alt Hacker News>AI hasn't mastered the text medium
I don't know what this means and I don't know what would qualify it as having "mastered" at all. Seems like a no-true-Scotsman thing where regardless there would always be someone that it couldn't actually do a thing because this and that.
>why can't they write a novel?
This is what I'm disagreeing with. I think an LLM can write a novel well enough that it's recognizably a pretty mediocre novel, no worse than the median written human novel which to be fair is pretty bad. You seem to have an unqualified bar something needs to pass before "writing a novel" is accomplished but it's not clear what that is. At the same time you're switching between the ability to do a thing and the ability to do a thing in a way that's honored as the best of the best for a century. So I don't know it kind of seems like you just don't like AI and have a different standard for it that adjusts so that it fails. This doesn't match what you'd consider some random Bob's ability to do a thing.
I don't dislike AI, I use it every day for coding and increasingly for non-technical tasks, and have also used it in enterprise workloads to great success. I am fairly optimistic about it - I think it will remove a lot of drudgery and make things economical which previously weren't.
I am just challenging the notions that "if you limit it to text, it's doing really well" or that the text contains in itself all the information that is needed to carry out a task to a certain level of quality. This applies in my experience not only to writing literature but also to certain human tasks which may appear mundane and easy to automate.