I won't read LLM authored fiction | Hacker News Reader

I won't read LLM authored fiction

mccormick.cx

72 pointschr15m114 comments

I won't (if I know) either, but for me it's because a very big part of reading fiction or enjoying any art is that you have a relationship of a kind with its creator. When a passage surprises me or a song lifts me or a painting inspires me it's partly because I'm amazed that someone was able to do that, and that they were able to reach me like that.

Everyone borrows or steals from prior art but I'm still amazed by the people that build on what came before to create something new. I just don't have that experience if I know it's generated by a LLM. I appreciate that it will be harder to know the difference as time goes on, and I'll need to be careful not to cast a side-eye at a lot of legitimate stuff unfairly in the future because of that.

>Everyone borrows or steals from prior art

We are products of our environment, we learned what art is by having other peoples art as reference to "what art is". So it's only natural that our own art is inspired by other peoples work. People usually do not directly steal an artstyle though and if so, they are usually called out for that. LLMs directly steal from artists works hallucinating them into a pile of stolen bullshit that roughly fits the given prompt.

You can't steal someone's art style because they never owned it in the first place. It's not copyrightable. It's good and right for AI to copy artists' styles - it can produce more work more cheaply for those who want it. If that affects the profits of commercial artists, so be it, that's the risk you take when you engage in business in the free market. Get over it.

Thanks for showing again that people on this platform have little to no empathy, only care about businesses and money and have no understanding of art in general :-) Shows why I don't befriend tech savvy people usually.

Do you have empathy for rent-seekers in other domains when they get undercut by cheaper alternatives? Property investors? patent trolls? Record labels that own the rights to music from long-dead artists finally reaching the end of their copyright terms? Commercial artists are businessmen out to make a profit just like all those others I listed. They're not some magical monks that society needs to protect and shield from the struggles of normal life.

Thing is, I started appreciating this way of looking at art only after reading anti-LLM arguments, and I am a bit angry at myself for not feeling it during the pre-LLM decades of my life, which would have been much enriched.

There is this other way of looking at art (which probably dominated my worldview) where you don't care much about where it comes from. An extreme example is reading Harry Potter fanfiction, which in some way feels like reading math proofs, namely you continuously wonder what else can be done in a largely fixed setting.

So HPMOR and friends prove that we don't need to worry about the authorship, and focus on the experience?

It makes sense, but is the opposite of the OP.

HPMOR is one of those fanfics which make you feel a strong connection to the author, he really poured his soul into it ("rare vitamins" as he put it [1]), the good and the bad, kinda the exception that proves the rule. Probably this is why it was so successful.

[1] https://hpmor.com/notes/progress-14-05-01/

> Everyone borrows or steals from prior art

I just want to mention that this is not a bad thing

Often we just call this "inspiration". All our genres are music have their origin in taking stuff from other genres. We wouldn't have reggae if not for ska, rocksteady and R&B.

But your view of art is based on who you “think” made it. So if someone lies about who made the art your views on the art changed. That’s a strange position that doesn’t make sense to me.

Context can very easily enrich or ruin nearly anything, but especially creative expression. I'm surprised this is seen as strange.

A Million Little Pieces was a popular book about addiction that inspired a lot of people. Turned out the story wasn't true, and so a lot of inspiration turned into anger.

Always thought that was interesting, because if the lies weren't exposed the readers would have remained inspired.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Million_Little_Pieces

One time I called in sick to work, they even sent me flowers. Later they found out I was lying and wasn't really sick and they got angry about it. Humans are strange.

One time someone asked me to paint their house, so I made a 5 square inch watercolour of it. Unfortunately this didn't protect the walls from moisture and they ended up with mold in their house.

I think it depends on what you value in art. For me, the value of art is that it's an emotional communication from a person. What the art actually looks/sounds/feels like is completely secondary to that. Machine-generated art is fundamentally empty and meaningless to me, and therefore uninteresting.

Also, if someone lies about using genAI I discover it, that makes the "artist" a liar who cannot be trusted.

It seems like a pretty normal behavior. Just look at the whole tabloid industry that follows actors and musicians around. You might like bland architectural paintings, but knowing they were made by Hitler sort of changes your impression.

It used to be justified and respected stance to separate the art from the artist.

At the same time, blatant copying was excepted, painters today can take Rembrandts like you wouldn't know the difference. But art fruits in a time and place.

I still think LLMs won't generate art worth anything, of course I make genai pictures of my dog with a pet bird.

