«And if there's no inherent value to humanity, why should the machines be compelled to interact with you?»

Reading this part made me wish it was more compelling than I think it really is, because I think someone could argue that the value of human consumption isn't predicated on the value of human creation.

I used to find things like machine-run pizza places and coffee shops really cool (even though I've never been to one). I even wrote a small coffee automation program once, but recently, with the promise of automation getting more real by the day, I find myself genuinely worried for the fate of human-run pizza places! They're doing fine now, but what if the machine-run ones become 10x or 100x cheaper? Would anyone still occasionally pay for the expensive human-run ones?

While it's debatable how that will turn out, the value of human creation feels a lot more significant when it comes to art and literature, but I'm starting to realize that for many others there's no fundamental difference between consuming art and eating pizza.

>Fundamentally, I know that HN has plenty of people who will react with "ha-ha, human authors should pack their bags", just like what we keep telling mathematicians, because we see the discipline as just another market that can be conquered by automation or another benchmark to track.

I think it's a bit more nuanced than that, at least some of us are going: "ha-ha, people derive their value from their outputs instead of understanding existence is itself valuable"

Why does everyone value themselves based on their economic output? Why do blood diamonds compete at all with lab grown - one often involves sacrifices to the minors, and the other is cheaper and by all metrics better? (hint: because the narrative of "effort" is what drives that particular example... the blood makes the diamonds shinier in some people's minds... that's not a good look, morally)

> people who care about the craft usually care about it telling genuine human stories and celebrating the author as much as the result

No, the human was never a core factor. People who enjoy a van Gogh - or any other work - primarily do so because it has particular qualities they appreciate (no, being human-made isn't an intrinsically appreciable quality; secondarily because many humans instinctively like to possess unique - or "shiny" - things), and the author tends to be a very good means to access other works with such qualities. That "celebrating the author" is just a side-effect, and there's nothing to stop a non-human entity from "telling genuine human stories" (whatever that means).

> why should the machines be compelled to interact with you?

The ultimate purpose of machines is to serve humans, and that's a bit hard to do without interaction. Just as the ultimate purpose of humans - and other living things - is to survive.

My optimistic take on literature, compared to code, is that what writers produce is what is exactly consumed. The medium stays the same. The implementation choices of writers, like syntax, matter deeply to how the text resonates with a reader.

Code, on the other hand, is not consumed by end users in the same way. It compiles and turns into applications, which are then used. So users of applications are less scrupulous about what the code looks like, what language was used, and so on.

The post is about ai literature winning awards. Since an award is supposed to be a measure of quality, not unit-cost, a trend of ai winning awards is either indicative of the quality of the writing or of a systemic flaw in how these awards are judged (which seems plausible too).

A van gogh painting is more valuable than a replica because 1. it is scarce and 2. owning one conveys prestige. A perfect replica of a van gogh painting conveys the same artistic expression as the original.

What interests me about art isn't just the result, it's the process, and the connection that process creates.

It's more than the "aura of the artist" which Walter Benjamin talks about in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction (highly recommend for anyone interested in past discussions on his topic), it's the fact that the writer is directly processing their world as experienced into an artifact which will allow me to understand their experience and enrich my own.

The loop is:

World -> Human -> Written Word -> Reader

compared to: Corpus -> Engagement Optimized Output -> Reader. This is something David Foster Wallace talks about in an essay E Unibus Plurum - the concern that artists producing art from media consumption rather than direct experience creates a house of a mirrors. Even if the optimization is for literary quality, it's still not coming from the world. Serious art is a kind of news, not just entertainment.

Beyond that, creating art isn't just a technical process, it's an open act of self-shaping and self-discovery that is meaningful to and reflective of a community. I worry about losing the deeply insightful members of society that artistic practises create. Of course if you're a media producer interested in profit that's perfect - they want caged pigs to consume their slop, not thoughtful connected individuals.

For that matter, these first major examples of AI literature—like the first passable Stable Diffusion images, and the first halfway-hummable Suno jingle—have the advantage of cultural novelty. I feel like the shine is likely to come off quickly as derivative AI works multiply.

