The End of an Era • Hacker News Board

Re: The End of an Era

#351

Post by ACCount37 » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 5:34 PM UTC

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #337

danaris wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs are writing as well as humans for people who think writing words is the goal. Only if what you mean by this is "for people who think padding a word count is the goal". LLMs absolutely do not write well , by human standards.

LLMs don't do anything well by human standards. Not even the one thing (programming) they are supposed to be good at. It's disheartening how many people are prepared to accept the slop an LLM puts out just because it's fast.

I've seen way too much humanslop to be able to reject LLM slop outright.

There are areas where the average of LLM slop already beats the average of humanslop by a sizeable margin.

Re: The End of an Era

#352

Post by dageshi » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 5:36 PM UTC

I read a lot of amateur litrpg, prog fantasy and cultivation stories on royalroad.com

I would guess I've actually tried to read more AI written stuff while checking out new stories than a lot of people in this thread.

In practice what I discovered is, AI spends a lot of words to say very little, its prose is quite annoying most of the time. It often makes mistakes in terms of continuity as the story continues.

Now both of those might be corrected with skilled enough use, but the real problem is it doesn't actually understand what makes a story (within a particular genre) "good" and I suspect to actually do that you need to seriously think about and practice writing itself. The process of doing it, is what makes you understand what it is you enjoyed about a genre in the first place and how to write your own.

Genres aren't static, often what readers want is an evolved version of what they've loved reading before, to repeat a piece of Thai wisdom, they want "same same but different" where LLM's will basically give you "same same".

Re: The End of an Era

#353

Post by argentinian » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 5:36 PM UTC

harimau777 wrote: post #225

fidotron wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely having the idea and curating the result actually is work? And pricing is determined by what someone else will pay for something, so if people want to read it and the author is charging for it . . . that's up to them if they want to make a trade about it. The odd thing is this attempt at gatekeeping what other people value.

Price is determined by what someone is willing to pay but value isn't. If the value from art comes from expression, then LLMs directly attack the core value of art.

LLMs don't impede human expression.

Re: The End of an Era

#354

Post by argentinian » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 5:38 PM UTC

bonoboTP wrote: post #313

argentinian wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you say, that already occurs with human made commercial crap literature. A person directing an IA could also lead it to build a story that teaches values.

True, but it's easier to get lazy and to just wire it up to an automatic engagement farming loop with no human input. Imagine the worst form of audience capture possible.

What's wrong with that? There's the low quality slop for the people who desire it, and then there's the high quality literature that's appreciated by people with good taste, and that cannot be easily produced

Re: The End of an Era

#355

Post by samatman » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 5:39 PM UTC

hughhowey wrote: post #296

f311a wrote: post #10

This is a well-known author, but how come he thinks AI is better at writing? AI writing makes me vomit. Also, I think he's too enthusiastic about the future of readers. In my opinion, reading books will be a very rare hobby pretty soon. The decline started more than 10 years ago.

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 specula…

Heh.

Literally, welcome to: Hacker News.

It's always been like this.

Re: The End of an Era

#356

Post by jamesgill » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 5:40 PM UTC

Hugh gets one thing right: his success was luck and timing. He self-published a modest story at an opportune time for cheap, and the easy accessibility of Kindle books for pennies made him enough success to quit his day job.

"Pulp" fiction has always been a very hard way to make a living, and nearly everyone has failed at doing so. Centuries before AI.

Now, if people leverage AI to write magnitudes more mediocre pulp fiction, what will happen? I have a guess:

1. millions of ebooks drive prices down to almost free (or just free).

2. quality eventually gets worse.

3. Consumers perceive it as lower and lower value. A commodity at best.

4. Distributors like Amazon eventually cut out the 'producer' and simply manufacture it themselves.

Spoiler: this is already happening.

And interestingly, most of these were predicted at the advent of the "self-publish to Amazon" era 10-15 years ago.

Re: The End of an Era

#357

Post by twobitshifter » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 5:40 PM UTC

kriro wrote: post #211

""" 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 does not align with what I see in the fiction book space at all. At least in the communities that I frequent (fantasy, sci-fi, horror) there is no AI publication that I am aware of that is good. And readers react allergically to any notion of AI in…

Look at Chinese AI Dramas, this is completely taking over this space.

https://news.mydramalist.com/article/ai-dramas-and-movies-ta...

People watch them and they look for more AI dramas, it’s exactly what’s being predicted for books in films. Now maybe novels are deeper than Chinese dramas, but how much fantasy writing and fanfic gets formulaic?

Re: The End of an Era

#358

Post by zbentley » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

argentinian wrote: post #349

zbentley wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and as Howey explains in TFA those things might be good for consumers and creators who create for fun, but they are not good for people who create in order to earn a living.

you are not taking into account that creators can be funded in different ways. For example like in Patreon. You can give part of your money to fund a creator that wants to create in order to earn a living. I believe that is better when people create for fun. If they need to create to earn a living they are forced to create and that is not the best incentive to create. Fun is a better incentive

> I believe that is better when people create for fun. If they need to create to earn a living they are forced to create and that is not the best incentive to create. Fun is a better incentive

I'm not sure that's true (thousands of famous creative works from the Sistine Chapel to the Benin Bronzes were created on commission/for remuneration), but even if it is, how are creators gonna eat? If the answer is "get a day job", I think that excludes a lot of folks from practically being able to create things. Patreon is not a great way to pay the bills for all but the most famous and popular people on it.

Re: The End of an Era

#359

Post by boogieknite » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #292

boogieknite wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my coworker presented a 93 page pdf for a project plan entirely created by $230 of Claude's deep learning. i hope i wasnt too mean while asking him variations of "what now? what do i do with this?" the answer is obvious: read it. but so much of it covers problems which are already solved and my coworker clearly hasnt considered at all point is: maybe llm output is best not shared. maybe, like a dream, the only audien…

Having made the mistake of writing a couple of them, I’m pretty sure the only uses of non-fiction documents longer than ~30 pages is * As a reference; people can look look up just the algorithm they want * As a token that says “I’ve thought about this problem” (The former is somewhat a subset of the latter. All of the stuff they didn’t read when they used the work as reference was there to provide them confidence tha…

totally. ive made some 10 pagers documenting topics ive THOROUGHLY considered and had my work peers review. same as you, the purpose is to point at it 5 years from now and say "the answers in there"

but when my coworker pays to create documents on topics he hasnt considered, for ideas of projects which dont exist, it feels like an exercise in text generation and i become mildy put off for the onus of reading it. i know it was written without purpose and while there are possibly novel tech and ideas in there, it feels like being handed less than a rough draft because it lacks any aim and intention

now, i expect he would get much more from it. hes the first party audience who reads the doc and sees a valuable project somewhere inside of it

Re: The End of an Era

#360

Post by samatman » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

reloty wrote: post #214

Is he financed by AI money now with the "meat-book" concern trolling? Pure "inevitability".

You've created a throwaway account specifically to post against the HN guidelines:

> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.

This is not cool. Please don't do it again.