The literary world is sleepwalking into an AI disaster | Hacker News Reader

The literary world is sleepwalking into an AI disaster

theargumentmag.com

I think we miss the elephant in the room.

Since the rise of "social media" driven by clicks on ads, quality has almost entirely been replaced by quantity. And now, creativity has been farmed out as well.

I still believe in quality.

George Monbiot said it years ago.

Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we're hooked on it.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advert...

Banning online advertising would solve very nearly everything. Specifically, social media would die (and traditional media would get a new lease of life).

An intermediate step would be to ban personally targeted advertising, at least then the playing field can be leveled somewhat.

Here is the problem with the idea of "banning online advertising" - there is a large amount of people who spend a lot of time online. To the point that even small local businesses will buy advertisement space on social media. If such advertising is, it can be assumed social media overall will die, and we will regress back to a world where the previous media incumbents (network television) once again gain all the power.

Not a very wise solution in my opinion.

> Banning online advertising

It's probably easier to end world hunger at this point.

I understand AI detectors are important when filtering huge amount of texts. But if there's a single winning story to evaluate, shouldn't human jurors assessment be the gold standard?

And if they assess it's human written but it was actually AI assisted ... does it really matter?

Perhaps AI detection tools work better on fiction vs. non-fiction. For scientific writing, I have trouble believing there is such a thing as accurate AI detection, but I haven't tried Pangram. Either way, AI detection tools are a bit useless in my view.

Sleepwalking, no, they're bitterly aware it is an issue and some are even scared of it. More of a question of how to spot it in less obvious cases.

I do free writing sometimes and devise some weird similes from time to time.

"Sleepwalking" is a poor metaphor here, and "sleep" appears nowhere else in the article. Vs. "head-in-the-sand" - introduced two dozen paragraphs later - is a far better fit for the situation.

It'd be more interesting if the article talked about the situations which literary editors and award committees would face, if they tried to reject submissions for (seemingly) being AI-generated.

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