alt Hacker NewsMany people here complain that AI writing is bad. And I agree with it, AI writing is boring and its distinctive tone is now associated with unpleasant thoughts for most people including me.
But I'm curious about how people will feel when AI writing is good and impossible to differentiate from a decent journalist-level writer, including with tooling. Then what? Are people going to stop reading?
I'm trying to separate the part of the argument related to "this writing is bad" from "this was written by AI".
I personally don't care if AI is a writing instrument for a human who's signing off on the content, as long as the writing is good and the source is legitimate.
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The comparison to painting before and after photography was invented is the closest to how I think about writing before and after AI.
We remember museum-quality painting, but there was a whole economy built around people getting portraits done. It was time-consuming and expensive. Then the camera came along and completely met that need with a far superior result (an accurate portrait) while being much cheaper and faster. So too has the listicle writer all but gone extinct.
But what about art? Painting went in a wild new direction, exploring the medium in a direct counter-trend from portraiture. In the same way, I expect "literary" and "experimental" writing become more outlandish while those middle of the road beach romance novel authors will shrivel up completely or flatten the market into a endless flood of options, possibly self-guided by readers.
The most interesting is what happened to photography, which quickly became its own art. Just as preposterous as saying prompting LLMs could be a form of artistic expression, photography was totally dismissed at first. But photography requires a much different skill set and type of discipline, while relying on the same visual concepts as painting.
If entire novels are going to be generated by AI, someone needs to write that prompt. What will it say? What concept will lead to a bestseller? This may seem reductive in extreme, but it puts a similar focus on the remaining human choices. If photos or prompts are relatively cheap, the expression of art becomes one of curation, instead of creation. Flower arranging and DJing are both curation and both expressive.
> But I'm curious about how people will feel when AI writing is good
This is the question I keep asking the people who seem to really hate AI. At some point it will produce good writing, both fiction and non-fiction, and then what? Will people stop reading?
Someone commented over the weekend they had an LLM generate a sci-fi short story and their community loved it until they told them it was LLM generated.
I’ve also noticed a new type of ad-hominem attack (especially here on HN) where instead of engaging with an argument, people claim a comment is AI and move on. HN users have found 10 of the last 2 LLM generated posts.
The fundamental problem with most AI "writing" is that writing is a communication medium, and if your text was just generated by a prompt, I would always rather read the prompt than the output, as the output contains zero additional bits of information.