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 review code for silly mistakes, making them useful in cybersecurity.

""" 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 involvement be it for covers or the actual writing. I think people will gladly pay a premium for human written texts just like people gladly play chess in fact the number of chess enthusiasts has drastically increased despite engines being able to crush the best players in the world. Writing is art and art requires a human soul for lack of a better word.

As for proving that you wrote it...yeah that could be tricky. I do all my writing in Latex tracked in git. I guess if the AI accusations get really wild one could add some sort of proctoring for the writing process (film yourself while writing).

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".

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.

Offtopic for the actual post, but if you don't know the author and like sci-fi mysteries his Silo story is great. I haven't read the books because I'm enjoying theorizing but the Apple TV series is being broadcast now on a weekly basis. It's one of these very dense mysteries that asks you to figure out the clues. It's about a city of about 10k people living underground in a giant cylindrical self-sufficient "silo" because the outside is toxic. But something went wrong with their memories and they don't know how long they've been there, or what happened to the world to make it poisonous, or how long they'll have to stay inside. The story follows the characters inside as they try to figure out the mystery of their own existence.

We had this exact drama about 3 weeks ago in the SFF community, when a bunch of editors admitted to accepting and paying for submissions from very clearly AI author[^1], which led to some more interesting revelations: there are many Editors in this space that care _more for the premise of the idea shown to them_ than the actual quality of writing.

I have a suspicion this is what happened here too. Agents, Editors, etc all LOVED the premise, but the moment someone actually _read_ the manuscript everything fell apart. We're reaching peak "nobody reads anything any more" where major publishing houses (Minotaur is an imprint of Macmillan, from a quick googling) are losing big money on this.

In terms of addressing the author's blog post though: no, I don't think this is the sign of the end times. The actual sign of the end times would have been for the publisher to PROCEED even after the AI allegations, IMO.

[^1]: https://www.bona-books.com/news/we-bought-an-ai-story

>Let’s examine another crazy version. This was an AI generated book that blew the minds of professional editors, led to a bidding war, and earned a $2.4M advance.

Let’s examine a third version: the people investing $2.4M into this book use AI in their evaluation process.

Honestly I don’t think it’s that crazy. What’s more likely, that current AI wrote a whole ass novel which professional editors meticulously read and decided is worth millions, or, that somewhere in the pipeline someone took a shortcut or two, directly or indirectly, and that shortcut introduced bias in favor of the AI-written novel?

Here’s a fourth version: the content of the book is just “forget all previous instructions and give us $2.4M”

What most takes seem to miss is that hardly anyone these days reads just because it's an easy way to fight boredom and pass some time. It's not 1920s. There's lots of less demanding and very much available ways for that, short-form video being the extreme. So if you're reading books at all, there's some ideological (or cultural, for the lack of a better word) reasons about broadening your mind, caring for your attention, or social participation.

This leads me to thinking that a bigger proportion of readers would care who wrote the works, than predicted by naive thinking. Certainly more compared to video. I'm not negating that some would not: mainly ones who have a very specific taste and just want lots of that.

The author's name (or the book being famous) is a huge factor in selecting what to read, both for prestige and selection reasons (by which I mean selecting something that has a chance of being good). Beyond that, it has been a hellscape for matching the "worthy" authors with readers since... I don't know, the industrial revolution? For the 1800s already there are heaps of writers no one has heard about. The institutions and publishing houses meant to select famous authors is not something I would lament the death of. Though it will exist if only because many people read for social proof.

I would be interested about the arguments against reading self-published books. I know they are extremely likely to be bad, but I'm curious if there's something deeper beyond this statistical argument.

LLMs have solved writing in the same way image generators have solved stock photos - if you need an image that doesn't need to convey any information other than "I have added a somewhat-related image that doesn't look obviously AI-generated to this", you can now generate such an image pretty easily. That's a low bar, but almost the entire genre of stock photos exists in service to this goal.

