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Comment by aleda145 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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