The End of an Era • Hacker News Board

Re: The End of an Era

#201

Post by monkeywork » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 2:07 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #182

monkeywork wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one PROVE AI or human writing to determine copyright? Who is challenging a lack of copyright on a work? You publish a story, I take it and republish it / remix it / whatever, you invoke copyright protections and try to have mine taken down - how do I prove your work was AI and thus has no copyright, and how do you prove (or do you even have to) that it's human? Who has the burden of proof - the person claimi…

Well, copyright claims are usually a civil matter (in the US at least). For a civil dispute you have to make a judge or jury believe you more than the other person. But it sounds like you are talking about a criminal charge. There the bar is higher and the government has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. In that case I suppose the government could do things like search your computer, subpoena the AI companies for t…

Before you would ever get to a point where someone claiming your work was AI would be able to get access to your computer, editor, family/friends, etc there would need to be a bar that needs to be cleared for a judge to allow that discovery to take place.

What I'm asking is what is that bar?

Copyright is going to be assumed by default - in order to break that assumption there needs to be some process... however for all the people who are "concerned" about the copyright status of works that have touched AI I've never seen anyone make a feasable argument on how it would ever practically take place.

Re: The End of an Era

#202

Post by harimau777 » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 2:09 PM UTC

smalltorch wrote: post #181

jtbayly wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

Im curious what you mean by this

They are quoting John 1:14. At the beginning of his book, John describes Jesus as being the personified word of God. That was likely an early example of the influence of Neo Platonism on Christianity.

Re: The End of an Era

#203

Post by JeremyNT » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 2:09 PM UTC

> 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 seems like a truly wild prediction to me.

LLMs can synthesize data in useful ways for all sorts of purposes, and I can see how they could be helpful in the process of a human editing and refining a work of fiction they are creating, but I can't imagine why I'd ever tolerate a work of fiction actually generated by an LLM.

The authorship and craft matters, the translation of human feeling and thought to the page matters. This isn't code where it either does what it's supposed to or does not.

Fiction from a machine is of no value.

Re: The End of an Era

#204

Post by greengemz » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 2:09 PM UTC

scronkfinkle wrote: post #123

p-e-w wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be interested to know what you think the “several layers” above a system that solves open mathematical problems in an afternoon, and writes entire operating systems from scratch, are.

> and writes entire operating systems from scratch ehhhh, we're not really there. Not saying it's impossible to reach in the future but large tasks like this are still out of scope for LLM's beyond demoing toy applications. Impressive nonetheless, but I can't tell an LLM to reproduce microsoft word and have it give me a useful enough tool that doesn't contain an immense amount of bugs and require a human in the loop…

I would go as far as to say the LLM part has peaked.

To 1-shot MS Word will be possible only within some workspace designed for creating that kind of software. It will probably be saas style where you pay to export binaries or maybe some will take 30% if they become destinations for finding such software.

But I would bet other platforms are used for game dev, or for filmmaking.

Such that we still won’t have some super “model” that just does everything. The harnessing becomes architecture becomes software becomes user experience and expertise.

Re: The End of an Era

#205

Post by sparsesignal » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 2:09 PM UTC

xorcist wrote: post #167

inigyou wrote: post #4

LLMs are writing as well as humans for people who think writing words is the goal. Printing presses also write words better than humans. LLMs are solving the problem one layer higher than printing presses, but still several layers down from the top. Note that LLMs aren't useless, since they have other strengths which can make them equal or better than humans in certain applications. For instance, they can tirelessly…

Right. LLMs are text production machines. You can also view them as data expansion tools. They expand an input to an arbitrary long text. That text contains roughly the same amount of information as was contained in the input to begin with. This is not very useful unless your work is content production. More useful is when the output length is shorter than the input. Then it is a (lossy) data compression tool. These…

This assumes one-shot generation. I don't use it that way, and I don't think many people who find it useful do.

