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AI vs. Professional Authors Results

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Re: AI vs. Professional Authors Results

#31

Post by exmadscientist »

Aeolun wrote: post #15
antihipocrat wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's voice are you using when adding your hand crafted prose? Mimicking the style of the 80% or switching to your own? Perhaps I'm a Luddite, or just in the dissonance phase toward enlightenment, but at the moment I don't want to invest in AI fiction. A big part of the experience for me is understanding the author's mind, not just the story being told

I think there’s only a very small subset of fiction that uses the prose to that extent. Much like code really. If you are writing original algorithms you cannot use the LLM. If you are just remixing existing ones, it becomes a lot more useful. Also, I guess I missed the brunt of your question, though the answer is similar. Most voice works for most characters. There’s only so many ways to say something, but occassion…

Perhaps on a relative scale "most" fiction doesn't carry any sort of deeper meaning, but if you look at things like "Hugo or Nebula Award nominees" (to pluck out the SF/F genre as a category), I'd say that almost every single one of them, going back all those decades, has something more to say than just their straightforward text.

And unless reading is your day job or only hobby, that's a massive, massive corpus of interesting text. (In just one genre! There are more genres!) So on an absolute scale, there is so much fiction to read with more-than-surface-level meaning that I personally just don't understand why anyone would have the least interest in reading AI slop.

(I also don't have any real interest in most Kindle Unlimited works, probably for similar reasons. Though I am quite certain there are diamonds there, I've just not had particularly much time for/good luck at finding them.)

Re: AI vs. Professional Authors Results

#32

Post by thedevilslawyer »

We're at a key milestone in the IP wars; IP was inducted into our civilization to protect the few who had the ability to create.

This idea is well past it's due date. We should move to a liberal IP regime, with copyright strictly reduced to 7-10 years, with all works then entering public domain. Our society will universally thrive with the abundance that will come.

I understand and empathize that a class of vocations today will go away, but so did lamplighters. The roles may become extinct; but we will endure as a people.

Re: AI vs. Professional Authors Results

#33

Post by exmadscientist »

bsder wrote: post #20

Perhaps what this is pointing out is that a lot of writers of the genre of "fantasy" produce mostly formulaic, trope-laden piles of crap that AI is pretty good at mimicking? This is neither new nor news. "The Well-Tempered Plot Device" is almost 4 decades old (see: https://news.ansible.uk/plotdev.html ). It does suggest that publishers might want to screen new writing with a quick "Did AI write this?" and only publis…

Yes, the human-written stories that I guessed wrong about were the ones that seemed to have nothing to say. When the plot's stereotypical and trite, there's no subtext (difficult to do in flash, but not impossible; some can do it well), and it scans like anyone could have written it anywhere or anytime, well, that looks like AI.

(In that vein I am baffled how anyone could think the fourth story, especially, was anything but AI.)

(And, as well, the seventh story is interesting because it reads, to me, exactly like someone who's used to writing something longer trying to write flash. It doesn't land anything, it doesn't conclude, but it looks like if it had about twice the length it might be interesting. And it's got some dissonance from breaking with the usual demon-bargaining template. So I pegged that as human. Oops!)

Re: AI vs. Professional Authors Results

#34

Post by HPMOR »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #32

We're at a key milestone in the IP wars; IP was inducted into our civilization to protect the few who had the ability to create. This idea is well past it's due date. We should move to a liberal IP regime, with copyright strictly reduced to 7-10 years, with all works then entering public domain. Our society will universally thrive with the abundance that will come. I understand and empathize that a class of vocations…

Why is it always taken as a conclusion that humans will persist? Lots of species go extinct, and it is not clear that won’t be true here as well.

Re: AI vs. Professional Authors Results

#35

Post by d0100 »

thwarted wrote: post #23
xenotux wrote: post #12

I think this is similar to AI generated images: it puts a new creative tool in the hands of people who might have had good ideas, but didn't have a mastery of the medium. In that respect, it's cool: if you had a great idea for a sci-fi story but no talent for writing, and if an LLM let you realize your vision, that's neat. It has some negative externalities for the craftsmen, but overall, more creativity is hardly a…

> I think this is similar to AI generated images: it puts a new creative tool in the hands of people who might have had good ideas, but didn't have a mastery of the medium. Reading this sentence reminded me of the classic HN position of "ideas are worthless, what matters is the execution", usually mentioned in the context of an "ideas person" looking for their "technical cofounder" and the ideas person thinking they…

> If your "vision" is only the "idea for a sci-fi story", is that really a vision?