The first spatter canvas was a new conceptual move and valued more for that than for the paint and canvas; subsequent works tended to ring hollow and command neither interest nor value. The first “ChatGPT, reword this like a pirate shanty” was worth a laugh, now it’s worth an eyeroll.

For that matter, as artists and writers incorporate these new tools into their practice, there’s still a difference between low-effort slop and the products of artistic obsession. AI image gen is commoditized right into the ground, yet you can still find interesting and distinctive works in, say, Midjourney’s community galleries. Or in at least one example from TFA:

> An AI reading machine uses computer vision, OCR, and language processing to find short poetic combinations in physical books, erase the surrounding words, pair them with images, and publish new volumes.

That sure sounds like an artistically interesting endeavor to me, independently of their choice to execute their concept through AI models.

There are like 5 gazillion books to read, even without AI. As a reader to curate your limited time you cling to every indicator of quality you can get.

And authors not bothering to write their own books or publishers not caring enough to get someone to design a good cover (which you would think would really be in their own interest...) is a good sign that the work is of low quality and that I'd be better served to just read something else

Fiction requires charting a path through the infinitely large space of what is possible. I think AI can be very helpful assistant when plotting, figuring out how you lead characters naturally, as the storyteller, to where you want to get them through manipulation of circumstance.

One is limited as a writer because of the hard problem of bringing to attention possibilities you haven't considered yet (ie writer's block). AI can be very helpful as a search tool for the "possibility space" even if its judgment and voice are mediocre.

To be honest I doubt it. As far as I am concerned at least, it's a bit like the distinction between a shit sandwich and a sandwich that uses shit as a condiment.

In the terms of the fruit of the poisonous tree, the tree is not AI or what it touches, it is an author who chooses to use AI in the process of writing. The fruit of that tree is simply not one I care to eat.

In PRs at work (software engineering) we distinguish between drafting, editing, review, and straight generation.

In creative writing I think it's less about the tool(s) and more about the investment. Reading takes time and attention. If an author offloads the actual composition (the deliberate thought, structure, and prose) to an LLM then they've reduced their effort to as close to zero as they can while still asking for the reader's full attention.

There is nothing unreasonable about identifying this as a bullshit proposition.

A term is all you need?

> I've chatted with people who will refuse to read a story because they think the cover art was generated by AI (even though they don't really know; they're just guessing). "It's AI slop."

There is beyond enough literature on offer for me to read in my lifetime. I'm not certain what this new age of expression will bring us, but the genie is out of the bottle. It is obvious to me that viewing llm output is distinct from the fusion I am part of traditionally when reading, even in the case of a shoddy translator. So for me personally, I will be attempting to continue reading in the same spirit traditionally. Anything contemporary I am reading, I will more fittingly treat as introspection or a window for dialect.

“Today’s old world won’t get in our way,” said the machine, enigmatically. “It even came to our aid. History has ceased its flow; no need to refer to it any longer."

>If we had better terms for the levels of AI involvement, maybe people would get a little less worked up about it?

I think this suggestions lacks an appreciation for why people get worked up about it.

Anybody willing to actually apply some nuance to all of this aren't these people. If you're willing to write off an entire book because you suspect AI may have been involved in its creation, then you're likely just grandstanding. That's not even to say it isn't a valid "strategy" for "dealing" with AI, but the approach is to just hardline the issue to a degree that there's explicitly no room for nuance. This strategy suggests there's a way for people to suppress AI basically back to the point of nonexistence, and it will take an absolute position that any AI is bad.

The people who are willing to apply some nuance will eventually have to learn that being a consumer almost requires you to ignore how the sausage is being made. If you get more value from something than it costs, then it is ultimately a worthwhile product to consume. It doesn't matter if it was made by a team of passionate humans who have never even touched a computer or if it was spit out by an AI seconds before you consumed it (or anything in-between, of course). This is the way it worked before AI, when most people didn't care to acknowledge that they were just consuming some engineered slop that lacked any semblance of a human connection, and this is the way it will work "after" AI.

At this point, the only reason this is still a factor is because there are still tells which remind consumers of this greater context which is uncomfortable (thanks, in part, to the first group of people). But at some point, it simply won't be a significant factor and people will assume their products were created with at least some AI input the same way people are generally fine with assuming their products are being manufactured with slave labor, cause global warming, make them dumb, etc.