I use it as a colleague I'm drafting with. I'll ask how a sentence lands, tell it to make a paragraph more friendly or more dramatic, have it argue against a point I'm making. The piece comes together over many turns, and the information arriving in each turn is mine — it's not expanding one prompt, it's helping me converge on something.

The information-content framing also proves too much: a copy editor adds no information either. Neither does a translator, or a ghostwriter. What they add is form, and form is most of what makes writing good or bad.

Re: The End of an Era

#206

Post by jonathanlydall » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 2:10 PM UTC

kardianos wrote: post #92

What LLMs have shown me most, is: Alternatively most blog posts could have been paragraphs. Most books could have been single chapters. Most newspaper articles could have been tweets. That being said, most readers want you to hold your hand step by step. They don't want to the outline: they want you to give them a story. Most people and writers know this already. To me, it was new.

Sometimes pleasure is in the activity, not just the outcome.

A good movie or novel is a generally pleasurable experience from start to finish, where the conclusion on its own might have only been mildly interesting at best.

Sex is also like this.

Re: The End of an Era

#207

Post by skybrian » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 2:10 PM UTC

xorcist wrote: post #167

inigyou wrote: post #4

LLMs are writing as well as humans for people who think writing words is the goal. Printing presses also write words better than humans. LLMs are solving the problem one layer higher than printing presses, but still several layers down from the top. Note that LLMs aren't useless, since they have other strengths which can make them equal or better than humans in certain applications. For instance, they can tirelessly…

Right. LLMs are text production machines. You can also view them as data expansion tools. They expand an input to an arbitrary long text. That text contains roughly the same amount of information as was contained in the input to begin with. This is not very useful unless your work is content production. More useful is when the output length is shorter than the input. Then it is a (lossy) data compression tool. These…

I agree that the output is more likely to be valuable when it’s shorter than the input. And when they use tools to do research and try things, it can be a lot of input that comes from all sorts of places.

Re: The End of an Era

#208

Post by inigyou » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 2:10 PM UTC

skinfaxi wrote: post #116

palmotea wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A thinking press? Soon you won't be doing anything. At best you'll just be a bag of meat attached to automated processes you don't understand in order to take legal liability for it. Literally a scapegoat, except of a different species.

That would be an interesting legal case. I would expect it to lead to negligence on the part of the employer for lack of training, etc rather than attach to the employee pressing the button.

Your job description won't say scapegoat - that would be too obvious. It'll be more like how Amazon drivers are forced to piss in jugs while driving.

Re: The End of an Era

#209

Post by harimau777 » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 2:11 PM UTC

un-diletante wrote: post #190

I feel like writing has traditionally had two purposes, to communicate some internal feeling or idea of the writer, and to entertain. For the reader, even if their primary purpose was to be entertained, they would have no choice but to also engage with the internality of the writer. This latter point is what is changing. I fully admit that we have been surpassed by the machine in the ability to entertain. And the big…

The problem as I see it is that you cannot communicate your internal feeling if no one reads you book. Therefore, even for people whose motivation is personal expression, there is a very real risk of being flooded out of the market by AI slop.

Re: The End of an Era

#210

Post by fidotron » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 2:13 PM UTC

jodacola wrote: post #191

fidotron wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is much "pursuit of art" is a status exercise by those with the leisure capacity to do so, and this only maintains status because most people do not have the spare time and energy to put into it. In the event everyone is sitting around with time on their hands wondering what to do and we have machines that spit out endless reams of anything it is a very curious question what exactly it is most people would…

Whoa, fascinating: what to call this paradox I'd never considered before? From the blog post: > In my dream world, the robots do all the boring jobs and humans spend all their time being creative, connecting with one another, learning about the universe, and sharing our ideas and creations in a great big prosperous circle. But with this and your other comment [0] about humans churning out 10 articles a day and changi…

My guess is energy gets redirected towards sport, and everything associated with it. It's already often an abstracted form of things that used to be work (sailing, hunting etc.), but it's also something more unique that a machine participating in makes no sense.