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I won't read LLM authored fiction

mccormick.cx

11–20 of 118 posts

Re: I won't read LLM authored fiction

#11
post #4

Afaik I have yet to encounter LLM fiction, but I have seen plenty of AI generated music and it truly disgusts me. Each to their own but to me a large part of music was always the life experience of the person making it. I'm listening to their life, their love, their pain in music form. Without an interesting human behind it, art loses all magic to me. That's why it's beyond annoying that my own brother absolutely lov…

>Without an interesting human me art loses all magic to me.

Thanks for mentioning this. I have been in so many arguments with tech savvy people who simply can't grasp this concept.

Additionally to that, if you're taking shortcuts with AI rather than actually learning a skill (writing, painting, drawing, producing music, etc...) how can you even feel good about your "art"? It's not special, it's stolen effortless slop. It's like playing a video game and getting that "early access equipment" that just lets you steamroll through the game without challenge.

Re: I won't read LLM authored fiction

#12
English teachers around the world have loathed that "The curtains were blue" meme, and are absolutely right to do so, but what happens when you ask what an author meant by the blue curtains and the answer is a fairly definitive "it's just the probabilistic output of the model the author used, it doesn't mean anything"?

Sure some people are just piggies lining up at the trough to consume content like it's the custard machine from tellitubbies, but the greatest works will be human written, and I don't see that changing. What will change is the discovery mechanism for a book or any art is shot to bits right now, I could see curation of books and reviews becoming much more important.

Re: I won't read LLM authored fiction

#13
I concur with the author. Personally I think I just won't read fiction produced after 2023. There's so much good literature already produced, why bother with the new stuff?

I feel very sorry to any budding new authors. Maybe we are entering a literary dark age?

Re: I won't read LLM authored fiction

#15
post #9

How to detect which fiction, article, or review is created by fake AI or LLM? There are too many texts generated by LLM on Internet now. The experience of exploring Internet is very bad now.

It's often quite easy, because most people who author articles with LLMs do not bother doing any kind of post editing. Meaning you can see/build a mental map of common tropes[^1] for what to look for. Once you read perhaps two or three articles authored with LLMs you will not be able to unsee it.

[^1]: https://tropes.fyi/

Re: I won't read LLM authored fiction

#16

That is a perfectly valid opinion and POV to have. While I don't share it personally, I can totally understand why one has it. That does not change, that I personally actually do not care the slightest about the question of who or what wrote a novel. But that is just me, having studied literatur and fallen into a school of literary studies that held Roland Barthes' claim of the death of the author [1] in high regard.…

> What does the author wanted to tell us with this story." Because -> The author never wrote that down. And deriving their intentions from a fictional text felt just like making shit up

It’s an exercise in engaging intellectually with the work. It’s not about knowing for a fact what the author wanted to communicate. Art is about engaging with human emotions and thoughts, not about deriving specific facts.

Re: I won't read LLM authored fiction

#17
I can't tell if I'm getting old, or if this is a reaction purely to people making blog-posts saying they don't like AI, but, I am filled with "who cares?".

Unambiguously the point of view is valid. I don't share it, but whatever.

But why are you writing this, and why is it getting upvoted? We're several years in. Is there new ground being covered here? Is there something special or unique to this take that we haven't read 1,000 times before? Are we doomed to these identical "I don't like it and I need to tell someone" posts forever? Yes, it's a valid view point, but so is not liking Meta, and yet we don't get a "I don't like Meta as a company!!" post upvoted every single day.

Re: I won't read LLM authored fiction

#18
This is approaching “I don’t want a synthetic diamond, I want the real thing” levels of lunacy

There will come a time, very soon, where you wont be able to tell the difference, and what then?

Re: I won't read LLM authored fiction

#19
I would like to read "actual" LLM fiction in the same sense I would like to read fiction from a lion. I wonder if that kind of alien writing is even possible with this kind of technology. The RL process would have to be quite different at least and even then it is still using human content as the base. Anyone seen any good or even decent or OK fiction of this type?

Re: I won't read LLM authored fiction

#20

That is a perfectly valid opinion and POV to have. While I don't share it personally, I can totally understand why one has it. That does not change, that I personally actually do not care the slightest about the question of who or what wrote a novel. But that is just me, having studied literatur and fallen into a school of literary studies that held Roland Barthes' claim of the death of the author [1] in high regard.…

> I hated the question of teachers asking: What does the author wanted to tell us with this story." Because -> The author never wrote that down. And deriving their intentions from a fictional text felt just like making shit up.

Then why does anyone write anything? Why did Orwell write 1984 instead of just making a 2 page bulleted list about how authoritarian regimes are bad?

Sure, an author can write something that is interpreted totally differently from what they meant, but that doesn't detract from the fact that they did have some intention behind what they wrote and it's worth exploring that.

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