We have art, games and movie directors

AI just enables anyone to be a "director", but most people can't direct anything worthwhile

Re: AI vs. Professional Authors Results

#36

Post by colechristensen »

thwarted wrote: post #23
xenotux wrote: post #12

I think this is similar to AI generated images: it puts a new creative tool in the hands of people who might have had good ideas, but didn't have a mastery of the medium. In that respect, it's cool: if you had a great idea for a sci-fi story but no talent for writing, and if an LLM let you realize your vision, that's neat. It has some negative externalities for the craftsmen, but overall, more creativity is hardly a…

> I think this is similar to AI generated images: it puts a new creative tool in the hands of people who might have had good ideas, but didn't have a mastery of the medium. Reading this sentence reminded me of the classic HN position of "ideas are worthless, what matters is the execution", usually mentioned in the context of an "ideas person" looking for their "technical cofounder" and the ideas person thinking they…

Having tried to use AI as a technical cofounder (in small scale experiments), nah it's not there yet. It's more like having a herd of interns. With close supervision there can be a lot of productivity but without a good deal of taste and expertise it's just going to be garbage unless you're very lucky.

Re: AI vs. Professional Authors Results

#37

Post by Aeolun »

exmadscientist wrote: post #31
Aeolun wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there’s only a very small subset of fiction that uses the prose to that extent. Much like code really. If you are writing original algorithms you cannot use the LLM. If you are just remixing existing ones, it becomes a lot more useful. Also, I guess I missed the brunt of your question, though the answer is similar. Most voice works for most characters. There’s only so many ways to say something, but occassion…

Perhaps on a relative scale "most" fiction doesn't carry any sort of deeper meaning, but if you look at things like "Hugo or Nebula Award nominees" (to pluck out the SF/F genre as a category), I'd say that almost every single one of them, going back all those decades, has something more to say than just their straightforward text. And unless reading is your day job or only hobby, that's a massive, massive corpus of i…

Sure, but that more than surface level meaning comes out in the story, not often in the specific way the sentences are written (I acknowledge those exist, I just don’t consider them the majority).

Also, you say you don’t understand why anyone would be interested in the AI slop. But from the article we learn that one is indistinguishable from the other (apparently even to the one professional author that tried)

Re: AI vs. Professional Authors Results

#38

Post by [deleted] »

thwarted wrote: post #23
xenotux wrote: post #12

I think this is similar to AI generated images: it puts a new creative tool in the hands of people who might have had good ideas, but didn't have a mastery of the medium. In that respect, it's cool: if you had a great idea for a sci-fi story but no talent for writing, and if an LLM let you realize your vision, that's neat. It has some negative externalities for the craftsmen, but overall, more creativity is hardly a…

> I think this is similar to AI generated images: it puts a new creative tool in the hands of people who might have had good ideas, but didn't have a mastery of the medium. Reading this sentence reminded me of the classic HN position of "ideas are worthless, what matters is the execution", usually mentioned in the context of an "ideas person" looking for their "technical cofounder" and the ideas person thinking they…

[deleted]

Re: AI vs. Professional Authors Results

#39

Post by rwyinuse »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #32

We're at a key milestone in the IP wars; IP was inducted into our civilization to protect the few who had the ability to create. This idea is well past it's due date. We should move to a liberal IP regime, with copyright strictly reduced to 7-10 years, with all works then entering public domain. Our society will universally thrive with the abundance that will come. I understand and empathize that a class of vocations…

I'm not sure people left without a job will endure, at least if they're unfortunate enough to live somewhere without social security. The key question is whether AI will somehow create enough new jobs for those let go (I doubt that), or just cause a massive unemployment.

Re: AI vs. Professional Authors Results

#40

Post by voidhorse »

Interesting study. I think the use of AI boils down to this: is the product independent of the process and the context? Or is it dependent on it in some way? I think, when it comes to art, the latter is truer than the former, and most use of AI in creative fields is predicated on trying to convince people to engage with art in an extremely shallow way (art strictly as soulless, time filling entertainment).

When an author writes a novel, the novel does not exist in a vacuum. The author's persona and the cultural exchange that emerges around the text also becomes an important part of the phenomenal status of the the work and its cultural recognition. Even when an author remains pseudonymous and makes no appearance, this too is part of the work.

If an author uses AI as a tool and takes care to imbue the output with artistic and personal relevance, it probably will become an art object, but its status may or may not be modulated by the use of AI in the process to the extent that the use does/doesn't affect people's crafting interpretations of the work, or the author's own engagements. Contrarily, AI generated work that has close to no actual processual involvement on the part of the author will almost always have slop status, just because it's hard to imagine an interpretive culture around such work that doesn't at some point break down in the face of the inability to connect the worm with other cultural touchstones or the actual experience of a human being. Maybe it could happen, but if it did, at that point the status of the work is till something different in so far as it would be a marker not of human experience, as literature traditionally has been, but something quite new and different literature-cum-hypermarket(we already had mass market) product.

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