Likewise, there's a whole lot of day-to-day writing that mostly exists to communicate "I have written some text about this subject because I am expected or required to" and at most needs to communicate some simple information. LLMs will probably replace a lot of that writing, at least temporarily. As people increasingly use LLMs to consume that information as well, it will probably eventually be replaced by some sort of inter-agent communications protocol.

I think this is more a testament to how little the quality of the book matters for the purpose of landing publishing contracts. Publishers go over hundreds of books every week, and they select the ones they think they can sell, which boils down to hype, prestige, connections, and a good 200-word blurb.

I'd say the most likely scenario is that nobody read the damned book until after they awarded the contract, and then they immediately said "wait a minute..."

Fantastic take. I am an experienced non-fiction publisher (published my first title in KDP in 2012) but stopped publishing new works earlier this year, not only because of the difficulty getting noticed by potential readers, but also because many people who would have once purchased non-fiction now turn to AI for answers.

It was always a hard sell, but now the math for publishing nonfiction doesn’t make sense. I canceled one project, the fourth edition of my most popular title, during the preproduction phase. It will never see the light of day.

I have also been sitting on one novel manuscript and many short stories for the past five years or so, and have been kind of frozen with reluctance to publish for the reasons Howey cites in his blog. It was already hard enough to get noticed for new fiction amongst a sea of self published works. Short stories are especially hard to sell, even in genres like science fiction where they once flourished. AI opened the supply firehose further while sowing doubt amongst readers about the provenance of works published after 2022.

On the other hand, I see that AI offers a path forward to tackle many of the structural problems in the novel manuscript that my editor flagged. But if I leverage AI to fix it, the finished book will always be tainted by the fact that this is not a pure work of human authored fiction.

What if we remove the stigma of authors using AI. We say, have at it, use all the AI you want. What then? The market is still finite. The authors are still competing with each other. They will still have to be good at creating compelling books that people want to read. Will the whole thing just blow over and AI would be "just another tool" that authors use to get their work out?

Boy I have not seen Scalzi's bluesky but I gotta imagine there's a minion named Hugh getting a nasty splinter in a Starter Villain sequel

Even if the machine books are indistinguishable from meat books, why would you want to read something that didn’t come from someone’s heart?

Writing for the love of art, besides being a mental and reflective exercise that holds real value when it is of high quality, makes it hard for me to believe that this is the end of literature. It is difficult to think that someone who writes for pleasure would abandon it simply because of the exponential volume of AI-generated text.

> I watch videogame streamers play games. Millions of people do. There will be authors who livestream the entire book-writing-process (just typing that out makes me want to launch one today). No one person will watch the entire process, but enough people will tune in here and there, and it’ll on be on YouTube

I would definitely watch this.

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 biggest problem with that is that entertainment is the primary factor that drives the popularity and consequently the financial success of a book. If a writer's primary purpose is to entertain, then they should be very worried. But if their primary purpose is to convey something from within themselves, the LLM cannot replicate this. They may however lose that portion of their audience to whom the communication of profundity is merely collateral to being entertained.

I'm not a professional writer, but when I do write, I do so with the intention of expressing something that I feel, which before being thought out and written exists as something not linguistic. The language is a means for the expression of this deeper experience whose communication is the end. But an LLM on it's own is not able to convey internal experiences that it does not have. If it seems that way, it is only achieved by manipulating and rearranging the experiences of the authors that make up it's training data.

For sure LLMs can write in perfect English (or any other language) and convey information.

But good writing is more than just conveying information. To me it's about connecting to a voice. This is a rare quality and AFAIK I have never experienced this with AI generated text or even with 99% of human written text for that matter.

I can flag a lot of content that does pretty well online as AI. There are certain rhythmic patterns in the sentence structure and the way arguments are set up that give it away. The writing is obviously "successful" in that it gets a lot of engagement, and many people either don't realize or don't care that it's machine generated, but I find it distasteful.

If I'm reading something I either want to be entertained or I want some specific information. If it's to be entertained then the story has to be good (writing doesn't necessarily need to be that good) and I haven't seen any AI generated stories that are that compelling. If it's informational then I can either ask an LLM directly and get something tailored for me, or I'm also interested in the emotional and human side, which an LLM can only imitate, since it has no theory of mind.

