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Comment by natbennett | Hacker News Reader

What I find interesting about this is the evidence that OpenAI believes that GPT-5 can replace genre writers (e.g. G.R.R. Martin and that this is why genre authors are mad at them.

The fact that they believed this is legally useful because of the definition of fair use, so I see why the Author’s Guild is emphasizing it, but the authors I know don’t talk about it. They’re very angry about their work having been used without compensation to create the model, but not because they think it can replace them.

Whenever I’ve seen AI researchers talk about the possibility of AI writing fiction they always sound very confused about why people read novels.

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It seems like you think AI will not replace artists/creatives, including creative writers, and I agree! I’ll say anecdotally, though, that the creative writers I know do believe AI generation to be an existential threat to their field. Not so much because they think machines can produce art at their caliber, but because they’re concerned that consumers of art won’t know or care about the difference.

I’m excited to be speaking about this topic at the Monktoberfest later this week.

"The fact that they believed this is legally useful because of the definition of fair use, so I see why the Author's Guild is emphasizing it, but the authors I know don't talk about it."

Perhaps "the fact they believed this [i.e., the infringement was intentional] is legally useful" for seeking statutory damages, up to $15,000 per infringed work (assuming registration was timely, otherwise up to $7,500), as this requires the plaintiffs to show defendants acted willfully

Without intent, statutory damages could be as low as $200 per work

Anthropic settled for $1.5B with Bartz et al. in an earlier case involving the same pirated copies. The Court in the Bartz case said that training LLMs with these pirated copies was not fair use

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settl...

""The training use was a fair use," he wrote. "The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative."

However, the judge ruled that Anthropic's use of millions of pirated books to build its models, books that websites such as Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) copied without getting the authors' consent or giving them compensation, was not. He ordered this part of the case to go to trial. "We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic's central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory (including for willfulness)," the judge wrote in the conclusion to his ruling. Last week, the parties announced they had reached a settlement."

> e.g. G.R.R. Martin

The hilarious outcome of this saga is people using LLMs to rescue the readers of the Game of Thrones series, since he has no intention of finishing it himself.

This reminds me of the peak of the crypto boom. I used to describe crypto as a mix of people who thought they could rug pull before they got rug pulled (seriously, go watch the Coffeezilla videos on Crypto Zoo) but beyond the scammers there were a whole bunch of people who not only didn't know why the finance system worked like it did, they considered their ignorance a virtue. They labelled their ignorance "disruption". Fresh thinking can lead to innovation but more often than not you have to know why something works like it does before you break it.

Do OpenAI employees really believe LLMs can replace GRRM? I'm tempted to say no but it's so crypto coded, I find myself thinking yes. It's again people who have no idea of what it takes to make a successful written work thinking they don't need to know how it works.

> Whenever I’ve seen AI researchers talk about the possibility of AI writing fiction they always sound very confused about why people read novels.

I wish it was just AI researchers. I recently recommended a non-fiction book to a friend, and they said they don’t have time to read anymore. They read an LLM summary instead (popular book, probably in the training data), and said they agreed with the core concepts. I was honestly stunned. The whole interaction felt completely foreign to me.

In TFA the comment about GPT-X finishing George R. R. Martin’s series without involving the author felt extremely dystopian to me. I felt enraged for hours afterwards. Have these people never read a book themselves for the pure joy of it? Were they only interested in the outcome or the “takeaways”?

I’ve read some pretty compelling arguments that GRRM developed his work in writers rooms and much of his content is ghostwritten. I think I recall reading one of his employees emphasizing what a great deal maker he was and how much aptitude he had for securing licensing agreements. There wasn’t much talk about literary genius.

So given that the literary work was outsourced, anyway, is it really that big of a deal that it’s getting outsourced to a machine? If that still bothers you, then how much machine assistance is too much? We’re already using Word processors, spell checkers, and other tools that have taken away much of the human effort. These language models don’t really have a strong sense of personal agency or what ought to be written, but they can fill out the details from a high-level schematic, which is probably, at best, what the author was doing with other team members.

[Book] was written by humans, perhaps many that didn't get credit.

As such, why do you care if book is written by machine?

??????????

Are the two scenarios not completely different?

"[An LLM] can fill out the details from a high-level schematic, which is probably, at best, what the author was doing with other team members."

If this is what you think writing is then why ever read a book at all? Just read the summary.

Luckily I don’t think these people are particularly representative of people who buy fiction.

It is probably why sales of things like self-help books are collapsing.

> Whenever I’ve seen AI researchers talk about the possibility of AI writing fiction they always sound very confused about why people read novels.

Why do people read novels? For the story or something else?

The AI researchers seem to think that mainly for book reports for school and being able to sound smart (read the AI generated summary and blurb bits of it out loud)

Few put it better than Tolstoy (from "What is Art?"):

"Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious Idea of beauty, or God; it is not, as the æsthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity.

