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- Hacker News
- I think people read novels because they want to connect with the author on some level. LLM generated text is actually more logically airtight than human writing. For non fiction, I think the information dense LLM style is often better. But human writing leaves space for the reader to breathe. There are gaps scattered throughout.
In that sense, I sometimes feel like logical flaws might actually be a signal of humanity
by jdw64 - 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.
by epihelix - Afaik I have yet to encounter LLM fiction, but I have seen plenty of AI generated music and it truly disgusts me.
Each to their own but to me a large part of music was always the life experience of the person making it. I'm listening to their life, their love, their pain in music form.
Without an interesting human behind it, art loses all magic to me.
That's why it's beyond annoying that my own brother absolutely loves generated music. He just wants the general ambient groove of reggae or blues, he doesn't care one bit for the artists.
by INTPenis - With AI music you can enjoy a thin red paste of every human emotion /sarcasmby igleria
- >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.
by sevenzero - 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.by cung
- 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.by Maxion
- > 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.
by soco - How to detect which fiction, article, or review is created by fake AI or LLM?
There are too many texts generated by LLM on Internet now.
The experience of exploring Internet is very bad now.
by lilerjee - Look at the publishing date. Unfortunately I don’t think we will have a more reliable way to do itby dgellow
- 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/
by jalev - I can't tell if I'm getting old, or if this is a reaction purely to people making blog-posts saying they don't like AI, but, I am filled with "who cares?".
Unambiguously the point of view is valid. I don't share it, but whatever.
But why are you writing this, and why is it getting upvoted? We're several years in. Is there new ground being covered here? Is there something special or unique to this take that we haven't read 1,000 times before? Are we doomed to these identical "I don't like it and I need to tell someone" posts forever? Yes, it's a valid view point, but so is not liking Meta, and yet we don't get a "I don't like Meta as a company!!" post upvoted every single day.
by petesergeant - I'm not sure if you notice, but there are also many more posts every day here about how great AI is.by j4yav
- 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.by Planktonne
- 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.
- Art requires intentionality, and this is most clear in long-form fiction. Without guiding intention, you can't have consistent characters, or satisfying plots, or meaningful themes. There has to be a mind guiding it, and LLMs don't have the intentionality or interiority to do so.
Theoretically, a sufficiently skilled and dedicated prompter could guide AI precisely enough to produce a good result, but
1. There are no examples of this.
2. Anyone with the focus & talent to do that would rather not.
As a result, AI produces--and is likely to continue to produce--extremely bad fiction (though bad in totally distinct ways from bad human writers).
by Planktonne - English teachers around the world have loathed that "The curtains were blue" meme, and are absolutely right to do so, but what happens when you ask what an author meant by the blue curtains and the answer is a fairly definitive "it's just the probabilistic output of the model the author used, it doesn't mean anything"?
Sure some people are just piggies lining up at the trough to consume content like it's the custard machine from tellitubbies, but the greatest works will be human written, and I don't see that changing. What will change is the discovery mechanism for a book or any art is shot to bits right now, I could see curation of books and reviews becoming much more important.
by Devasta - 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.
- While I understand the hesitancy for LLM fiction, I do look forward to LLM powered games, *IF DONE RIGHT*. I imagine a game like Skyrim, where each character has handwritten backstory and dialogue, with an LLM extending that.
Having the city guard dynamically react to what you do, stay in character, and even point you to new POI from those conversations seems like a very cool new dimension in storytelling.
I took a creative writing class back in the day, and we talked about how fiction writers often have a massive "canon" backstory to many characters and worlds, and draw from that to create the story. That same backstory details can be use to flesh out a very immersive world. You still have guidance and handwritten essential lines, just use LLMs to enhance the world.
Now, will there be lots of projects that use LLMs to take shortcuts and be far from this idealized narrative, yes. But not all of them. Some will stand out for getting it right.
by km3r - 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.
by mxmlnkn - 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
by dgellow - Definitely agree with LLM texts being boring and lacking personality. Which for technical text is fine, but devastating for fiction. I wonder if you could coax it into writing less average formulations with some clever prompting?
I don't oppose LLM fiction on principle, and I don't think McCormick does either, but it's just too damn boring to be worthwhile, and I think McCormick hits the nail on the head as to why. This seems like it'll be the last frontier for LLMs, good fiction requires a departure from LLM nature, and that'll inherently be difficult to solve.
I do wonder if you could do something like style transfer on texts? I'm not a very good author either, but occasionally I'll get an idea for a story and wish I had the skill to write it in a way that'd be worth reading, but my poor prose tends to get in the way. Would be cool if I could feed it my poorly written attempts and say basically "this story but in the style of [insert great author]" the way you can snap a photo and get it in the style of a Van Gogh painting.
If nothing else I think I'd enjoy a Tolkien sci fi story, or a Asimov high fantasy.
by amarant - > 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
by dgellow - I concur with the author. Personally I think I just won't read fiction produced after 2023. There's so much good literature already produced, why bother with the new stuff?
I feel very sorry to any budding new authors. Maybe we are entering a literary dark age?
by aleda145 - 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?by tempfile
- 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.
by sevenzero - 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?by jalev
- 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.
- That is a perfectly valid opinion and POV to have. While I don't share it personally, I can totally understand why one has it. That does not change, that I personally actually do not care the slightest about the question of who or what wrote a novel.
But that is just me, having studied literatur and fallen into a school of literary studies that held Roland Barthes' claim of the death of the author [1] in high regard.
That might just be a German thing, but in school 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.
So when entering university and learning, that to analyse a text, to understand how structures within a text enable us humans to interpret and generate meaning, regardless of what the author originally might have intended, was freedom to me.
To make a long story even longer: As long as the story is good - I don't give a rat's ass if an LLM wrote this, a monkey on a typewriter or a human being (or a group of authors writing under a pseudonym).
by sdoering - What makes a story good except for something the author was trying to convey?by j4yav