> I'm amazed that someone was able to do that

This is a bit "woo" but I've always thought of this experience/phenomenon as souls touching across time and space. LLMs either don't have souls or they've stolen them but, either way, that experience (if still possible with slop) would be tainted and perverted.

I would like to read "actual" LLM fiction in the same sense I would like to read fiction from a lion. I wonder if that kind of alien writing is even possible with this kind of technology. The RL process would have to be quite different at least and even then it is still using human content as the base. Anyone seen any good or even decent or OK fiction of this type?

Whenever people say they like AI music or fiction, I've only ever been able to determine they are something like the equivalent of people with no taste buds describing how delicious the gruel is.

A little disclaimer before the rest of my comment: I think machine-generated art (fine art, anyway. Commercial and functional art have different nuances) is objectionable.

Many people with fully-functional taste buds genuinely find gruel delicious. Oatmeal is a variety of gruel.

People like what they like and aren't ever "wrong" for having their own tastes. I think claiming that other people have no or bad taste isn't really a supportable stance. It's totally valid to say that someone doesn't share your tastes, but not that either of you are right or wrong for having those tastes.

Also, tangentially related, you know that cliche "the customer is always right"? That's only the first half of the sentence that is a quote of. The second half is "in matters of taste". The reason the cliche is obviously wrong is because it omits that.

I would have loved that too but that is quite impossible in this paradigm.

Probably the way people in the 20th century envisioned AGI rising out of GOFAI (also quite impossible in its own way) would have produced an "alien" entity with the properties you desire

One of my favorite childhoods stories was told from a perspective of an arctic fox. It wasn’t a cartoonish “Lion King” type of story but pretty serious and mature stuff.

Reading your comment I suddenly remembered the existence of Stephen Baxter's Mammoth Trilogy. No idea if it is any good but I should probably try reading it.

That is a perfectly valid opinion and POV to have. While I don't share it personally, I can totally understand why one has it. That does not change, that I personally actually do not care the slightest about the question of who or what wrote a novel.

But that is just me, having studied literatur and fallen into a school of literary studies that held Roland Barthes' claim of the death of the author [1] in high regard.

That might just be a German thing, but in school I hated the question of teachers asking: "What does the author wanted to tell us with this story." Because -> The author never wrote that down. And deriving their intentions from a fictional text felt just like making shit up. You either hit the interpretation of your teacher or received a bad grade.

So when entering university and learning, that to analyse a text, to understand how structures within a text enable us humans to interpret and generate meaning, regardless of what the author originally might have intended, was freedom to me.

To make a long story even longer: As long as the story is good - I don't give a rat's ass if an LLM wrote this, a monkey on a typewriter or a human being (or a group of authors writing under a pseudonym).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author

> What does the author wanted to tell us with this story." Because -> The author never wrote that down. And deriving their intentions from a fictional text felt just like making shit up

It’s an exercise in engaging intellectually with the work. It’s not about knowing for a fact what the author wanted to communicate. Art is about engaging with human emotions and thoughts, not about deriving specific facts.

> Art is about engaging with human emotions and thoughts

Exactly. Still, that does actually not contradict what I wrote. You can still do this from a viewpoint of Structuralism, Formalism, Reader Centric Schools of Interpretation and Author Centric Schools of Interpretation.

Non of those are less intellectually" engaging with the work. Differently - and in my personal opinion more or less intellectually rewarding - yes. But not less or more.

It's not just the reader engaging in the work, but the author. If the author can't or is unwilling to put in any actual work, and also lies about it, I've lost all respect and interest in them. Saying you only care about the message and not the messenger is sort of like saying you only care about the words coming out of your friend's mouth but not your friend.

True, but that does not mean that the average teacher won't grade you badly if your interpretation is completely opposed to their and what was discussed during lessons.

There are bad teachers, sure. There are also bad students who think that the issue was that they weren't being taught when it was actually that they weren't trying to learn.

Bad teachers are the default, and good ones exception, maybe 10:1. It's an underpaid, overworked job mostly.

Yeah, I had similar bad teacher experiences. But also had good ones who pushed us to come up with our own interpretations and defend them

> I hated the question of teachers asking: "What does the author wanted to tell us with this story." Because -> The author never wrote that down. And deriving their intentions from a fictional text felt just like making shit up. You either hit the interpretation of your teacher or received a bad grade.

