Thing is, I started appreciating this way of looking at art only after reading anti-LLM arguments, and I am a bit angry at myself for not feeling it during the pre-LLM decades of my life, which would have been much enriched.

There is this other way of looking at art (which probably dominated my worldview) where you don't care much about where it comes from. An extreme example is reading Harry Potter fanfiction, which in some way feels like reading math proofs, namely you continuously wonder what else can be done in a largely fixed setting.

But your view of art is based on who you “think” made it. So if someone lies about who made the art your views on the art changed. That’s a strange position that doesn’t make sense to me.

> Everyone borrows or steals from prior art

I just want to mention that this is not a bad thing

Often we just call this "inspiration". All our genres are music have their origin in taking stuff from other genres. We wouldn't have reggae if not for ska, rocksteady and R&B.

>Everyone borrows or steals from prior art

We are products of our environment, we learned what art is by having other peoples art as reference to "what art is". So it's only natural that our own art is inspired by other peoples work. People usually do not directly steal an artstyle though and if so, they are usually called out for that. LLMs directly steal from artists works hallucinating them into a pile of stolen bullshit that roughly fits the given prompt.

> I'm amazed that someone was able to do that

This is a bit "woo" but I've always thought of this experience/phenomenon as souls touching across time and space. LLMs either don't have souls or they've stolen them but, either way, that experience (if still possible with slop) would be tainted and perverted.

Whenever people say they like AI music or fiction, I've only ever been able to determine they are something like the equivalent of people with no taste buds describing how delicious the gruel is.

I would have loved that too but that is quite impossible in this paradigm.

Probably the way people in the 20th century envisioned AGI rising out of GOFAI (also quite impossible in its own way) would have produced an "alien" entity with the properties you desire

> 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.

> 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. You either hit the interpretation of your teacher or received a bad grade.

I think this might be the most pernicious strain of anti-intellectualism online: the idea that there is no subtext, that a text only communicates exactly what it lays out on the surface level. That's not at all what Barthes was saying; you've misunderstood him.

Writing is not a noiseless transmission of thoughts, and thoughts themselves are not totally uninfluenced by the outside world, and people do not always state exactly what they mean in the simplest possible words, and words are understood by the reader in ways that writers did not intend. At every stage, there is the possibility of subtext and context being present.

Your teachers weren't trying to get you to fix on the one perfect interpretation, because that idea (Barthes would agree) doesn't really make sense. Instead, they wanted you to interpret, explain, and justify in a complex and ambiguous space.

There are lots of fun ways to experience literature or any art, and you can do multiple! I love reading a book and just considering it from the text alone, and then also considering it from in the context it was written. And then considering my own biases and how they might be similar or different to the author and how that might affect my interpretation.

I could probably enjoy certain LLM-generated art, but in far fewer ways.

What makes a story good except for something the author was trying to convey?

> 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.

To be fair, reading new fiction is… Well, it is not a waste of time, but you really need a good recommendation from another reader you trust to find the gems in the manure pile. I don’t know how much of ”booktok” and whatnot is just cynical marketing and how much of all this ”romantacy” or whatever is generated by LLM’s, but it might as well be. And same goes to literature awards, oh boy are some of those award-winning books trash.

But the thing is, bad art dissappears. People simply forget, because bad art just is not interesting. Maybe it has a nostalgia comeback or two, but eventually it just dies away with the people who made it, who sold it and who read/experienced it. The great art stays, because it is found again and again by yet another generation. I heard kids have somehow found Count of Monte Cristo again. They are still making movies of Homeros’ texts. Joyce never went out of fashion, neither did Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes nor Proust.

So only thing you need to do is wait, really. Meanwhile there is more classic’s around no-one reads in a lifetime.

I'm interested in why you feel like this. Do you take this action because you can't trust traditional channels (blogs, established tradpub authors, Goodreads et al) to self-curate LLM writing out of the pool of available literature you would normally be aware of?

Why can't you just find authors you like and respect, that you trust not to write slop? Why go all cabin-in-the-woods about it?

I am afraid a lot of non-fiction is also AI generated slop...

"Hey ChatGPT here is a checklist of some facts, here are some sources, write a text about this"

Ultimately resulting in the same boring writing style over and over again for non-fiction.

Personally I enjoy the personal note in non-fiction. Political Girl by Maria Aljochina wouldn't be the same if it was produced by AI.

> and that'll inherently be difficult to solve

Why does that have to be solved? There isn’t a problem with art being a human thing. AI doesn’t have to take over all spaces humans occupy just because it is technically possible to do so. We don’t have to push things that way, we can say stop

Sounds like a fun gimmick for maybe a month. And something that will be getting really tiring really fast.

And imagine the PR horror when people start jail breaking the NPC LLMs

I have been imagining this since GPT-3. I still only know of very few games making use of LLMs. There are add-ons for Skyrim, and web search points me to NVIDIA's ACE autonomous game characters framework and games such as InZOI, PUBG's ACE-powered AI teammate, Dead Meat (unreleased interrogation game), AI Dungeon, Suck Up!, Vaudeville, and more. It seems there are a few more than I would have thought, but the smaller ones seem to have some mixed reviews. It would be interesting to check out how these games resolve the reasons against LLMs in games I can think of:

Cost: LLMs fitting into local GPUs, in addition to the memory required for game textures, are too constrained for the quality, latency, and concurrency required. Connecting to the cloud would be too expensive, and even if it would work, it would indeed be the death of local offline gaming, and it would give a valid reason for a subscription to keep the servers running as opposed to a buy-once play-forever game business model.