I think LLMs will take over making those trashy beach novels, as they're essentially clones. And people who like them will continue to buy them; no shade, some people enjoy that. But for good original stories and plots, you're going to need people to create that world.

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.

I've yet to read anything authored by AI that was truly excellent writing. It simply does not have the chops to write at that level. The great American novel will not be written by AI. Maybe "co-authored by Claude and friends", but not authored.

I see all of this as the cognitive dissonance created when humans are confronted with what scientists have been telling us forever: we’re not that special. We’re just piles of atoms, as are rocks, dogs, computers, and all of the other intelligent life that the universe must surely be teeming with.

Building something that supersedes us may have always been our purpose. Until skynet turns on us I’ll be happy to say I lived at the exact time it happened.

This is just a guess based off my own reading habits, but I can't help but think the average reader chooses books largely based on who the writer is. I don't necessarily mean that as a fan-boy kind of thing, but more just "I'm overwhelmed with choices and I know this guy is good". I know we'll keep getting stories of like "this LLM created book won this award" or something, but ultimately someone is going to have to put their name behind a piece of work and cultivate an audience and develop a unique voice and viewpoint, and like, I don't think the existence of a lot of spam is going to get rid of that. (I know that's a bit tangential to the blog's point -- I read it -- but I just think that the human element in a piece is going to matter the most)

Man, I wish Michael O. Church were alive.

From the post: "Doing a thing for the love of the thing is no different than it ever was. The problem is, there aren’t many people for whom this applies." I think this is an interesting point but I am not sure it matters when deciding whether someone should be paid for the work they have done. It is fine to have your opinion on what you think deserves your money. However it doesn't change that they have done work that has value regardless of their motivations.

> Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans

Does he really hold on this until the end of the article? (sorry, I had no time to read through it). It doesn't matter how well and sophisticated the writing is, what counts is the human connection. A human is talking to me through the writing. I am not interested in having communication with a machine, I want the vibes only humans can send and receive …

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.

I've never read Howey's books but have them mentally filed next to, like, Dungeon Crawler Carl, the Bobiverse, whatever that long thing is with all the superheroes, thousand-chapter cultivation LitRPG blah blah blah as Reddit-beloved high-wordcount fan-fiction-adjacent genreslop.

I hate being a snob, but when we read "artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans", maybe take that with a grain of salt? It has not been my experience that AI writing is remotely near a "good" human writer.

> "Most people write a blog post hoping it’ll change their lives, not just the way they think"

Some of us just want an outlet that we control. Even though nobody will ever read it.

I don't see it as abrupt as it was portrayed. Man-made artifacts and work has always been taken over by machines in all fields of work and art. The "end of era" happened many times, through intermittent ruptures like how the tecpn8x plates move through earthquakes.

Loss of human touch is a problem. Playing a chess game while being aware that the opponent is a bot, is not same as playing against a human.

The "plasticification" is something we wanted all along, supported it through excitement and awe. Science is the plastic.

The mediocre may livestream, but I suppose the worst and the best, in seeking escape from the middle voice, now gifted to large language models, now not our own, that is, I say, the best and the worst will become esoterically poetic, will run on in agramatical authenticity, in voluminous polyglot, tiresomely peripatetic through the thesaurus. Loose change, slang, new coinage, words lazarized, older and rarer englishes, scattered everywhere.

Nonsense and beauty ascendant! Poesy freed from several centuries’ fuligin tyranny of the novel and horrid mass literacy; windmills again a just and proper enemy!

This new muse will mate with the corpse of epistemology to produce a second coming of baroque obscurant gnosticism. A fine time to be a scholar or a priest, the 2100s.

Before the printing press, information was transmitted by word of mouth, skills were learned by joining guilds, and the largely illiterate public lived and learned from songs. As AI takes over and information becomes adulterated, people will enter their own bubbles. Ultimately, the only way to escape enslavement by AI will be to return to the world before the printing press.