I think this might be the most pernicious strain of anti-intellectualism online: the idea that there is no subtext, that a text only communicates exactly what it lays out on the surface level. That's not at all what Barthes was saying; you've misunderstood him.

Writing is not a noiseless transmission of thoughts, and thoughts themselves are not totally uninfluenced by the outside world, and people do not always state exactly what they mean in the simplest possible words, and words are understood by the reader in ways that writers did not intend. At every stage, there is the possibility of subtext and context being present.

Your teachers weren't trying to get you to fix on the one perfect interpretation, because that idea (Barthes would agree) doesn't really make sense. Instead, they wanted you to interpret, explain, and justify in a complex and ambiguous space.

> That's not at all what Barthes was saying; you've misunderstood him.

Thanks for misrepresenting me. Or willfully miunderstanding me. But hey. No qualms here.

Just that I never said: > the idea that there is no subtext, that a text only communicates exactly what it lays out on the surface level.

Not sure though, what made you read that into my writing (and I am aware of the ironiy here). I actually read Barthes. And not only him. I actually used him and his ways of looking, together with thelikes of Genette and others when doing my thesis work (and before).

Because their depth and their way of looking at the depth within text was what fascinated me.

I always compared them to trying to understand the bones, the organs, the muscles and sinues of a text, compared to a surface level way we were taught in school. Combine that with a more culturally anthropologic way of looking at topics in literature and outside of it, more like Focault did (as an example) and my time in university was actually one that I cherrish deeply.

Edit: > Your teachers weren't trying to get you to fix on the one perfect interpretation, because that idea (Barthes would agree) doesn't really make sense. Instead, they wanted you to interpret, explain, and justify in a complex and ambiguous space.

I have to disagree here. My university teachers mostly did. In school, my experience sadly was quite different. In school there was in most cases and with most teachers only one correct way of interpreting a work of literature. Regardless how well you argued your interpretation.

But I actually love the discussion. Thanks for engaging my opinion.

> I hated the question of teachers asking: What does the author wanted to tell us with this story." Because -> The author never wrote that down. And deriving their intentions from a fictional text felt just like making shit up.

Then why does anyone write anything? Why did Orwell write 1984 instead of just making a 2 page bulleted list about how authoritarian regimes are bad?

Sure, an author can write something that is interpreted totally differently from what they meant, but that doesn't detract from the fact that they did have some intention behind what they wrote and it's worth exploring that.

There are lots of fun ways to experience literature or any art, and you can do multiple! I love reading a book and just considering it from the text alone, and then also considering it from in the context it was written. And then considering my own biases and how they might be similar or different to the author and how that might affect my interpretation.

I could probably enjoy certain LLM-generated art, but in far fewer ways.

What makes a story good except for something the author was trying to convey?

I concur with the author. Personally I think I just won't read fiction produced after 2023. There's so much good literature already produced, why bother with the new stuff?

I feel very sorry to any budding new authors. Maybe we are entering a literary dark age?

To be fair, reading new fiction is… Well, it is not a waste of time, but you really need a good recommendation from another reader you trust to find the gems in the manure pile. I don’t know how much of ”booktok” and whatnot is just cynical marketing and how much of all this ”romantacy” or whatever is generated by LLM’s, but it might as well be. And same goes to literature awards, oh boy are some of those award-winning books trash.

But the thing is, bad art dissappears. People simply forget, because bad art just is not interesting. Maybe it has a nostalgia comeback or two, but eventually it just dies away with the people who made it, who sold it and who read/experienced it. The great art stays, because it is found again and again by yet another generation. I heard kids have somehow found Count of Monte Cristo again. They are still making movies of Homeros’ texts. Joyce never went out of fashion, neither did Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes nor Proust.

So only thing you need to do is wait, really. Meanwhile there is more classic’s around no-one reads in a lifetime.

I'm interested in why you feel like this. Do you take this action because you can't trust traditional channels (blogs, established tradpub authors, Goodreads et al) to self-curate LLM writing out of the pool of available literature you would normally be aware of?

Yeah I think it boils down to trust issues. I can't know how the text was created. Anything created before 2023 I know that at least a human had to invest a significant amount of time to produce the story.

Maybe I'm a bit too reactionary though. Thinking about it some more I would absolutely read something if it was recommended by a trusted source (which in my case is almost always a human I know in the physical world).

I get the sentiment completely. I am actually doing what you're thinking: if it didn't come from my List Of People Who Know Of What They Speak I want nothing to do with it.

