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Comment by flumpcakes | Hacker News Reader

I think people are missing the point.

The point is not that AI produces slop (it does).

The point is that I don't want to consume "art" that has been generated out the distillation of stealing all of the world's current art. That's not original, it's a facsimile of art.

I want to read something that has intent. That has a purpose. A reason why it exists. Not just the lowest effort cash grab.

This usage of AI is the equivalent of manufacturing companies making the flimsiest, cheapest, plastic crap to save 1/3 of a cent on every mop they produce. Designed to work for the least amount of time before needing replaced.

This planet has enough people on it that I will never, ever be able to read all the books written.

Please don't exponentially pump the number up by 1,000x every year from AI generated garbage.

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> I don't want to consume "art" that has been generated out the distillation of stealing all of the world's current art

It seems that you've fundamentally misunderstood art. I wouldn't personally call it "stealing", but T.S. Eliot would beg to differ (as would Pablo Picasso who "stole" that line)

> I want to read something that has intent. That has a purpose. A reason why it exists.

If the "allegories for the LLM condition" angle is accurate, then these stories do. In which case I believe what you mean to say is that you want to read something that has human intent.

Are you claiming that LLMs have an intent beyond producing the statistically most "correct" output? This sounds a bit like you are saying LLMs are conscious.

> producing the statistically most "correct" output

That isn't quite how they work - there's a degree of randomness depending on so called "temperature". And it isn't the output that's statistically modelled, it's the next token based on the prior output.

> This sounds a bit like you are saying LLMs are conscious

No more so than OP is implicitly asserting that human art is produced in cleanroom isolation. I don't believe either to be true.

> distillation of stealing all of the world's current art

Here's the age-old dilemma, though - how is reading stealing?

I think there is a meaningful distinction to be made between a human reading and an AI company consuming data without consent in order to train their models. Certainly if enough people feel the same then what AI companies are doing is "wrong" .

I get it. However, consuming data without consent is not well defined, when said data is publicly available on the internet. Licenses for code, and not abiding them are a different thing, I think. Most authors (of books) wouldn't credit their inspirations, unless specifically asked about them.

An author has lived experiences, including other books they have read, to draw upon to tell a narrative they want to tell (either purely for expression, purely for profit, or more often than not somewhere between).

A machine that chews up the worlds literature and spins out a best guess at what the next word should be does not have intent, and the vast majority of the time is used by unscrupulous people purely for profit and/or deception.

An LLM and a living human being are not the same thing, I am tired of apologists comparing them as if they are.

It's not surprising that a computer (doing trillions of calculations on a billion parameter model that was trained on the world's literature) can string a coherent sentence together...

This is predicated on the belief that the AI is running autonomously without ongoing input over hundreds of interactions to produce the output. In all of the professional contexts where I've leveraged AI, every output is the result of hundreds of back and forth interactions, review, modification, and iteration.

Your narrative about next token prediction makes no allowance for this.

> manufacturing companies making the flimsiest, cheapest, plastic crap to save 1/3 of a cent on every mop they produce. Designed to work for the least amount of time before needing replaced

We live in a world with such companies, and we can still buy quality things. If there is a demand for the purely-human generated texts, they will be around. Perhaps a lot of people around you will read ai text instead, and you'll get upset because of it, but it's their choice. You'll still have your thing

I don't know that we can have nice things. If two companies produce a similar widget but one is higher quality in no visible or articulable way... Which one will sell better, the cheaper or more expensive one? What if we as consumers can't really definitely tell when one is prone to failing in 1 year instead of 5? It takes too long to find out and by then the more expensive one is underselling and forced to enshittify.

I think it's worse than that - the AI slop low effort cash cow is using deception (as well as theft). For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUSY6mtqQDI

I get it. You want something genuine and original, not a mass-manufactured copy. You want grass-fed beef raised ethically and killed humanely, butchered by an artisanal butcher and cooked by a specialist chef on a charcoal grill, not a weiner stuffed with starch, salt, and fat that goes directly to your pleasure centers and bypasses the whole point of eating food to get nutrition for you mind and body alike.

I get it. We all get it. Except we can't easily ... you know, get it. Anymore. We've industrialised everything. Why not also art and even our thoughts?

I mean termites don't need art, nor do they need individual thoughts but they manage to create marvels of engineering and they have survived for millions of years. Why wouldn't humans go the same way, too, eventually?

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