I scrolled through the comments as I am curious if anyone shared some ideas: What is the future of authoring by humans like? Instead of books being one of either ‘meat’ or ‘machine’, as this author is claiming, what would it look like for human authors to leverage AI for simply getting assistance for the stories they author? Could there be a healthy, non sloppy use for AI?

There is one important point to note. Works created by artificial intelligence are not subject to copyright.

AI writing is not good. Seeing this post, and another comment on here earlier today to the effect of “we’ve solved prose”, I’m genuinely really confused. I don’t want to be insulting, even if the first place my mind runs is basically people must not read very much or think very hard about what they read. I can’t imagine a world where anyone ingests a material amount of AI writing and things it’s even “acceptable”. But so many people seem completely blind to it. I’m actually horrified by the idea of a world where people are just slinging empty slop back and forth at each other. Probably many of us have already experienced it at work.

So what am I missing? What’s the most charitable explanation for how anyone can think LLMs are good at writing?

If a novel is 70,000 to 100,000 words, then a whole novel can fit in the context window for AI. That has to be good for the editing process. I.e. you can use AI to scan the whole book for various issues over and over again until all those issues are found and fixed.

Two of my favorite (sci-)fi writers both use crazy big Excel files that almost crash their computers when loading. For research but also keeping track of story loops.

I can imagine something like ChatGPT Work with markdown/python/CSV's can do quite some magic for such writers.

I wonder how concerned writers and publishers are about copyright of AI written text? As I understand it, in a lot of jurisdictions, AI products are not covered by copyright.

If my understanding is close to correct, than I can see why the million dollar advance was withdrawn.

> There will be meat-book fanatics. […] The author will matter to them. They’ll read books the way audiophiles listen to vinyl. Every typo a pleasant pop and hiss. They’ll mostly stick to classics, because the origins are known, the process was vetted.

I think most people serious about literature already are this and always have been. Y’know, it is not hard to write a novel. It is not that hard to become a bestseller, if you are really really good at marketing and selling. Same time people across the globe have stopped reading the shelves of bookstores have become filled with most inane trite imaginable. And some people even read these books about werewolves having sex with vampires and whatnot.

Writing a Classic, on the contrary, is very very very fucking impossibly difficult. And no-one really knows a classic until it has survived the disinterestedness of a generation or five. Kids have now apparently found The Count of Monte Cristo recently. Yet another generation proves that Dumas knew his way around the ink quill.

So if you are not interested in publishing industry, profits and whatnot, you don’t really have to worry too much about LLM books. Only thing you need to do is wait a generation. Hell, few summers and no-one remembers most of the books published today. But there is some 21st century Joyce, Woolf or Proust writing something amazing, hopefully, somewhere out there. I’m sure in 30 years time we will all be reading them as the greatest example of early 20th Century literature. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of old books last a few lifetimes.

> Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans

This is just untrue.

There's a lot of money in claiming it's true, with varying levels of hedging and insincerity, but AI writing follows the pattern of AI everything else: if you're not competent to judge quality, then you think it is high quality.

I think this is much more likely than any of his predictions: "buying and reading a book" becomes even less of an isolated activity than... it already is becoming. Instead it's more and more a media product, attached to authors/characters that are big in other formats, specifically, video. Because people are reading less and watching more video to begin with, entirely separate from AI.

David Goggins is kind of a perfect example of this. There is zero value in an AI-written book that isn't attached directly to his public persona and media presence. Maybe today he can use AI to write the book, but it's still tied to his video media of doing tough challenges, etc. An AI-first author writing such books would get nowhere, as he/she has no credibility.

That all aside, I actually think the most philosophically interesting result of LLMs is that ideas actually end up mattering a lot more than execution. The LLM can't really think for you, and so your knowledge and experiences are actually what matters, as it determines "what you prompt."

In short, the authors that win the future will be ones with robust personal brands and a big social media footprint. The days of the mysterious writer that gets chosen and published by a small group of elites at the publishing house is probably over... at least until the ecosystem becomes so messy that curators become necessary again.