> We really need more terms for AI-assisted writing.

I actually think we need less discernment. All AI work is slop, but an enormous amount of human-written work is also slop. I think we need to come to an understanding that we're filling our lives with repetitive, derivative garbage that mostly shouldn't exist. AI is adding to the problem, not causing the problem.

We started deleting all of the good stuff on the internet and replacing it with crap long before LLMs were viable. Too many books are published every year. The biggest sellers are sort of ideal, overengineered, perfect slop that will just get over the bar of acceptability for the widest audience (and be enthusiastically praised by people in the industry whose ideal is perfect, bestselling slop), everybody else sells zilch, if they can find a publisher. Consolidation (media deregulation and the end of antitrust) has forced everybody to shoot for that widest audience, or cease to exist entirely. People are trained to slop. Slop is a sign of maturity and understanding adult responsibilities. Slop art, slop opinions, slop design, slop world.

We don't appreciate the good things (or can't even find them), let them be crowded out by slop, and we lose some of them forever every day. AI is an industrial level advance in this process, but it's still human hands letting it loose. Their motives are mortgages, healthcare, not being fired at will, avoiding social rejection, feeding your kids that maybe you'll one day be able to afford to have. You feed that into the market in return for the least amount of security the surveys and equations say that they can possibly give you, and the equity of pigs, born pigs, just rises like a hockey stick. Making slop for the pigs.

I'm sure you can do good things when assisted with AI, or you can trick AI into doing things that are great by themselves. But you've always been able to collage things out of slop, or pick a piece of slop and recontextualize it into something that implies a particular conversation with the context. But denying it's slop is just denial.

Nothing on this list looks appealing outside of the "AI Was Allowed From The Start" section; it all looks like annoying literary pandering. If you need AI to come up with names and change your grammar, you're not a writer who in concerned about writing imo, but about creating product.

I heard once that Peter Straub, a horror writer from the 80s, started his career in that way. He looked at all the bestsellers, found commonalities, such as the types of main characters, the types of conflicts, the genres that were selling (horror was big), the lengths of books, the lengths of chapters, the types of sentences, adjectives, plot arcs and scene descriptions, etc., and engineered a career. That's artistic and inspiring for me, but the art isn't on the paper, it's in the process. A.E. Van Vogt did the same thing in the 50s iirc, and he inspired Philip K. Dick who could slop nonstop without sleeping for days in a Methadrine haze by mixing his own divine inspirations and paranoid hallucinations with Van Vogt's cynical commercial nearly-incompetent dreamlike incoherence. If you use AI to express things that you calculate might be lucrative to feel, you're part of a long slop tradition, maybe you should be proud.

Or maybe you should just render unto the slop machines what now belongs to the slop machines, and work on something else. The slop market is full.

> If we had better terms for the levels of AI involvement, maybe people would get a little less worked up about it?

I feel like the people getting worked up about it are the ones collapsing everything into a single term they can blanket apply everywhere.

> Largely African-American or Indian authors. Stories involving "big" humanistic issues like the legacy of colonialism/slavery, the importance of remembering one's roots, gender-based violence, and so on, with the implication that the writer is drawing on their lived experience somewhat.

I can't read this without recalling American Fiction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0MbLCpYJPA

Does entertainment need a point? People like what they like, machines have been able to learn that for years, and they can now directly produce it.

I agree such inclusions are misleading and probably shouldn't be included. But the page has plenty of instances that aren't like this, so this objection seems to also mostly obscure.

Yeah, or the one where only the cover was generated or the anthology where one page was AI-generated or the many cases where the only evidence of AI use was a Pangram score or the one that's just an illustrated edition of Frankenstein.

If AI art becomes indistinguishable, then art made by humans will keep its value or go up in value as it will be infinitely more scarce than infinitely generatable AI art generated for cents.

> As amazing as AI writing is, we are still in the uncanny valley, and that is why we hate it.

Or perhaps, people notice the AI art that is slop or in the uncanny valley. By definition when something crosses the uncanny valley you don't notice.