The full sentence I wrote: "Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans — at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation — and that’s creating an existential crisis among authors, confusion among readers, and legal action within the industry"

"About as well as" doesn't mean "better." Wild that you jumped from one to the other.

I continue: "-- at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation --" This is factual.

One thing I am sure of is that computers are better at reading than people. The way some people read makes me want to vomit.

> AI writing makes me vomit.

I think this was fairly obvious and fair 1 - 2 years ago. Now though, I have to wonder if people who think this with such conviction are falling for the toupee fallacy.

You said it yourself: someone you consider a well known (and presumably accomplished?) author thinks AI is pretty good at writing.

Agree. I've just decided that I'm limiting my reading to pre-2021 books. There's still many lifetimes of a backlog there, even at my relatively high rate.

This is happening in every creative industry. The creators on the edge of this space in every medium have seen it from both sides.

AI creative is easy to spot _right now_. It will not always be that way.

AI makes you vomit because most uses of it are hamfisted attempts at doing a thing.

People are going to eventually figure out how to polish and refine the usage and outputs so you cant even tell it is AI.

This is already becoming increasingly true for code and software. The next step is writing and then media.

> AI writing makes me vomit.

There is likely a non empty set of writings that are AI written and that you don't recognize to be AI written.

I agree that the Ai-isms are ugly.

Butni also acknowledge that I am likely reading huge amounts of Ai text I don't attribute Ai.

that's not how I interpreted the whole article.

Default unspecifically-prompted AI writing makes you vomit, because it has a specific pattern.

But with enough well-defined prompts AI can be made to write in practically any style, often with results unrecognizable as AI-generated.

>"This is a well-known author, but how come he thinks AI is better at writing? AI writing makes me vomit."

Most of all writing makes me want to vomit. It's not impossible to write well with AI, but it's the same argument as vibe-coded slop vs. a senior engineer using the tools carefully. I'd be inclined to accept the expert's opinion here.

how come he thinks AI is better at writing?

He talks about this in the article, did you read it? Reasons include AI winning writing contests, AI hitting bestseller lists, and now apparently an AI-written book inspiring a bidding war between publishers that resulted in the supposed "author" getting a $2.4M advance (until it was revealed that the book was written by AI).

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"how come" makes me want to vomit. (That "It’s a common idiom" is completely irrelevant. And note that it doesn't actually make me vomit.)

Also, here's another thought. In my opinion, here's my opinion.