Also, I think he's too enthusiastic about the future of readers. In my opinion, reading books will be a very rare hobby pretty soon. The decline started more than 10 years ago.
"About as well as" doesn't mean "better." Wild that you jumped from one to the other.
I continue: "-- at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation --" This is factual.
One thing I am sure of is that computers are better at reading than people. The way some people read makes me want to vomit.
Literally, welcome to: Hacker News.
It's always been like this.
I read the whole thing and it was my impression.
I think this was fairly obvious and fair 1 - 2 years ago. Now though, I have to wonder if people who think this with such conviction are falling for the toupee fallacy.
You said it yourself: someone you consider a well known (and presumably accomplished?) author thinks AI is pretty good at writing.
And that's mostly for us, developers who use it all the time and maybe for other office employees. Not sure if random person would recognize LLM-isms.
Would we not expect AI fiction to be the same? A stream of poor and excellent taste, not particularly original or surprising, samey in hard-to-define ways, but capable of being hammered into a good story by an editor.
That could also describe many human writers…
AI writing seems to have a quality ceiling, or an ick floor if you prefer to think about it that way around, but is OK compare to bad human writers.
I'm still committed to the career suicide that is refusing to touch generative AI beyond the supped-up auto-correct/-suggest that has replaced the older method in my IDE (replaced, such that if I turn it off I also lose what I had before), but seeing results others around me have pulled out of the hat I have to admit the tech can produce serviceable work if properly fettled by a person afterwards.
That being said, the better coders I've seen aren't looking for a speed up, they're generally looking for something to bounce ideas off of, or to get a first draft going to defeat writer's block or something (I guess this is technically a speed up, but not the way people mean when they describe slinging tokens around). It's generally to wind up at a better solution at the end than to get a sustained speed up (which seems to only be possible in boilerplate heavy domains, but those were previously slowed down by the boilerplate and are really only coming up to speed with everything else, at significant cost).
Replace Microsoft with LLMs and the same quote applies. They have no culture, no connection. The code or comments they produce will not effect any future LLM session and they current have no concern how it will effect future humans except for maximizing engagement for the human at the console today.
Fiction is no different. Unless there’s a feedback loop the LLM just spits out text and will never see it again. The LLM will never meet the readers at book signings, weave in personal details that could only be known for experience.
It’s probably perfect for the write-by-committee style of movies and shows being created today. Just like organic food or locally made products, there are already creators putting Human Intelligence badges on their work and there will probably be a market (though niche) for that until human supremacist laws push it underground.
If this is the case it should be quite easy for you to provide examples of excellent AI-fiction.
As for the “well-known author”, Occam’s razor says he (like most “well-known accomplished authors”) doesn’t know what the hell he is talking about.
I feel that's the opposite of the toupee fallacy. The lack of labelled excellent AI fiction supports the idea that there's a lot of excellent fiction that was written by largely by AI but nobody was able to identify it as AI, because they were looking for writing that makes them vomit.
Regardless, how about this: https://deadline.com/2026/07/ai-questions-debut-novel-book-f...
Maybe that debut novel is amazing, but the fact that we are even discussing whether it’s AI or not tells me it might not be - in any case we can’t read it yet to judge ourselves - just that publishing agents are completely out of touch. If it were truly great I don’t think anyone would care, since hey, good writing is good writing, no matter where it comes from. We would just read it and enjoy.
Similarly models are for fact able to produce music and images that are very difficult to differentiate from meat made, but still… Most people don’t like them. Something seems always a bit off, kinda artificial and boring. Lack of imagination, lack of authenticity, lack of voice.
Look, I don't know who you are, or what your background is, and without that, there's nothing I can do to convince you that AI is being used in writing and you can't identify it.
The fact is there's a well-known author saying from their experience that the writing produced by LLMs can be amazing, that's the article we're all here to discuss. I've then included a link to another article where a whole bunch of publishers couldn't tell if AI was being used.
