alt Hacker NewsThe End of an Era
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Is he financed by AI money now with the "meat-book" concern trolling? Pure "inevitability".
This is the black and white perspective that literally every other human-creative industry is wringing its hands over. But I think it misses a key difference that is already painfully obvious, which is creating new and engaging things will never be as simple as pressing a button. There will always be a human at the other end, pressing the button (or a human who deploys the agent, etc.)
The best comparison is photography. Instantly, a whole career path of portraiture was tossed out the window. Go to a museum and you see portrait after portrait - the best ones. There were millions of shitty ones made at all levels of society, and that job was replaced by cameras. But painting didn't go away, it got weird, it became anti-camera and more human, in a way.
This splitting of purpose and amplification of humanness is going to ramp up. Expect everyone to grow a taste for weirder, unprocessed music, experimental novels, wild and unexpected designs. Art is human communication and AI brings that into sharp relief.
Novels seem the most protected from AI - pulp/romance/beach novels will be crushed by volume and the sad remains of the publishing industry along with it, but interesting human novels will be just fine. And, much like with photography, I think AI will eventually normalize to its own artistic medium with writing, where careful usage will allow more ambitious work to appear that wasn't possible before, like a novel written using only sestinas, for example.
Publishers and "professional editors" have been releasing crap for years, even decades. No LLM needed. Humans are perfectly capable of writing so-called "slop" without a machine.
Any better word than ‘meat-books’?
Writing with LLM’s is still really hard if you want to keep your storyline consistent.
What annoys me the most about current day and age is PROLIFERATION of everything…
Not so long ago the author / creator would have to be very skillfull and prolific to write-and-write-and-write… nowaways I fee like I (we?) are drowning in more and more content…
I'd take back substance over volume :/
the article talks about AI books winning awards and AI books on bestseller charts, but can any one of us think of a book they genuinely enjoyed that was written by an AI? this feels less like proof that AI books are good and more like proof that awards, rankings and other accolades are rife with abuse. it's a known issue across almost all entertainment media: you start by trying to find the best media to consume but the process is so subjective and gameable that it ends up being a way to pick something arbitrarily and then declare it to be the best.
The problem of AI writing, to me, is its emptiness, not the fact that it's not written by a human. Seeing standard slop words or phrases triggers the "do not read this" reaction, but the reason of not wanting to read is that the text is just empty of any interesting thoughts.
The majority of us read ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini responses, even though they are, by definition, slop, because we probably asked some question (the one we did not really care about and just wanted to explore) and the response has some valuable information in it (maybe true, maybe not). So we read it.
If (or when?) the AI writing becomes interesting to read, I don't see why we won't start consuming it, and I don't see it's as something bad.
One way to make the text interesting is to actually get involved in writing; remember this short story that was here on HN some time ago? [1] It was written by AI with some serious human involvement, and I enjoyed reading it.
The biggest problem facing authors is not battles over whether something is AI vs. human. Most readers don't care.
AI has made creating content almost free. What it hasn't done is add free hours to our day to consume all this new content. The number of people who want to read a book this month is roughly what it was five years ago, and roughly what it'll be five years from now.
Supply is exploding into demand that is stagnant (at best) or falling. Upload a book to Amazon today — good cover, sharp title, a blurb you sweated over for a week — and there is no longer any reasonable expectation of an organic sale. The book goes up, and then nothing happens, indefinitely.
Five years ago that wasn't true.
The answer is paid advertising. Buy your way onto the shelf. Stand out from the slop. But every writer is being given the same advice at the same moment, and there are only so many slots. The price of the slots must rise. And will keep rising for as long as there are writers able to pay.
The old metric was it takes about $5 to sell a book via paid advertising. I think in a year we'll look back on that figure fondly.
This is AI-writes-too-well is a problem with many solutions. Here's a slightly unconventional one: if an author has enough skin in their book, they could just do as Tolkien and sing their songs[^2], in public. Taking that one step further would be to establish rapport with readers by teaching them how to play those songs, e.g. in a piano or a guitar. It's like going back in time, to when the Iliad was sung and performed instead of written. Though there's no need to negate technology; if a writer is sufficiently technologically inclined, they could forego the linear story and instead release interactive fiction for musical instruments...Hm, I'll see myself out now.
> Another prediction is that MOST readers will care about machine-vs-meat as much as they currently care about publishing imprints, which is to say almost none.
This seems like a truly wild prediction to me.
LLMs can synthesize data in useful ways for all sorts of purposes, and I can see how they could be helpful in the process of a human editing and refining a work of fiction they are creating, but I can't imagine why I'd ever tolerate a work of fiction actually generated by an LLM.
The authorship and craft matters, the translation of human feeling and thought to the page matters. This isn't code where it either does what it's supposed to or does not.
Fiction from a machine is of no value.
definitely dipped my chin a few times at HH's maddeningly human way of writing prose a couple times whilst reading this
I actually think AI has great potential to help low budget movies, shows and even books.
CGI is so expensive only the most generic and safe sci fi movies get made. I want a 30k movie with amazing effects.
As for writing, AI is great at filler. But a lot of books are brought for Instagram photos and social validation. Not to be actually read.
Self help books are like this. Maybe a few are good. Many are slop to funnel you into buying other products.
But with AI telling us what to buy, how long until we have books written specifically for LLMs ?
I’m sure they’ll be absolutely gibberish, but you can still pose with them on Instagram?
Don't you find it surprising that seemingly the largest firms don't use RLHF to prevent LLM writing from sounding like LLM writing?
I started writing because AI made me obsolete in software development. Or at least gave me depression that blocks me from writing code. What I did instead I started writing my thoughts as short stories and then made an attempt to write full blown 50k words novel. It worked as therapy surprisingly well.