We really have gone full circle! It's quite upsetting.

I am afraid a lot of non-fiction is also AI generated slop...

"Hey ChatGPT here is a checklist of some facts, here are some sources, write a text about this"

Ultimately resulting in the same boring writing style over and over again for non-fiction.

Personally I enjoy the personal note in non-fiction. Political Girl by Maria Aljochina wouldn't be the same if it was produced by AI.

Why can't you just find authors you like and respect, that you trust not to write slop? Why go all cabin-in-the-woods about it?

Because there are also thousands (millions?) of such non-slop-books published before 2023?

You can't find new artists because art already exists? I feel like you're ignoring my question. It is not a good solution to "art is slop" to decouple yourself financially from all human artists. Your choice is making human art less sustainable.

Definitely agree with LLM texts being boring and lacking personality. Which for technical text is fine, but devastating for fiction. I wonder if you could coax it into writing less average formulations with some clever prompting?

I don't oppose LLM fiction on principle, and I don't think McCormick does either, but it's just too damn boring to be worthwhile, and I think McCormick hits the nail on the head as to why. This seems like it'll be the last frontier for LLMs, good fiction requires a departure from LLM nature, and that'll inherently be difficult to solve.

I do wonder if you could do something like style transfer on texts? I'm not a very good author either, but occasionally I'll get an idea for a story and wish I had the skill to write it in a way that'd be worth reading, but my poor prose tends to get in the way. Would be cool if I could feed it my poorly written attempts and say basically "this story but in the style of [insert great author]" the way you can snap a photo and get it in the style of a Van Gogh painting.

If nothing else I think I'd enjoy a Tolkien sci fi story, or a Asimov high fantasy.

> and that'll inherently be difficult to solve

Why does that have to be solved? There isn’t a problem with art being a human thing. AI doesn’t have to take over all spaces humans occupy just because it is technically possible to do so. We don’t have to push things that way, we can say stop

While I understand the hesitancy for LLM fiction, I do look forward to LLM powered games, *IF DONE RIGHT*. I imagine a game like Skyrim, where each character has handwritten backstory and dialogue, with an LLM extending that.

Having the city guard dynamically react to what you do, stay in character, and even point you to new POI from those conversations seems like a very cool new dimension in storytelling.

I took a creative writing class back in the day, and we talked about how fiction writers often have a massive "canon" backstory to many characters and worlds, and draw from that to create the story. That same backstory details can be use to flesh out a very immersive world. You still have guidance and handwritten essential lines, just use LLMs to enhance the world.

Now, will there be lots of projects that use LLMs to take shortcuts and be far from this idealized narrative, yes. But not all of them. Some will stand out for getting it right.

Sounds like a fun gimmick for maybe a month. And something that will be getting really tiring really fast.

And imagine the PR horror when people start jail breaking the NPC LLMs

I dont think it should be a PR horror anymore than someone using photoshop to make a disturbing image. I get that is not quite the current reaction, but i dont see why it should be that way.

I have been imagining this since GPT-3. I still only know of very few games making use of LLMs. There are add-ons for Skyrim, and web search points me to NVIDIA's ACE autonomous game characters framework and games such as InZOI, PUBG's ACE-powered AI teammate, Dead Meat (unreleased interrogation game), AI Dungeon, Suck Up!, Vaudeville, and more. It seems there are a few more than I would have thought, but the smaller ones seem to have some mixed reviews. It would be interesting to check out how these games resolve the reasons against LLMs in games I can think of:

Cost: LLMs fitting into local GPUs, in addition to the memory required for game textures, are too constrained for the quality, latency, and concurrency required. Connecting to the cloud would be too expensive, and even if it would work, it would indeed be the death of local offline gaming, and it would give a valid reason for a subscription to keep the servers running as opposed to a buy-once play-forever game business model.

Unreliability: You don't want to miss a major quest because the LLM did not decide to hand it out. It might be workable with some proper "agentic harness", with some hardcoded world lore, long-term memories, goals, midterm memories, some deterministic actions, and a short-term free-form loop that gets cleared every now and then. For OpenClaw instances, it would be the SOUL.md, but it would have to be read-only. Some logic might have to be hardcoded outside of LLMs, e.g., to start a new narrative branch powered by a new character memory when a keyword has been mentioned or a quest item has been given. Similar to agentic frameworks, it would have tool calls such as `offer_quest`, `give_reward`, etc.