As, thanks to man’s capacity to express thoughts by words, every man may know all that has been done for him in the realms of thought by all humanity before his day, and can, in the present, thanks to this capacity to understand the thoughts of others, become a sharer in their activity, and can himself hand on to his contemporaries and descendants the thoughts he has assimilated from others, as well as those which have arisen within himself; so, thanks to man’s capacity to be infected with the feelings of others by means of art, all that is being lived through by his contemporaries is accessible to him, as well as the feelings experienced by men thousands of years ago, and he has also the possibility of transmitting his own feelings to others."

Full text: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64908/64908-h/64908-h.htm

Yeah but same dude also said:

"Woman is generally so bad that the difference between a good and a bad woman scarcely exists."

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/65159

I don't think what you shared is an exhaustive or even a valid answer to "why do people read novels?" It's just one author's thoughts on art, and it's debatable how accurate they are.

I really don't understand why people can't stop thinking that people like Tolstoy, Kant, and Hitler were beyond human beings who weren't absolutely influenced by the common thinking of their time. Almost every great writer/philosopher had massive blind spots that could only be fixed over time.

Yes, the categorical imperative still stands as a sound idea, but Kant also thought African people lacked the natural intelligence and emotional faculties that Europeans possessed. Does not sound that categorical to me if you're willing to consider a race of human beings as subhuman.

The point is that it's not just Tolstoy; a lot of views shared by some of the "greatest men" are absolutely vile garbage, and we must talk about that as well when we talk about them, instead of making an intellectual martyr and using their quotes as if they have any valid objective truth behind them to answer genuine questions.

Ideas can stand for themselves, the quote can stand for itself. You don't need to take all the things Tolstoy ever said and average their badness to decide whether a quote is true. You can read it yourself and see if it resonates with how you think of things.

Similarly, if you find that the quote resonates with you, you are not on the hook as endorsing every bad thing he ever did, or stupid thing he ever said.

There's a class of people who are so unfamiliar with ideas and critical evaluation that they cannot separate the idea from the person. These same people are the kind that typically excuse horrible ideas from people they admire/idolize.

That is a quote (not from one of his own writings but from a retelling from one of his friends) that is preceded by a one page disclaimer. I'm sure Gemini can find you a better quote than that if you want to slander Tolstoy.

But if you really are interested in knowing about Tolstoy's views on women, go read Anna Karenina. There is good reason why it is considered one of the greatest pieces of art ever written.

> physiologist

Im assuming this means the oposite of a metaphysician

I think he is referring to what we today would call scientism.

I know that there is not one particular reason why people read novels, as I have more than one particular reason just in myself. Given just that one data point I suppose there must be many reasons why people read novels.

A deep question.

The component that I believe AI researchers miss is the parasocial relationship.

The G.R.R. Martin bit struck me too and I commented about it. I think ModernMech captured the situation really well in that thread: many of the people in the AI industry seem to only understand the logic of commodities and to reason about everything in terms of commoditization. All that matters to them is outputs, not process, not social relationship, not human experience. They understand everything in terms of before and after states, and they don't see any value in the "in between" (that is, they are "destination" not "journey" people). They believe that basically everything is fungible.

This kind of perspective is insanely crude, pathetic, and foreign to me, and to be honest I'd feel kind of bad for these people who clearly don't understand a really crucial and basic part of human existence, if it wasn't for the fact that this ignorance is powering further devaluation of these things, and further reduction of humanity to a kind of technocratic, flat, hyper capitalist, existence.

Thank you. Apparently I’m being downvoted here for this view.

I am on a LitRPG site (RoyalRoad) and there are routinely AI Gen novels in the top 5 novels on Rising Stars on the site which is basically traffic and rating metrics for newish novels. People say they hate AI writing and downvote it when they know it’s AI but seem to read it just fine without noticing fairly often as well.

This is a moral dilemma when you've basically read everything in your favorite genre.

Please, elaborate on that extraordinary claim.

LitRPG is fairly new (2017 or so) as a genre so in terms of significant works it’s quite possible to read all the major titles.

AI-written stories are definitely extremely common in low-brow fiction, but it's notable that they're not restricted to it. There's an ongoing scandal with an award-winning French novel C'était ça ou mourir which seems to be entirely AI-written. I fear the lesson here is that the AIs have actually correctly learned that the average person loves this style, and only starts disliking it once it becomes repetitive.

And there are people who exclusively read AI generated fiction. These people mostly weren’t reading a lot before. AI in a lot of cases isn’t replacing existing fiction, it’s offering a different product.

Genres where ghost writing is a already a big part of it and where authors routinely publish multiple books a year might end up incorporating AI more but right now you’d have to lie to readers to do it.

Why do you think people read novels?

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