Unreliability: You don't want to miss a major quest because the LLM did not decide to hand it out. It might be workable with some proper "agentic harness", with some hardcoded world lore, long-term memories, goals, midterm memories, some deterministic actions, and a short-term free-form loop that gets cleared every now and then. For OpenClaw instances, it would be the SOUL.md, but it would have to be read-only. Some logic might have to be hardcoded outside of LLMs, e.g., to start a new narrative branch powered by a new character memory when a keyword has been mentioned or a quest item has been given. Similar to agentic frameworks, it would have tool calls such as `offer_quest`, `give_reward`, etc.

These ideas seem to converge onto the Westworld mechanics of backstories, cornerstone memories, reveries, narratives, and loops, at least as far as I remember them from the series. Thinking about it, given enough investment, I feel like the amusement park of Westworld should already be somewhat possible to implement with the recent advances in LLMs and robotics.

In the end, I am not sure how much sense it makes for games. Maybe it would suffice to only make companion characters LLM-enhanced while NPCs stay pre-programmed in order to let the game stay deterministic. Games should simplify real life in order to increase enjoyability. Making all characters backed by LLMs might decrease enjoyability because of forgetfulness or confabulations inconsistent with the game world and actions. It would need to be heavily constrained and trained or prompted to say "I don't know about that.". It might also be questionable how much needs to be dynamic. E.g., when thinking about the NPCs in The Witcher, which are talking about random stuff, maybe you only need to pregenerate much more random stuff for them to talk about so that you don't notice the repetition, but there might be no need to have this completely dynamic and burn through GPU power for every action. The question would be what to cache and what really needs to be dynamic.

You're underselling those books and overselling AI; people have tried generating romantasy and power fantasies, and it's very obvious that it's not up to par.

People want tropes, sure, but that's not the same as wanting trash; our culture is built on satisfying narratives treading well-worn paths, and there's a skill to it. Pratchett, for example, was only able to do what he did because he was deliberately playing with existing expectations; his work wouldn't exist without the stuff you denigrate to build off.

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/

Look at the publishing date. Unfortunately I don’t think we will have a more reliable way to do it

I would not be surprised if you've listened to AI generated music or read AI generated text without identifying it. Same as with VFX in shows and movies, the good stuff people don't identify as VFX, but the shitty stuff stands out. It's going to be the same with LLM generated content.

I have been listening to a whole lot of AI music and it is often better than human generated. I foresee an immense unavoidable shift in the music industry due to this. It is already impossible to distinguish what is AI and and what is human generated music.

With AI music you can enjoy a thin red paste of every human emotion /sarcasm

> the general ambient groove of reggae or blues

This, like elevator or contact center waiting music, has very little to do with "music" itself. It's just something to signal the waiting time and ease a bit of anxiety. While I'm saddened that somebody lost their income with automated background generation, I don't find the end product interesting at all, so whatever. However. However, listening to my genres does definitely need the connection to a human. No, I won't "hate" AI because of it, I will just ignore or press "skip" (where I can). Freedom of choice, baby.

>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.

It's true and so it makes sense to be a bit picky about what you read. A great many non-fiction books should probably be blog posts or articles for example.

I think it's unhealthy, your attitude.

When you have such disdain for "piggies", and hold your opinion as the true one, on a very subjetive question, well, it's very pitiable.

Well can you give me back the few seconds I spent reading your post that was to me pretty much worthless? Alas, while I reckon you wasted precious bits on my bandwidth, some other poor soul might find your sentiment agreeable and insightful.

Why do people write personal blogs? Why do some people read them? Why some people discuss those personal writings on- or even offline? Why do we write? Why do we do anything at all? Why do monkeys hang on trees and go yak tak?

Maybe AI boosting is just a collective Death Wish where we hope for some lobotomised barely existing humanity, where machines in loving grace write poetry of deers strolling past peacefully, and do everything else we humans used to.

I'm not sure if you notice, but there are also many more posts every day here about how great AI is.

There's a continual push from AI enthusiasts to have their work considered equal (or superior) to human output. While that continues, you'll get response articles.

While I also don't like the idea of LLM-generated novels, if you browse the shelves of an airport bookstore you'll see a load of facile by-the-numbers pap novels that could just as well have been AI generated.

I suspect readers keen for the latest installment of "Clive Cussler's MacGuffin Files" or [Cover picture of nerdy, barely legal girl gazing adoringly at buff, smug, confident dude] will happily welcome their LLM overlords, without noticing any difference at all.

Fortunately, there are enough books out there to keep one occupied for a whole lifetime without reading anything published after 2022. The classics are classics for a reason.

And you do not notice that you do.

Yeah, most of the comments.

I don’t think it’s lunacy to care about the context around something and not just the final product.

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

People have been saying this for a while, and--particularly with long-form fiction--we're not getting any closer.

Presumably artists will be sent to the glue factory and then we'll get to live eternally on regurgitated facsimilies of the corpus of creative work that was produced pre-AI.

You're thinking of _entertainment_, not art.

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

We'll stop buying new books, sticking to things written before 2022.