alt Hacker NewsPeople seem to have very short memories. LLMs are easily capable of good writing. The fact that they are loaded up with obvious "tells" now is quite a recent development.
One year ago, the writer Mark Lawrence posted an article [0] (featured on HN) describing how he generated 4 pieces of flash fiction with ChatGPT, asked 4 published authors (with a combined book sales of $15M) to also write a flash fiction piece, and then did a blind test asking respondents, for reach of the 8 pieces, (a) whether they thought it was written by a person or not and (b) an overall quality score. The result was that people (who were avid readers and skewed anti-AI) were no better than a coin toss at determining whether the piece was written by ChatGPT, and slightly preferred ChatGPT-written writing overall.
[0]: https://www.marklawrence.buzz/2025/08/the-ai-vs-authors-resu...
This is something that constantly gets missed by HN in discussions about AI in the arts. There's the quality of the output and the essence behind the art itself. Humans want both [1][2] but these models only provide an output. Could ChatGPT output the next IT or Lord of the Rings, probably.
However, once it's understood that it wasn't written by a human it loses all value. I use this quote by Kane Parsons a lot but I think it summarizes why humans like art.
> If I see an element of the environment has been, you know they used generative fill or whatever to change something about the scene, even if--. It just shuts the part of my brain that wants to know more about that world and wants to look for details, 'cause I would assume if they're willing to make an arbitrary choice there, they can make an arbitrary choice with literally anything.
Specifically, people like dissecting art whether its writing, a movie or an image. It could be seeing the Chekov's Gun finally fire, and going back through the pages to see the author wrote it in there earlier and you missed it. It could be speculating about the unopened questions the author deliberately left there. This is how a lot of people at least in my circles engage with art and AI provides none of that. Even if the author specifically prompts that into it, those arbitrary choices are going to be made in certain spots that just disinterests me.
1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096969892... 2: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-45202-3