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Comment by torben-friis | Hacker News Reader

I think the argument is misguided, even if I agree with the principle: it is based in the effort one puts in and how it's similar to a sport.

I don't care whether my favorite author sweated for months facing a typewriter, of he effortlessly dictated the final form of the book in one sitting to a secretary while sipping mojitos.

I think my issue with AI has more to do with the signal it sends: reading takes effort, particularly literature, and I use the author's name as a proxy to judge whether to invest that effort myself. Nothing bad in selling dollar store crap, but it's bad to put 'Nike' on it.

Your individuality is what you sell as an author. I can get access to the LLM without you.

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i don't get your point. am i reading the article in a different way?

my reading is: if you use AI to help you write, then i can't know how much of the work is yours and how much is AI. therefore, when AI helps i have to expect the worst and assume that it is mainly AI and your input is very little. consequently, don't use AI at all, or the work is no longer yours.

i think that's a pretty good argument. it's not about the effort you made but about the amount of control you have over the text. and, as you say, the signal it sends. so i think you agree more with the article than you say.

what is weird is the title: don't say you use AI for writing, but then in the text it says: don't lie. if you can't do either then you can't use AI for writing, so why not just say it directly: don't use AI to help you writing.

I should have clarified or quoted, my bad. I was talking about the work references, mainly this paragraph:

>was I tempted to use AI to speed things up? No. It would be like hooking a motor to a stationary bike and calling that exercise. It would be like taking a helicopter to the top of Everest and saying that I summited.

> I can get access to the LLM without you.

And you can read a car maintenance book. That doesn't mean you can fix your car now.

The author vouched the LLM output using their experience, that's what you get. Unless you are as experienced in their domain, it will take you time to figure out if the output of your LLM prompt is correct or non-sense.

Yeah, the somelier argument.

It doesn't work for me sorry, because you wouldn't accept a book by John, a friend of Hemingway, as a Hemingway book no matter how much he assisted in editing. Nor a Picasso museum exhibition is by Marie because Marie chose which paintings to display.

Authorship and edition are different claims.

I think a better analogy is cartoon or animated films. The artist, creator, engineer lays the key frames, the plot points, characters, etc. The team builds it. Fills in gaps, especially with direct input from the creator.

The creator still gets the credit.

LLMs can just be the part that accelerates laying the code down.

I think folks are just too emotional over a tool that we are ignoring drawing similarities on purpose. That or just different audiences, hackers vs professionals. The latter just meaning being payed and usually working in a team. The styles can be different and the value placed on crafted code vs results.

> The creator still gets the credit.

Actually, they all get credit, at least in Hollywood

they are, but when i read a scifi magazine like clarkesworld, i can trust that the editor made a good selection of stories. the work of the editor does have value. it's just a different value.

and how do you handle the reverse? use AI as the editor for a hemmingway book. is it still hemmingway?

>the work of the editor does have value. it's just a different value.

I mostly agree with that, with some caveats (in short, there's an uncomfortably thin line to appropriating the curated work, consciously or not).

>and how do you handle the reverse? use AI as the editor for a hemmingway book. is it still hemmingway?

I'd be comfortable saying at least that it's less misleading to declare that book as written by Hemingway. Doing so is more in line with the social expectations that come with having the author's signature on it.

But who vouches for the author? If you're not already experienced in the domain, how would you know whether to pick up a book written by Jane Expert or by Dave Dunning-Kruger?

Traditional authorship is self-vouching: writing a coherent book on a complicated subject is hard. You can't exactly bullshit your way through 500 pages of car maintenance minutia. If a book actually manages to make its way all the way to a book store, there is a pretty good chance it is worth reading.

LLMs change this equation. Any idiot can prompt an LLM into writing reasonable-sounding slop, so any idiot can now write a book on any subject. Combine that with self-publishing and print-on-demand, and suddenly all bets are off.

If 99% of LLM-written (or LLM-"assisted") books on a subject are garbage you aren't going to buy a book and hope it is the 1% - it makes far more sense to save yourself the money and get the mediocre answer by prompting the LLM yourself. Want expert information? Just buy an LLM-free book written by an actual expert.

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