These ideas seem to converge onto the Westworld mechanics of backstories, cornerstone memories, reveries, narratives, and loops, at least as far as I remember them from the series. Thinking about it, given enough investment, I feel like the amusement park of Westworld should already be somewhat possible to implement with the recent advances in LLMs and robotics.

In the end, I am not sure how much sense it makes for games. Maybe it would suffice to only make companion characters LLM-enhanced while NPCs stay pre-programmed in order to let the game stay deterministic. Games should simplify real life in order to increase enjoyability. Making all characters backed by LLMs might decrease enjoyability because of forgetfulness or confabulations inconsistent with the game world and actions. It would need to be heavily constrained and trained or prompted to say "I don't know about that.". It might also be questionable how much needs to be dynamic. E.g., when thinking about the NPCs in The Witcher, which are talking about random stuff, maybe you only need to pregenerate much more random stuff for them to talk about so that you don't notice the repetition, but there might be no need to have this completely dynamic and burn through GPU power for every action. The question would be what to cache and what really needs to be dynamic.

A harness can definitely still make it "deterministic":

if (responses > 3) prompt.md += "Divert the conversation to bring up QUEST4.md"

I look at it a lot like procedural generation. It can be done well if used in the right spots and enough handwritten/tweaked stuff to make sure it feels right.

English teachers around the world have loathed that "The curtains were blue" meme, and are absolutely right to do so, but what happens when you ask what an author meant by the blue curtains and the answer is a fairly definitive "it's just the probabilistic output of the model the author used, it doesn't mean anything"?

Sure some people are just piggies lining up at the trough to consume content like it's the custard machine from tellitubbies, but the greatest works will be human written, and I don't see that changing. What will change is the discovery mechanism for a book or any art is shot to bits right now, I could see curation of books and reviews becoming much more important.

I think it's unhealthy, your attitude.

When you have such disdain for "piggies", and hold your opinion as the true one, on a very subjetive question, well, it's very pitiable.

Someone who likes Shakespeare is going to be able to talk about what they like about Shakespeare, his impact on language, his works, and so on.

Someone who likes Austen is going to be able to talk about the themes of the books, how funny Pride and Prejudice is, maybe how Jane Austen's position in society informed her works, etc.

How is anyone going to be able to do the same for an AI generated book? "Reading book 894 from batch 60 of the Booktron V2.46.01 collection was formitive for me, it was very reminiscent of the early works from the Automatic Grammatizator." Is this really a discussion we expect will be had in schools, or in any art discussion? Absolutely not.

This would have been a much better comment as is, originally, instead. I disagree with your thesis, but at least it would have been worth engaging with.

Art requires intentionality, and this is most clear in long-form fiction. Without guiding intention, you can't have consistent characters, or satisfying plots, or meaningful themes. There has to be a mind guiding it, and LLMs don't have the intentionality or interiority to do so.

Theoretically, a sufficiently skilled and dedicated prompter could guide AI precisely enough to produce a good result, but

1. There are no examples of this.

2. Anyone with the focus & talent to do that would rather not.

As a result, AI produces--and is likely to continue to produce--extremely bad fiction (though bad in totally distinct ways from bad human writers).

I can't tell if I'm getting old, or if this is a reaction purely to people making blog-posts saying they don't like AI, but, I am filled with "who cares?".

Unambiguously the point of view is valid. I don't share it, but whatever.

But why are you writing this, and why is it getting upvoted? We're several years in. Is there new ground being covered here? Is there something special or unique to this take that we haven't read 1,000 times before? Are we doomed to these identical "I don't like it and I need to tell someone" posts forever? Yes, it's a valid view point, but so is not liking Meta, and yet we don't get a "I don't like Meta as a company!!" post upvoted every single day.

Well can you give me back the few seconds I spent reading your post that was to me pretty much worthless? Alas, while I reckon you wasted precious bits on my bandwidth, some other poor soul might find your sentiment agreeable and insightful.

Why do people write personal blogs? Why do some people read them? Why some people discuss those personal writings on- or even offline? Why do we write? Why do we do anything at all? Why do monkeys hang on trees and go yak tak?

Maybe AI boosting is just a collective Death Wish where we hope for some lobotomised barely existing humanity, where machines in loving grace write poetry of deers strolling past peacefully, and do everything else we humans used to.

There's a continual push from AI enthusiasts to have their work considered equal (or superior) to human output. While that continues, you'll get response articles.

I'm not sure if you notice, but there are also many more posts every day here about how great AI is.