I write mostly without AI but then I use AI for editing and grammar correction. Sometimes when I struggle with plot threads I ask AI for an advice. When I write about something that a have a vague understanding about I may ask AI to write a paragraph or two. I'm also open about it and warn reader in preface and mark generated text using italics.
As a new author I find AI both helpful and discouraging, because it CAN write better prose than me. I think text that's written for humans should be written by humans, but temptation to ramp up quality with zero effort is huge.
Then I experimented with different regimes when I only allow myself a couple of prompts at the end of the day when I done writing and only allow minor edits. At least my conscience is clear.
I think that Silo is just a darker, stupider City of Ember. Like there have been shitty derivative works long before AI came along. Now there’s AI that can plagiarize faster and better than humans and those people are sad.
AI is beginning to seriously annoy me.
I just watched:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo5w2S-h5dI
I think it is time to jail those CEOs that drive up the prices and destroy industries. RAM prices up 350%? ALL AI companies are in my opinion a mafia structure that must be eliminated. They not only force us to have to overpay (or be stuck) but also destroy industries downstream, thus eliminating jobs. All that cost should be paid by Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon etc...
I think this is even worse for music. There’s almost no way to tell if a track is produced by humans or AI.
In my view the best writing presents a portal to someone else's mind. LLMs do not have a mind. They can produce text and perhaps even 'weave a tapestry' of plot lines that make for an enthralling and well written story. Maybe a meaningful one, if prompted with a particular set of themes and narrative ideas. Is that a voice?
I don't know. But I do think, or rather I hope, real voices will prevail. But publishers (including KDP) have a rough road ahead of them, if they also want that. Just search YouTube for tutorials on how to spam Amazon with AI generated works, hoping for a break out. It is sad.
Is anyone working on cryptographic human-crafted attestation, without feeding the work into LLMs?
Is there a cap on AI intelligence?
Is it just a case of throwing more and more resources at a pattern recognition machine with no upper limit except the energy of the universe and the economy of the algorithms?
Someone else suggested the maximum intelligence is capped as the average intelligence of its training data, which is an interesting take.
Completely disagree, I think LLMs write horribly badly.
Documentation, marketing, prose, it’s all horrible slop writing, immediately recognisable regardless of model
Article predicts that we'll see tools to "roughen up" slop to pass as human. Surprised we aren't there already...
I'm already being more careless with spelling and grammar because it gives authenticity.
Maybe people will revert to Jeffrey Epstein style prose to avoid any suspicion of slop..., e.g:
“no , bed, i, m laying on thefloor so it can't move.”
Another wave of marketing from AI companies?
Only speak advantages of AI, no or a few trivial disadvantages.
I read the author's entire post and find it interesting that the author attributes success to having a good story to tell based upon some wild youth experiences while sailing. Not being able to type real fast, not some magic sauce from a "how to be an author class" but being able to spin a good yarn, one good enough for other people to pay to hear it.
There was/is a business position as a middleman of sitting between a storyteller and the printing press, called authoring or writing and that's slowly been denigrated for over a century by mechanical typewriters, word processors, spelling checkers, grammar checkers, now LLMs.
However there's always been a shortage of good story tellers with a story to tell, and for at least a century or two been a MASSIVE oversupply of the middlemen mentioned above, who end up failing. They can type, and they insist thats all they need, and the ability to spin a good yarn is just fluff or unimportant. Then they fail, so they're probably incorrect.
I suspect as long as the author can spin a heck of a good yarn based on his personal sailing experiences mixed in with whatever else, the author will have gainful employment in the book biz. As a storyteller. Not as "a guy who types really fast" or "a word processor technician" or whatever.
The middleman author who used to have a job writing generic romance novel #7994126 and was hoping to make money off writing #7994127 is probably utterly doomed. Why does the publisher need him if we have LLMs, or even better, why do we need publishers if we have LLMs and can enter a short simple plot just as well. "Claude generate me a 75K word romance novel similar to 'Just for the Summer' from last year but write all my favorite past characters into it. Especially character Anne she's my favorite."
But lets be realistic, those middlemen were already doomed anyway. Very few people in the book biz can spin a good yarn and that shows up in the stats of "failed writers". LLMs just mean they'll generate more scrap paper along the way to failure. But about the same percentage will sell books and about the same percentage will fail unless AI itself causes a substantial difference in readers tastes (honestly, I think not...)
Compare it to programming, about which we supposedly have more experience. LLMs generate more code that no one is responsible for nor understands fully. But does it make more or less successful startups? Nah, not really. Doesn't seem to have much effect on "idea people" at all. The people whom always generate bad ideas crash the plane with no survivors a little quicker, the people whom always generate good ideas make money a little quicker, most people in the middle are unaffected beyond change for the sake of change, which is always expensive.
Deleted because I realised I am not in the mood to argue with people who don’t read; don’t make an effort to understand an argument; or make shallow dismissals thinking they consist in any way of a valid point. There are more important things to worry about than internet randos (and that includes me, if you’re offended).
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I think I saw an em dash in there, guys!
Nice blog post but this one part is so irritating:
"In my dream world, the robots do all the boring jobs and humans spend all their time being creative, connecting with one another, learning about the universe, and sharing our ideas and creations in a great big prosperous circle. I believe such a utopia is possible. It does not violate the laws of physics, so much the laws of human nature."
What irritates me is when people say "human nature" but what they actually mean is "capitalism" or "the profit motive". Common among people who have fallen into the trap of what Mark Fisher called "capitalist realism", a capturing of the imagination by the cultural concept in the west that capitalism will be with us forever, or that it is the natural state of humanity.