Live data from Hacker News

Warranty Void If Regenerated

nearzero.software

261–270 of 353 posts

Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated

#261
post #208
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> preface explaining it was written by an LLM why can't the quality of the works stand on its own? Whether there's LLM generation or not should be irrelevant.

because we typically want to know the writer of a piece. we want to know where to lay credit. every book you buy has an author credited. articles in newspapers and magazines have photographer and author attributions. asking an ai to write you a story does not make you an author. if you ask someone to take a photo for you, you don’t magically get to say “look at this photograph, i’m a photographer.” if you ask someone…

can't reply to your comment below so i will comment here

> why does it bother you to give attribution? why do you think crediting the writer impacts how the piece stands?

clearly it does to you?

thing is, this is a fool's errand to try to police what people credit when there is zero capability of verification and enforcement

the current social norms still value authorship, so people will just take or omit credit as they see most advantageous, even if it's merely an ego advantage, which it typically is but a proxy for brand building

what will happen if/when the currency of attribution is completely altered? hard to predict

my prediction is that track record will be considerably more important, not less, but human merit will be increasingly seen as irrelevant

Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its a valid emotion to feel. I genuinely resonated with the story, but when I learned it was written by Claude it kind of left me feeling ... betrayed? One of the many things I love about art is when I encounter something that speaks to emotions I've yet to articulate into words. Few things are more tiring than being overwhelmed with emotion and lacking the ability to unpack what you're feeling. So when I enc…

You can never be sure if what you're feeling is a genuine human experience or not. This is what the deconstructionists were preparing us for, I guess. The author is dead, and if not dead, then fake. It was never a good idea to tie our sense of meaning to external validation. The humanity immanent in the text came from you, the reader, not the author, and it has always been that way. Language never gave us access to t…

I don't agree.

Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated

#264
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you point out what made you think the images were AI generates? I suspected they were (before reading in this thread everything is AI generated), but I couldn't find any of the usual signs. I thought they were AI because I suspected nobody would pay an illustrator/actually spend time making those illustrations for a story like this. The fact that the whole text was AI came as a surprise. I did notice that weird i…

The combination of a "hand-drawn" art style, with text that is obviously not hand-lettered, is a dead giveaway. It would be very weird for a human to do that. If you have an eye for fonts, the text itself stands out too, at least to me. The font style of "HARTMANN SOFTWARE MECHANICS" is a particular combination of clean, bland shapes and rounded corners that you rarely see in human-designed fonts, but it's super comm…

Thanks. That's interesting. I haven't paid particular attention to the fonts. I do draw quite a lot these days but I don't have a particular eye for fonts.

I personally have on occasion added software rendered fonts into hand-drawn images. Sometimes instead of directly adding it with a text tool I would add it on a temporary layer and then trace it over by hand. This results in similar looking text with clean shapes and rough lines that fit better with the other parts of the drawing.

To me the only thing that stands out in the image is the view through the laundry shop windows. The line of laundry machines doesn't look aligned at a right angle to the window - given that the tiles in front of the window clearly establish perspective lines it's a mistake that seems hard to make and would be pretty apparent in early stages when drawing this.

In fact looking closely, the perspective of the building itself doesn't match the perspective of the fields behind it, but I can see myself doing something like this if it's not that noticeable and gives me better composition.

Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated

#265
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> preface explaining it was written by an LLM why can't the quality of the works stand on its own? Whether there's LLM generation or not should be irrelevant.

Because 'quality' is a misnomer. LLM writing has quality in the same way that a press release from a big company has quality, or a professional contract written by a lawyer has quality. It is functional, generally typo-free and conforms to most standards but that doesn't mean it has flavor or spice to it. Creative writing is the intent to convey feelings, thoughts, to create atmosphere. Here's a great example of the…

Well-put.

This "flavorlessness" is all over the story, and paired with the obviously genAI images is how I realized as I read that this was either generated or at the least deeply driven by AI.

It constantly described facial expressions, tones of voice, and other emotional cues in generic, dry terms that communicated nothing but the abstract notion of "this person felt a particular way about what happened and it's up to you, the reader, to imagine what that feeling was."

It felt very much like it was prompted to "show, don't tell," by someone who has no idea what that phrase actually means.

As a professional programmer with a deep background in literature and music, this is yet another example that if you aren't an expert in a field, you will get mediocre results at best from an LLM, while being deceived into thinking they're great.

Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of course have a very unique style that seems very hard to replicate. Personally I haven't yet found a single band that manages to faithfully execute classic era Slayer. But there are countless bands today who make very good execution of norwegian black metal and swedish death metal. Edit: And a lot of modern black metal for example doesn't even bother with stating who they are. Member lists are pseudonymous or…

Ok I'm not as up to date with modern black metal, that pseudonymity seems cool. There's also upcoming math rock band Angine de Poitrine who are also anonymous https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ssi-9wS1so . In these cases you can argue that the person doesn't matter but in my opinion it still does . There's a person inside that costume, who has made the decision to be anonymous as part of the whole experience. That's p…

There's anonymity/pseduonymity where we have a entity that does not do any performances and releases cassettes with members acknowledged as "M., K. and J." or even nothing and there is "anonymity/pseudonymity" where a band tries to use that as its own image (eg Kanonenfieber). Obviously I meant more like the former which is legitimately a music first person irrelevant presentation, but modern black metal is a wide spectrum, it has some of the most image conscious crap out there too, if anything I think its probably the most superficial and image focused of the main metal genres. It's just that anonymity hasn't historically been part of death metal culture that much but I feel its actual presentation is quite workman like in many ways.

Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated

#267

Folks labeling "AI generated" might be jumping the gun considering OP described his process took him the last couple months and then some for this project. Call it what you want, but I think this sits better with "AI assisted" and, perhaps, really well supervised full of the human intent behind of it. Then again, labels are strange, we call algorithmic and synthesizer assisted music "electronic" music these days and…

> we still praise musicians who take the time through endless Moog / Ableton fine-tuning sessions to find the perfect loop patterns for their craft.

There are still plenty of purists that will not consider this a "craft". But it's always been that way. The electric guitar itself was a controversial music transition. Bob Dylan was famously criticized heavily for going electric.

But that was a long time ago, and people got over it. And they will again this time.

Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated

#268
Its good but it still has a bit of that LLM-sound to it and it really drives the point home after like 2 or 3 paragraphs and kind of keeps repeating itself over and over again. But it is still interesting, from an artistic perspective, to see a work that does the thing it is, so to speak: it is showing and doing. Of course, there is a certain art to writing: the ruthless, violent practice of editing; which, perhaps is even more important than the original text that is always, like a model output, just an unconscious stream that has not quite taken shape.

Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stories are particularly troubling because we have the concept of "suspending disbelief" and readers tend to take a leap of faith with longwinded narratives because we assume the author is going somewhere with the story and has written purposefully. When AI can write convincingly enough, it is basically a honeypot for human readers. It looks well-written enough. The concept is interesting and we think it is going som…

Right, but in the present case we have exactly what you're describing—a story, almost fully written by AI but with some human cherry-picking in the mix. And readers are finding it a phenomenal story and then wanting to vomit retrospectively in learning about the authorship. It just seems patently obvious to me that this is not where the sentiment is going to stay—it will hit the margin, like the people who decide to…

That's all speculation, and it may prove to be true.

But:

> readers are finding it a phenomenal story

is not true across the board.

I thought to myself, explicitly, and fairly early "This is a fun and thoughtful idea, but the writing is kinda crap" before I realized (maybe a third if the way through) "ah, right, this is genAI. That tracks."

Despite my deep-seated hatred of LLMs, I choose to finish the piece and see if I was being unfair to the actual work ("the output", in the soulless descriptor used by programmers who've never once written a real story or crafted a song).

As a longtime avid reader of fiction, lit nerd, and semi-pro musician, I understand writing and artistry better than the average HN poster, and couldn't help but see the flaws in this.

People who don't have deep knowledge of literature don't catch the tells or flaws as well, but are still understandably angry when they find out they burned their time reading clanker output, and are understandably depressed that they were suckered into it because they haven't spent a lifetime developing a deep understanding of the discipline.

It's possible that genAI approaches will surpass humans in every field we invented.

So far, though, in every field I understand deeply, I see the uncanny mediocrity of the average in every LLM output I have subjected myself to.

Re: Warranty Void If Regenerated

#270

One thing I'll note about this is that the writing reminds me of the much contested "MFA workshop" style that has launched a thousand think pieces. --- The story was decent! I thought it was insightful and it made me reconsider some aspects of AI use. I am skeptical that an AI could write something on par with the Iliad, or Anna Karenina -- but perhaps I will be disabused of that notion someday. Still, this is a leve…

That's a great point about the choreographer. Hopefully I'll be able to afford one some day...
Post reply on HN