I think there are posts every day by people who think AI is great, that also imply AI is great, but I don't think there are daily posts whose entire content is "I really like AI, yay".

In that sense you're in luck, neither is this post as simple as "I really don't like AI, boo".

How to detect which fiction, article, or review is created by fake AI or LLM?

There are too many texts generated by LLM on Internet now.

The experience of exploring Internet is very bad now.

It's often quite easy, because most people who author articles with LLMs do not bother doing any kind of post editing. Meaning you can see/build a mental map of common tropes[^1] for what to look for. Once you read perhaps two or three articles authored with LLMs you will not be able to unsee it.

[^1]: https://tropes.fyi/

Yes but it's still like wading through shit to find the occasional gem. It's not hard to pick out when you work with LLM's a lot. But it's still a bad experience. Social media was already hard at work at killing the internet (or at least what the internet used to be). LLM's made it worse.

For fun, I pasted a few Matt Levine's newsletters into the AI Vetter on the above page. Since it can't fetch the Bloomberg's paged directly, I had to copy the content into Github gists.

4 out of 5 were marked as suspicious, mostly citing short punching sentences, negative parallelism, and content duplication.

Look at the publishing date. Unfortunately I don’t think we will have a more reliable way to do it

If the artist isn't one that I already know and trust, then this is how I do it.

It's very sad, but I have to view any recently-created work from an unfamiliar artist with great suspicion. It does make me less interested in recent works by default, because of the work of vetting the artist.

Afaik I have yet to encounter LLM fiction, but I have seen plenty of AI generated music and it truly disgusts me.

Each to their own but to me a large part of music was always the life experience of the person making it. I'm listening to their life, their love, their pain in music form.

Without an interesting human behind it, art loses all magic to me.

That's why it's beyond annoying that my own brother absolutely loves generated music. He just wants the general ambient groove of reggae or blues, he doesn't care one bit for the artists.

> the general ambient groove of reggae or blues

This, like elevator or contact center waiting music, has very little to do with "music" itself. It's just something to signal the waiting time and ease a bit of anxiety. While I'm saddened that somebody lost their income with automated background generation, I don't find the end product interesting at all, so whatever. However. However, listening to my genres does definitely need the connection to a human. No, I won't "hate" AI because of it, I will just ignore or press "skip" (where I can). Freedom of choice, baby.

I would not be surprised if you've listened to AI generated music or read AI generated text without identifying it. Same as with VFX in shows and movies, the good stuff people don't identify as VFX, but the shitty stuff stands out. It's going to be the same with LLM generated content.

It should be easy then to link to some AI generated music that is actually good?

I would be impressed if you could link to some human generated music that everyone will agree is good.

I wonder if anyone anywere actually thinks Beethoven’s 9th is bad. But that’s not the point is it. I can link you plenty of music that was absolutely lambasted and despised when it first was performed and today is recognised as classics. Plenty of people hated while many loved it. Rites of Spring, Charlie Parker, Miles David and Coltrane where all moved people against or for, created energy, created something which changed the way we listen music today. It caused people to feel and react.

I have no idea if most new pop playing at the gym is genetated with this or that machine learning aid and I don’t care. It is all meh. And so is AI-generated music and therefore we will forget it.

> Plenty of people hated while many loved it.

I think this is a hallmark of successful art. The point of art is emotional communication. If someone reacts very negatively to a piece of art, that still means an emotional communication happened. If it's an honest and resonant emotional communication, then some people will react negatively to it and others positively.

Every artist I've ever known would prefer to get negative reactions to their art over not getting a reaction at all.

Sure, we can lower the bar to "non-shitty" per GP if that's the only way I can get a link?

No, music and literature are not like VFX, unless I'm truly blind to the magic of After Effects.

A good novel can have you laughing out loud or crying to yourself, they can introduce new ideas that can totally change your outlook on the world. I've read books I've continued to think about for months after I've finished them.

Great music, whether classical or contemporary, particularly when experienced live, can be transcendental.

Both can be wonderful ways of connecting with humanity. To read The Leopard is to inhabit the soul of a minor Sicilian noble, putting on Ride the Lightning is a viceral experience, like hitting a line of speed.

Cinema can evoke these intense experiences, but VFX is but a minor component, and much of the best uses no CGI.

Regardless, as a man who dabbles in AI in his own creative practice, I remain utterly unconvinced that AI is capable of eliciting the response we get from great music or literature. It may produce some filler around the edges, but that great line, the chorus that drives the heart to the sky with a fist raised in the air like an antenna to heaven, this will always be human.

