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- Hacker News
- If I found the best human writer in the world, and had him write every article on the internet, wiping his memory between each one, his writing would start to get pretty noticeable and boring!by pants2
- I agree. LLMs write really well, but probably too consistently in terms of style. That said, I did recently ask AI to do an editing pass over some writing I did, and I was surprised that it missed a tense mismatch that I had (not within a sentence, but within a paragraph).by kenjackson
- If that writer had consumed terabytes of text, and in spite of not perfectly memorizing all of it could quite accurately predict the next word from a sample of it, and still couldn't vary their word choice and sentence structure, something would be wrong.by kazinator
- The real thing being said here is that the author can tell good writing from bad, and assumes everyone can... I'm a visual artist and at generative art is blindingly obvious.... To me.... But not to many folks around me! Including a few artists and art adjacent folks.by shahar2k
- I think you are too close to the trees though to see the forest.
I have made digital art for 30 years and this all just sounds like what people use to say about digital art in general.
The main problem I see with generative art is not that you can tell it is generative. It is that most the art is shit. The same way if you gave a 1000 random people a blank canvas and paint, most the paintings would be shit too.
The counter example is there is a billboard that I see driving sometimes that is obviously AI generated graphics. It is so eye catching compared to any of the other billboards because most billboards are boring.
You are just puppeting the standard gate keeping bullshit to a new art form and personally I sick of reading this.
Who the fuck are you to say what art is or what art can be?
by polnoner - > generative art is blindingly obvious.... To me
Have you tested this systematically, or is it possible that you are experiencing survivorship bias? If there were any generative art pieces that you didn't notice, you would have thought that they were human-made. Therefore, all the pieces you identified were "obvious" to you. Not to mention false positives.
by david-gpu - LLM prose has degraded with each model update, the models are now being RL'd into wall of texts that only makes sense to other agents. I think its going to become more obvious as we move forward that is llm generated because labs seem to only be focused on tool-calling/agentic-coding environments, as that's the only thing that drives revenue.
There may come players who focus on models that are good at writing for technical writing/docs , copyrighting ect but I think people will lean towards not using them and will rather have the "human touch" for the things that directly impact brand perception.
Keep in mind, every single AI company that is selling the idea that you don't need to hire designers and web design is "solved" have $100k retainer designers crafting their landing pages.
by dakolli - It extends well beyond creative stuff too. It makes me think of Gell-Man amnesia [1].
People can tell when something they are experts in is being done poorly, but others can't, and it frustrates the experts. Then, those same people think something completely different is being done well despite what experts in that respective field say. It's like when someone from your family reads an article about your profession and then proceeds to tell you how your job works. lol
It's a really pervasive issue in society IMO. And a few prompts in someone's favorite LLM just reinforces it to people that don't know (any better|what they don't know).
by 99954bb63ccc - “Writing will remain valuable” and “writing is a safe job” are two very different claims.
AI doesn't need to write better than the best humans. It only needs to be good enough to replace a large part of the mundane paid writing that used to support writers while they developed their craft.
by wainguo - Mmm, I doubt it.
I have a weird background (product, development, writing + devrel). I write a lot of code and a lot of articles.
I think there is a lot of overlap in how people who write code or articles (documentation, books, etc.) use AI. On one side of the spectrum, you have people who just blindly input some prompt, accept the output and move on with their lives. You can likely predict how that is going for them (not great). On the other side of the spectrum, you have people who outright reject all AI and are continuing to plod on with how they have always done things.
In the center is a more reasonable approach that leverages AI to create without blindly accepting the output. This applies very much to writing.
The workflow that I've adopted over the past two years or so has been to leverage AI to help with the research and outline process. Once I'm happy with the structure I go and I write what I need to write.
This maps pretty closely to the code that I write. It's fine.
by ramijames - Has writing ever been a safe job, even before AI?by paxys
- If you're good at it, which extremely few people are. It's my belief that not enough good writing exists for the tech companies to train an LLM. At least not a generally applicable on.by mrweasel
- If you are Steven King, sure.
From what I heard it's a bloodbath at the bottom.
by szatkus - Workaday copywriting is dead (was moribund, now has been shot in the head). Prestige literary writing is zero-sum and therefore eternal, in the same way that equities trading (not formation and not business-building) is zero-sum and therefore the actual success of LLM has not given anyone a signal advantage anywhere there, because everyone else has LLM too.by curuinor
- Equity trading is not zero sum. There are real businesses and assets behind the equities they represent that have actual value and produce actual money.by phyzix5761
- Copywriting struggles with the issue that businesses know they need it, but they don't value it. It's absolutely shocking to see how poorly companies, and governments, communicate and no amount of AI/LLM usage will change it. For decades it's been neglected and relegated to "cover my ass"- writing.
The majority of AI deployment in businesses could have been avoided, if more attention had been placed on good communication. LLMs don't yield better communication or corporate writing, just more of it, because no one in business seems to understand the value or have the ability to recognize good writing.
by mrweasel - No. Below is my emotional opinion based on my own experience:
Currently the models are totally helpless with plot and emotions.
They make epistemic, logistical and temporal mistakes.
But:
They are very good in finding _your_ epistemic, logistical and temporal mistakes. They are great as adversarial reviewers. They can validate grounding. They can test voices. They can build complex parallel reconstructions representing timestamped inner monologues, dialogues and events.
A process consisting of many models representing characters + states + epistemic isolation + reviewers could be great to validate or disprove ideas.