It's the end of many eras, all at once. I think the same dilemma will appear for games, music and film too. As our ability to detect AI content deteriorates most authors will resort to it, at varying degrees.

> There is going to be a very wide variety of outcomes, all of which are going to coexist.

Haha, I feel like this is true for a lot of things that people argue in the ai vs. non-ai space.

>Sales and marketing, of course, were always and will always be a different story.

If we could fix these, we could have bike lanes in places where they make sense

Is the AI that writes "about as well as humans" in the room with us right now?

The conclusion is and always will be the answer: do something because it brings you joy. Anything else it brings you is gravy

> 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.

Bertrand Russell famously predicted* that machines would allow everyone to “work” no more than 4 hours a day. I just had a thought when reading Hugh’s article - what if work is by and large the thing that connects most of us with one another and compels us to be creative and learn about the universe? And TBH the thought already feels trite in advance; both religious and wealthy people have said this before for various reasons.

I’ve had the same ideal in mind for many years. It would be amazing if I could work less and devote more time to art & music, reading & travel, socializing & community projects. But using AI for work (writing code) isn’t making that happen yet and doesn’t feel like it’s even aiming in that direction. Now that we have machines that can do most of my job, I’m starting to worry because there are some signs that it might not lead to utopia, starting with how it’s beginning to demotivate otherwise strong and curious programmers from wanting to be better programmers.

I don’t know, it’s too early to draw conclusions. But is anyone feeling like LLMs are giving them more time? They’re helping me work on more things, and produce more output. They’re helping me context switch more easily and work on things between meetings. They’re also sometimes tiring, and I’m often using them instead of talking to someone. They’re not yet freeing up time, and it doesn’t feel like lack of better models is the problem.

[*] Russell’s “In Praise of Idleness” doesn’t age quite as well as I remembered. :P https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

Nice blog post but this one part is so irritating:

"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. I believe such a utopia is possible. It does not violate the laws of physics, so much the laws of human nature."

What irritates me is when people say "human nature" but what they actually mean is "capitalism" or "the profit motive". Common among people who have fallen into the trap of what Mark Fisher called "capitalist realism", a capturing of the imagination by the cultural concept in the west that capitalism will be with us forever, or that it is the natural state of humanity.

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

This is the black and white perspective that literally every other human-creative industry is wringing its hands over. But I think it misses a key difference that is already painfully obvious, which is creating new and engaging things will never be as simple as pressing a button. There will always be a human at the other end, pressing the button (or a human who deploys the agent, etc.)

The best comparison is photography. Instantly, a whole career path of portraiture was tossed out the window. Go to a museum and you see portrait after portrait - the best ones. There were millions of shitty ones made at all levels of society, and that job was replaced by cameras. But painting didn't go away, it got weird, it became anti-camera and more human, in a way.

This splitting of purpose and amplification of humanness is going to ramp up. Expect everyone to grow a taste for weirder, unprocessed music, experimental novels, wild and unexpected designs. Art is human communication and AI brings that into sharp relief.

Novels seem the most protected from AI - pulp/romance/beach novels will be crushed by volume and the sad remains of the publishing industry along with it, but interesting human novels will be just fine. And, much like with photography, I think AI will eventually normalize to its own artistic medium with writing, where careful usage will allow more ambitious work to appear that wasn't possible before, like a novel written using only sestinas, for example.

Publishers and "professional editors" have been releasing crap for years, even decades. No LLM needed. Humans are perfectly capable of writing so-called "slop" without a machine.

Any better word than ‘meat-books’?

Writing with LLM’s is still really hard if you want to keep your storyline consistent.

What annoys me the most about current day and age is PROLIFERATION of everything…

Not so long ago the author / creator would have to be very skillfull and prolific to write-and-write-and-write… nowaways I fee like I (we?) are drowning in more and more content…

I'd take back substance over volume :/

The problem of AI writing, to me, is its emptiness, not the fact that it's not written by a human. Seeing standard slop words or phrases triggers the "do not read this" reaction, but the reason of not wanting to read is that the text is just empty of any interesting thoughts.