This is for the simple reason that art is fundamentally about human connection and empathy, the transmission of emotion and energy from one sentient being to another.

No LLM could ever write Hallelujah, because no LLM has witnessed heartbreak, contemplated the divine, or practiced bondage.

No diffusion model could paint Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, which incidentally took over a decade, as no machine has ever laughed in contempt of its enemy.

Sure, we can say that there's a human behind each machine, but AI places a wall between the creator and their work. The momentum, inspiration, creative blocks and breakthroughs in the shower, these form the basis of great art.

Re-reading the parent, I've digressed, and perhaps somewhat misinterpreted. I guess I just wanted to write what I've written. Very human.

Yeah, "good" AI blends into the background? No, good art is never in the background. It grabs us, pours into us, and leaves us changed.

God, spent too long on this and need to get some shit done. I'll go put on Ride the Lightning.

I have been listening to a whole lot of AI music and it is often better than human generated. I foresee an immense unavoidable shift in the music industry due to this. It is already impossible to distinguish what is AI and and what is human generated music.

> I foresee an immense unavoidable shift in the music industry due to this.

If this happens then I'll take some solace in that at least we have a very large existing collection of older music guaranteed to be made by people, so I won't have to do without.

Can you share a playlist or something so we can see?

As much as I hate to say it, I agree.

I also foresee a huge shift in the music industry. Because a lot of music lovers are not like me, they don't care about the artist behind the music, just the music itself.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

But it is a scary future when a huge part of music produced will come from a computer.

>Without an interesting human me art loses all magic to me.

Thanks for mentioning this. I have been in so many arguments with tech savvy people who simply can't grasp this concept.

Additionally to that, if you're taking shortcuts with AI rather than actually learning a skill (writing, painting, drawing, producing music, etc...) how can you even feel good about your "art"? It's not special, it's stolen effortless slop. It's like playing a video game and getting that "early access equipment" that just lets you steamroll through the game without challenge.

With AI music you can enjoy a thin red paste of every human emotion /sarcasm

I think people read novels because they want to connect with the author on some level. LLM generated text is actually more logically airtight than human writing. For non fiction, I think the information dense LLM style is often better. But human writing leaves space for the reader to breathe. There are gaps scattered throughout.

In that sense, I sometimes feel like logical flaws might actually be a signal of humanity

While I also don't like the idea of LLM-generated novels, if you browse the shelves of an airport bookstore you'll see a load of facile by-the-numbers pap novels that could just as well have been AI generated.

I suspect readers keen for the latest installment of "Clive Cussler's MacGuffin Files" or [Cover picture of nerdy, barely legal girl gazing adoringly at buff, smug, confident dude] will happily welcome their LLM overlords, without noticing any difference at all.

That's true, but even so, there were people who loved the story itself regardless of the grammar. I was actually shocked when I read the original English version of the Twilight series..

I think many people forget that the vast majority of books aren't high art.

Your mind goes to Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, N.K. Jemsin, or Pratchett.

My mind goes to Ice Planet Barbarians[0] or Crimson Worlds[1] (both written by actual humans, but I think they are good representations of their genres)

There are so many books in the romantasy genre specifically that could be just mad libs templates for AI Generated books.

The people who read them don't care about the plot, they want specific kinds of tropes in the book. They look for enemies-to-lovers, 7 foot tall men, tiny women and other very focused traits (ages, races, LQBTQIA+) in the books. They are consumable fun, not something anyone expects to be stored in the Library of Congress for future generations because they were so earth-shatteringly insightful.

Yes, AI authored (or assisted) books won't bring us the next Culture books by Iain M. Banks, but the next generic romantasy or self-published military scifi books could very well be. And nobody will notice - or care. It's 200-300 pages of entertainment that hits just the specific itch you had.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/series/151379-ice-planet-barbarian...

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/series/97149-crimson-worlds

You're underselling those books and overselling AI; people have tried generating romantasy and power fantasies, and it's very obvious that it's not up to par.

People want tropes, sure, but that's not the same as wanting trash; our culture is built on satisfying narratives treading well-worn paths, and there's a skill to it. Pratchett, for example, was only able to do what he did because he was deliberately playing with existing expectations; his work wouldn't exist without the stuff you denigrate to build off.

What's the difference between "trash" and "tropes" in your mind?