This means either you're confidently know you're a more discerning reader/writer than a well known author and a bunch of publishers. Or, you know you're not, and you're choosing to believe your feeling that you know better then them, which I'm not really interested in discussing.
To be clear: I'm not saying AI doesn't produce slop, I'm saying it also produces stuff that the vast, vast majority, even of experts, cannot identify as AI produced. This means anyone who suggests they can easily identify it now, or "all AI stuff makes me vomit" is probably needlessly deluding themselves. I think this has only been the case for the last 6 - 12 months.
Only thing I asked you was provide evidence, which should be pretty easy to come up with. If I asked you to produce an example of a 2D-platformer game AI has made from scratch, you had no trouble to prove me wrong. Yet you have to default on appeal to authority. Could it be those publishers are creating buzz to sell something? Besides, I’m sure there’s dozens of quotes saying LLM’s cannot produce shit with some really authoritative names behind them. That also doesn’t mean anything.
I’m certain there’s plenty of books generated solely or in last part by LLM’s. They usually have some scantily clad woman or man in the cover. In genre fiction it is becoming a nuisance, but then again, many readers do not care. So I know that LLM’s cannot produce not slop, but not exactly good literature either.
But the claim is there is yet again some secret super-AI somewhere that produces this amazing writing and has been doing so past 6-12 months. Well the shelves full of amazing new books, are we living new renaissance of literature? As a book nerd, am I desperately trying to find hours in the day to read all these new Ulysses’, Lord of The Rings, Search of Lost Time’s and whatnot? Is every blog post so good that it could be written by Nabokov?
You probably guess the answer.
In the article that we're all here to discuss, it talks about an unpublished novel that is unpublished specifically because expert publishers couldn't determine if it was AI. I'll quote from the source that the article references:
> In an email obtained by the outlet, Hodgman said that the “incredible” manuscript “dazzled” publishers around the world, but they failed to authenticate the evolution of the writing. The email adds that while they vetted the submission and were reassured that AI tools weren’t used, they could no longer substantiate any claims.
It's a dazzling manuscript according to publishers around the world. Seasoned publishers couldn't be certain if it was AI. This is literally an article about the exact thing you're arguing against - I can't be more specific with my evidence.
Ultimately, I feel you're not trying to come to a correct conclusion together like a healthy debate should. You spent half a sentence dismissing what I was saying and then paragraphs talking about how certain you are about your own opinions on AI writing, whilst providing no real argument or evidence beyond rhetorical questions.
That's not really what I'm here for, sorry.
People are going to eventually figure out how to polish and refine the usage and outputs so you cant even tell it is AI.
This is already becoming increasingly true for code and software. The next step is writing and then media.
Personally, I'm gonna go offline after this and meet more people. One of the reasons I read comments is because it's human conversation. When everything will be ridden by bots — I'm out.
There is no point in consuming this.
AI creative is easy to spot _right now_. It will not always be that way.
There is likely a non empty set of writings that are AI written and that you don't recognize to be AI written.
I agree that the Ai-isms are ugly.
Butni also acknowledge that I am likely reading huge amounts of Ai text I don't attribute Ai.
But with enough well-defined prompts AI can be made to write in practically any style, often with results unrecognizable as AI-generated.
People tried to fool Pangram by using custom prompts and instant feedback (rewrite until it passes). After hundreds of rounds, the text was still detected.
Although it's harder to detect such text by humans, there will be clues if you want to write a whole book based on a few pages of input.
Most of all writing makes me want to vomit. It's not impossible to write well with AI, but it's the same argument as vibe-coded slop vs. a senior engineer using the tools carefully. I'd be inclined to accept the expert's opinion here.
He talks about this in the article, did you read it? Reasons include AI winning writing contests, AI hitting bestseller lists, and now apparently an AI-written book inspiring a bidding war between publishers that resulted in the supposed "author" getting a $2.4M advance (until it was revealed that the book was written by AI).
Also, here's another thought. In my opinion, here's my opinion.