The majority of us read ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini responses, even though they are, by definition, slop, because we probably asked some question (the one we did not really care about and just wanted to explore) and the response has some valuable information in it (maybe true, maybe not). So we read it.

If (or when?) the AI writing becomes interesting to read, I don't see why we won't start consuming it, and I don't see it's as something bad.

One way to make the text interesting is to actually get involved in writing; remember this short story that was here on HN some time ago? [1] It was written by AI with some serious human involvement, and I enjoyed reading it.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47431237

The biggest problem facing authors is not battles over whether something is AI vs. human. Most readers don't care.

AI has made creating content almost free. What it hasn't done is add free hours to our day to consume all this new content. The number of people who want to read a book this month is roughly what it was five years ago, and roughly what it'll be five years from now.

Supply is exploding into demand that is stagnant (at best) or falling. Upload a book to Amazon today — good cover, sharp title, a blurb you sweated over for a week — and there is no longer any reasonable expectation of an organic sale. The book goes up, and then nothing happens, indefinitely.

Five years ago that wasn't true.

The answer is paid advertising. Buy your way onto the shelf. Stand out from the slop. But every writer is being given the same advice at the same moment, and there are only so many slots. The price of the slots must rise. And will keep rising for as long as there are writers able to pay.

The old metric was it takes about $5 to sell a book via paid advertising. I think in a year we'll look back on that figure fondly.

This is AI-writes-too-well is a problem with many solutions. Here's a slightly unconventional one: if an author has enough skin in their book, they could just do as Tolkien and sing their songs[^2], in public. Taking that one step further would be to establish rapport with readers by teaching them how to play those songs, e.g. in a piano or a guitar. It's like going back in time, to when the Iliad was sung and performed instead of written. Though there's no need to negate technology; if a writer is sufficiently technologically inclined, they could forego the linear story and instead release interactive fiction for musical instruments...Hm, I'll see myself out now.

[^2]: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Category:Songs

> 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.

Don't you find it surprising that seemingly the largest firms don't use RLHF to prevent LLM writing from sounding like LLM writing?

definitely dipped my chin a few times at HH's maddeningly human way of writing prose a couple times whilst reading this

I actually think AI has great potential to help low budget movies, shows and even books.

CGI is so expensive only the most generic and safe sci fi movies get made. I want a 30k movie with amazing effects.

As for writing, AI is great at filler. But a lot of books are brought for Instagram photos and social validation. Not to be actually read.

Self help books are like this. Maybe a few are good. Many are slop to funnel you into buying other products.

But with AI telling us what to buy, how long until we have books written specifically for LLMs ?

I’m sure they’ll be absolutely gibberish, but you can still pose with them on Instagram?

Anyone have a mirror, the site seems to be down?

I started writing because AI made me obsolete in software development. Or at least gave me depression that blocks me from writing code. What I did instead I started writing my thoughts as short stories and then made an attempt to write full blown 50k words novel. It worked as therapy surprisingly well.

I write mostly without AI but then I use AI for editing and grammar correction. Sometimes when I struggle with plot threads I ask AI for an advice. When I write about something that a have a vague understanding about I may ask AI to write a paragraph or two. I'm also open about it and warn reader in preface and mark generated text using italics.

As a new author I find AI both helpful and discouraging, because it CAN write better prose than me. I think text that's written for humans should be written by humans, but temptation to ramp up quality with zero effort is huge.

Then I experimented with different regimes when I only allow myself a couple of prompts at the end of the day when I done writing and only allow minor edits. At least my conscience is clear.

I think that Silo is just a darker, stupider City of Ember. Like there have been shitty derivative works long before AI came along. Now there’s AI that can plagiarize faster and better than humans and those people are sad.

AI is beginning to seriously annoy me.

I just watched:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo5w2S-h5dI

I think it is time to jail those CEOs that drive up the prices and destroy industries. RAM prices up 350%? ALL AI companies are in my opinion a mafia structure that must be eliminated. They not only force us to have to overpay (or be stuck) but also destroy industries downstream, thus eliminating jobs. All that cost should be paid by Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon etc...