For example the good old Harlequin books were pretty much trash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlequin_Enterprises

But when the expectation is trash, they deliver. They're the Hallmark Movies of books. It's not Citizen Kane, but sometimes you just want a predictable plot of a big city girl coming back to her home town and falling in love with the rugged local man.

That's what I'm saying; even the 'trashiest' of human literature is an awful lot more sophisticated than AI madlibs.

Is there such a thing as "LLM authored fiction"

Can LLMs distinguish between non-fiction and fiction, i.e., true and false

The literature on LLMs states that LLMs sometimes output falsehoods irrespective of whether the persons using them have prompted for non-fiction or fiction

The papers imply that it is up to the person using the LLM to distinguish what is true from what is false

Whenever I read something that's LLM generated without knowing it, and it's actually interesting, I have questions for the author. After they read my emails and reply back, I realize that they have no answers for me. It's all because both me and the author are reading the article/story/code for the first time.

worth noting you don't usually read _that_ many books in your lifetime. e.g. 20 a books a year for 40 years is just 800 books

side note: i've noticed people writing with no caps, unusual grammar, splling mistakes, etc. which does differentiate their output from typical llm output - although ofc llms can probably imitate that

It's true and so it makes sense to be a bit picky about what you read. A great many non-fiction books should probably be blog posts or articles for example.

I have come across a lot of AI-generated youtube videos lately, most of them about trivialities and clearly aimed at a not very critical audience. A few of them also contained hallucinations.

I think a lot of people might be creating AI generated content, books, videos, etc as a kind of side hustle unfortunately.

This effect will disappear when, instead of having 4-6 big models that everyone uses, we'll have trillions of models with memory / continual learning, each independently developing its own voice / personality, drowning all human expression.

Enjoy this "boring LLM" era while it lasts.

I feel like LLMs could produce some pretty cool fiction - like cranking up the temperature setting like you can with many models to produce nonsensical garbage that isn't even real sentences during a planning stage to end up with some ideas that human writers wouldn't commonly come up with, and then letting a model that is less lobotomized do the actual writing.

The problem is that regardless of all of that RLHF and positivity bias and slop has essentially ruined any and all LLM writing for the foreseeable future: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/ai-slop-is-a-self-inflicted-tra...

In short, the writing could be good if it wasn't fucking bullshit.

It's not impossible to skew an LLM into a specific style of writing, one to reflect the author's intentions.

I think that LLMs made everything easier, as in, lowered the barrier. With that, comes a natual inscentive to be lazy, and not implement your style of writing into it. This will mean the production of more "slop" articles but also a chance for great novels with the help of LLMs. As I say, both human and AI slop exists, as well as truly great things from both. Similarly to how before AI, we had "little to no code!" promises, "make your app with no experience", as well as the endless WordPress/"PHP scripts" promising "SEO optimization" and likes from everyone.

Except all these pre LLM methods were limited and could easily be ignored; now the machine can truly get "smarter" and output new content to the point where beginners can truly become something better (or output beginner quality work at mass) with little to no work, exactly as promised before.

What strikes me about (some, or most of, as I see nowadays) Anti AI is that you never really cared about the human before AI, it was all about quality. But only now do you decide to care about the human? If you truly did, won't you have cared about the human before?

Spoiler: You already do.

Fortunately, there are enough books out there to keep one occupied for a whole lifetime without reading anything published after 2022. The classics are classics for a reason.

And you do not notice that you do.

What would be an example of LLM generated fiction I've likely already read? I'd be very surprised that it's so pervasive that you can make blanket statements like this.

Yeah, most of the comments.

I wont read LLM authored non fiction either, that includes code /s

This is approaching “I don’t want a synthetic diamond, I want the real thing” levels of lunacy

There will come a time, very soon, where you wont be able to tell the difference, and what then?

I don’t think it’s lunacy to care about the context around something and not just the final product.

> There will come a time, very soon, where you wont be able to tell the difference, and what then?

People have been saying this for a while, and--particularly with long-form fiction--we're not getting any closer.

Presumably artists will be sent to the glue factory and then we'll get to live eternally on regurgitated facsimilies of the corpus of creative work that was produced pre-AI.

> There will come a time, very soon, where you wont be able to tell the difference, and what then?

We'll stop buying new books, sticking to things written before 2022.

Think about what you’re saying for a moment. Play that scenario out in your head.

... Is that so difficult to imagine?

You're thinking of _entertainment_, not art.

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