Models can write you formal models of your writing. They can run solvers against your formal models to - again - validate and disprove ideas. Literally, you could validate your writing with TLA+, SAT solvers, queries against formal ontologies.
They can build corkboards of unimaginable complexity.
A moderately good writer who plays well as a part of human-machine writing apparatus could be a competitor even for a top-tier author.
When you write with a model, you define disciplines. You write your prose. You let your model turn your prose into formal systems and verify it. You let your model criticize you. Sometimes you let your model to polish your crude language into something sleek.
So, at current state of LLM development, writer as source of ideas and governing process is safe. Writer as a vision-expansion machine is not.
I've been very hostile to LLMs in literature. I've started to write a short novel about that. As a joke I tried to use models after half of the text was done. I've applied my engineering skills. That changed both me and my opinion. Models are awesome if you know their advantages and weaknesses.
A so-so writer with a good model and a good approach to prose development could produce epic stuff.
by pshirshov - If it will be true, then we should have many superb books by new authors at this point. But we do not.
This is similar to observations that effect of AI on quality of apps in stores is mostly non-existent.
by fpoling - > A so-so writer with a good model and a good approach to prose development could produce epic stuff.
Well, there have been hugos/nebulas awarded to "creative workshop" quality work before (and i mean before LLMs). But that doesn't make those books "epic".
by nottorp - I have a feeling the author framed this the wrong way.
my take is - the author wanted to express that there's always a demand for human prose / writing that captures the subtleties of expression, thought & ideas. which is very true. & we can already see this e.g by people opting out of LinkedIn for it's A.I driven long posts. whereas engagement is high on X where posts are likely to be human generated.
I wouldn't say writing as a job is protected - as corporations will always take shortcuts.
by dzonga - To the contrary: Twitter has the lowest content engagement rates out of any of the networks.by lexandstuff
- This argument can be applied to anything AI does. AI can do bad writing, bad code, bad graphics and bad music.
But AI cannot (yet?) do the job of a skilled writer, coder, graphical artist and musician.
And it is the same problem every time, LLMs lack intention. That's essentially what the article is about, writers choose every word because they have something to convey. Something complex, deliberate, that can't fit in a simple prompt, a LLM can't get these nuances, it is all in the writer's head, so you get something generic, the information to do it better simply isn't there.
But it apply to other arts as well, ChatGPT flyers, Suno music, etc.. they all look and sound the same, because there is no intention behind them, besides all the technical issues, like inconsistent images and instruments blending into each others, the model just can't work with information it doesn't have, so it just generate something generic that looks like its training dataset.
And it is the same with code. Coding is not about the programming language, it is about expressing with precision what the machine has to do, and programming languages are really good at that, that's why they exist. LLMs let you use English instead, but it doesn't change the fact that everything has to be intentional, otherwise, the LLM will just put something that may or may not be what you want.
Most success stories of LLM coding are ports. Because someone already did most of the job with the original code, sometime even twice if we count the tests.
by GuB-42 - I mean a lot of it comes down to:
"Give me a poster for my band playing a gig"
Versus
"Give me a poster for my band playing a gig, it should have x y and z. Use a x' artistic style and include elements of y'. The layout should be z'..."
You ask for the default, you get the default.
by fennecfoxy - Also, a huge area that AI seems to thrive in is cybersecurity, which almost by definition involves errors that the original programmer failed to think of or catch.by NewsaHackO
- This is because understanding is an intrinsically personal experience. To convey it to others is to choose words, phrasing, and sentences which best express what is in one's mind.
Call it "intention", call it "understanding", call it "effective communication." The lack thereof is obvious and easily identified.
> Most success stories of LLM coding are ports. Because someone already did most of the job with the original code, sometime even twice if we count the tests.
Another way to phrase this is:
Because someone already thought about the problem and what needs to exist in order to solve it.by AdieuToLogic - A lot of the replies are insisting AI will get better at writing with more development but I don't see it. Even if you have a mathematically perfect writing AI you still run into the same problems you would have if you handed off your writing task to someone on fiverr or something. It can't magically know what you want to say, it only has the information you gave it. A prompt complex enough where it won't get any wrong ideas has to contain as much information as the output would have.. so just write it.by unleaded
- > It can't magically know what you want to say
I think for this argument to be true, the axiom that supports it is that the models have just as much context as they will ever have, and you cannot see being able to give them more / enough to be able to understand your perspective. That feels unlikely to be a position that doesn't change. As a society we're giving more and more context each day to this, and that makes this a valid opinion now, but one that erodes over time.
by joshka - I also believe this. Post-training LLMs with vague metrics can only be achieved with RLHF, which is not impossible, but extremely costly and difficult. Instead, companies will opt for RLVR, focusing on math and programming tasks. This pushes objectives away from writing quality; often far away. That is why older models, in my view, actually read better than newer ones. It's by design.by hodgehog11
- One of the biggest lessons in life to learn is there are no shortcuts.
Doesn’t stop people trying.
by grebc - > A prompt complex enough where it won't get any wrong ideas has to contain as much information as the output would have.. so just write it.
This is only if the output is fully compressed. Writing is not just about encoding the writer's ideas but also about how the reader will ingest those ideas. The writer needs to consider when to put in rests in between complex ideas to help the reader flow through the text. This suggests the LLM could be prompted by a dense complex idea to be presented with the boilerplate needed for the human mind read smoothly and without unnecessary effort.
by jmpeax