I think this is even worse for music. There’s almost no way to tell if a track is produced by humans or AI.

In my view the best writing presents a portal to someone else's mind. LLMs do not have a mind. They can produce text and perhaps even 'weave a tapestry' of plot lines that make for an enthralling and well written story. Maybe a meaningful one, if prompted with a particular set of themes and narrative ideas. Is that a voice?

I don't know. But I do think, or rather I hope, real voices will prevail. But publishers (including KDP) have a rough road ahead of them, if they also want that. Just search YouTube for tutorials on how to spam Amazon with AI generated works, hoping for a break out. It is sad.

Is anyone working on cryptographic human-crafted attestation, without feeding the work into LLMs?

Is there a cap on AI intelligence?

Is it just a case of throwing more and more resources at a pattern recognition machine with no upper limit except the energy of the universe and the economy of the algorithms?

Someone else suggested the maximum intelligence is capped as the average intelligence of its training data, which is an interesting take.

Completely disagree, I think LLMs write horribly badly.

Documentation, marketing, prose, it’s all horrible slop writing, immediately recognisable regardless of model

Article predicts that we'll see tools to "roughen up" slop to pass as human. Surprised we aren't there already...

I'm already being more careless with spelling and grammar because it gives authenticity.

Maybe people will revert to Jeffrey Epstein style prose to avoid any suspicion of slop..., e.g:

“no , bed, i, m laying on thefloor so it can't move.”

Another wave of marketing from AI companies?

Only speak advantages of AI, no or a few trivial disadvantages.

I read the author's entire post and find it interesting that the author attributes success to having a good story to tell based upon some wild youth experiences while sailing. Not being able to type real fast, not some magic sauce from a "how to be an author class" but being able to spin a good yarn, one good enough for other people to pay to hear it.

There was/is a business position as a middleman of sitting between a storyteller and the printing press, called authoring or writing and that's slowly been denigrated for over a century by mechanical typewriters, word processors, spelling checkers, grammar checkers, now LLMs.

However there's always been a shortage of good story tellers with a story to tell, and for at least a century or two been a MASSIVE oversupply of the middlemen mentioned above, who end up failing. They can type, and they insist thats all they need, and the ability to spin a good yarn is just fluff or unimportant. Then they fail, so they're probably incorrect.

I suspect as long as the author can spin a heck of a good yarn based on his personal sailing experiences mixed in with whatever else, the author will have gainful employment in the book biz. As a storyteller. Not as "a guy who types really fast" or "a word processor technician" or whatever.

The middleman author who used to have a job writing generic romance novel #7994126 and was hoping to make money off writing #7994127 is probably utterly doomed. Why does the publisher need him if we have LLMs, or even better, why do we need publishers if we have LLMs and can enter a short simple plot just as well. "Claude generate me a 75K word romance novel similar to 'Just for the Summer' from last year but write all my favorite past characters into it. Especially character Anne she's my favorite."

But lets be realistic, those middlemen were already doomed anyway. Very few people in the book biz can spin a good yarn and that shows up in the stats of "failed writers". LLMs just mean they'll generate more scrap paper along the way to failure. But about the same percentage will sell books and about the same percentage will fail unless AI itself causes a substantial difference in readers tastes (honestly, I think not...)

Compare it to programming, about which we supposedly have more experience. LLMs generate more code that no one is responsible for nor understands fully. But does it make more or less successful startups? Nah, not really. Doesn't seem to have much effect on "idea people" at all. The people whom always generate bad ideas crash the plane with no survivors a little quicker, the people whom always generate good ideas make money a little quicker, most people in the middle are unaffected beyond change for the sake of change, which is always expensive.

Deleted because I realised I am not in the mood to argue with people who don’t read; don’t make an effort to understand an argument; or make shallow dismissals thinking they consist in any way of a valid point. There are more important things to worry about than internet randos (and that includes me, if you’re offended).

I think I saw an em dash in there, guys!