or engage with their work on the same level as an artist. The produced slop is not art, because it cannot be engaged with on the same level.
Due to LLMs making the cost of publishing “thoughts” extremely low, there’s now an over-supply of content that looks decent on the surface, but in reality the author has probably spent less time on than the reader.
I’m just talking about the general topic about the usefulness of an “this is AI generated” classifier.
exactly what i'm trying to get at too. And my thesis is that this classification method is pointless - it's just as pointless as saying things like "this author went to harvard", or "he/she came from a poor background".
Of course these systems may eventually break down, but for now they seem to work.
we have pop musicians who produce massive hits under their names and the song writers are still given credit in liner notes and in the tracks details on spotify or wherever.
if it’s created by a bot, id take it even further and say which version of which model actually generated it should be declared. why would anyone be against giving proper attribution?
AI is just a tool
If you used a fancy auto bake cake machine instead of an oven, you still get to claim that you made the cake.
100 years ago someone would be making the claim that using an oven to make cakes “doesn’t count”
All AI did was raise the bar
It’s quite clear here that the author spent a lot of time on this so he absolutely gets credit as the author
If you use an AI, there isn't.
Either way, it's clear that the author (yes, the author) put a lot of work into this by iterating and shaping it to what he wanted, and that's a lot more than sprinkles.
> If you use an AI, there isn't.
What is the functional difference here? You are commissioning (see: prompting) someone (see: an AI) for a piece of work, or artwork or whatever. The output is out of your control; and I don't think the existence or lack thereof of a human on the other end materially matters.
If we had hyper-advanced ovens from The Jetsons where we could type a prompt using a fold-out keyboard and it would magically generate whatever cake we ask of it: did we or did we not bake that cake? And I do not think it is clear the author put a lot of work iterating and shaping it into what he wanted; we have zero insight into that.
If we had a complete black box where you submitted Prompt and out came Thing, and you had zero clue what said black box actually did, could you claim creation over Thing? What does knowing that it's a human vs LLM make materially different in terms of whether or not you created it?
Imagine if you had an auto cake making machine that decides on its own the best time to make cake. It adds the ingredients, stirs, turns the oven on, and leaves the finished cake on the counter for you.
People start opening bakeries consisting entirely of cakes baked by the automatic machines. The owners of these machines have no idea whether the cakes have a bit too much flour or were slightly over-stirred. In some cases, they haven't even tried the cakes.
Who gets to claim they made the cake?
By contrast, there are others who carefully tune their machines to make sure everything is perfect. They adjust the mixing settings and ingredient proportions. They experiment and iterate. They taste test throughout the process. And what they give to the public tastes every bit as good as a homemade cake.
The first group is creating slop. The second group, I think, is baking. And OP is in the second group.
Why would I give him the same credit I would give a writer.
Or why would I give a writer the same credit I would give someone who created the AI prompts and scaffolding to generate this?
Being unhappy about not being able to call oneself an author, ends up betraying a lack of confidence in the work or process.
In the end writer, dancer, actor, whatever - these titles come from their impact.
There will be a different name for this, and eventually there will be something made that is good enough that people will be spell bound. At which point its going to be named something else.
At which point.
In general, though, I think part of the mistake people keep making is that they try to imitate what would be value to engage with if a human wrote it, in an attempt to claim the role of an author of a book or whatever. There's likely artforms that are unique to what an LLM can facilitate, but trying to imitate human artforms is going to give you stunted results. The AI is very good at imitating the form but not the substance.
Once we stop trying to generate and pass off AI essays, novels, choose your own adventure stories, and all the other human genres as being human writing, we'll have a chance to figure out actually interesting artistic forms.
However - since we are humans - we also care about the artist.
Creating something without the effort previous works involved, can and do affect the context and understanding of it.
Hah - just thought of one good example: how would people feel about talking to only fans creators, if they didn’t know it was AI.
not really. Unless you place value on _effort_, rather than be objectively outcome based. Someone digging a hole with a spoon doesn't make it a better hole than a jackhammer.
I maintain that the work itself - that is, the contents of what is being expressed - is the sole judgement of how good the works is. Not the authorship, LLM-usage or otherwise.
A core fact about information, is that signal only exists in the right context.
As an illustrative example: A string of static or gibberish numbers converts to signal when we have the right tools to interpret it.
You could see a bunch of rocks arranged on a beach, while someone who understands the local language may see an SOS.
Culture itself keeps evolving, and teenagers reuse language to create jargon that makes sense to them, but is opaque to others.
I am arguing that your point is true, but its phrasing focuses on the Platonic ideal, and avoiding the messy practical context of communication.
> how would LLMs fair when the content of the work itself is about “Something made by a human”.
it would fair just as well as if the same words had been written by a human, provided the contents are sound and has good meaning - conversely, slop is slop, regardless if it was written by an LLM or human.
My point at the grandparent post is that there's a lot of blind discrimination on the origin of a works - if it was written by or with the help of LLM, then it automatically deserves less attention, and/or its content's worth diminished. All without actually discussing the content.
> why does it bother you to give attribution? why do you think crediting the writer impacts how the piece stands?
clearly it does to you?
thing is, this is a fool's errand to try to police what people credit when there is zero capability of verification and enforcement
the current social norms still value authorship, so people will just take or omit credit as they see most advantageous, even if it's merely an ego advantage, which it typically is but a proxy for brand building
what will happen if/when the currency of attribution is completely altered? hard to predict
my prediction is that track record will be considerably more important, not less, but human merit will be increasingly seen as irrelevant
Also I feel a bit conned. I was curious what Tom Hartmann was up to and now it seems he doesn't exist and it's just some slop?