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- Hacker News
- This sounds as of AI has wider appeal. Like those bland mass-market beers that nobody likes very much but nobody hates either. Restaurants have those on the menu as a second choice.
While a real, published, author has taste and appeals to some people, not to everyone. Journal editors make sure of that.
by Arnt - Here are the stories, sadly, they immediately reveal the source so you can't play the quiz really. On the other hand, I think most people would spot the classics like em-dash and metaphores straight away. https://osf.io/d8f6m/files/osfstorageby unglaublich
- "We assume creative writing requires uniquely human qualities, such as emotional understanding and lived experience, which leads people to underestimate AI's capabilities."
It's not about the relative "creativity" of it. Art is fundamentally about communication. It's a social activity, whether you're reading a book or listening to music or looking at a painting. Even a mid-average author is going to make something more compelling, on a human level, than extraordinary prose generated by a machine.
AI-generated creative artifacts are as interesting as the fractals in a snowflake. Interesting, sometimes beautiful, but void of human meaning.
by danielvaughn - Is art what is generated, or is art what is in the eye of the beholder? Do we find artistry in nature?
What does it say about us that the sum average of us disgusts us on a visceral artistic level, is that the machine's fault for reflecting us accurately?
by altruios - What was the quality? AI generally will have better grammar and such vs what most people write. So I could believe you prefer the AI content in this example because it is better quality, but this tells us nothing about AI vs human written when someone takes the time to edit their rough drafts.
(Note that hacker news discussions are not conductive to spending days crafting a good response - that takes days - so everything here is a rough draft)
by bluGill - Here's a scoop from inside writing circles (pre-AI era): we were a lot into "good writing techniques". Not into communication. We wanted to produce a "marketable product". On the way, we (writers, literature professors, critics, etc) trained readers and writers to appreciate technique by telling them there was such a thing. We established tropes, because "This enemies-to-lovers story is good" sells more than "you should read Book". AI is very good at techniques and tropes. If readers want authentic human writing, they will have to change.by dsign
- It's quite likely that many survey participants were AI bots, and hence preferring AI generated content. And certaintly, that of the 1600+ people whose 15min they rented, few were paying any meaningful levels of attention to earn their 3 USD.by mjburgess
- Every story told, is folded into the corpus of all human stories, all variations of the heroes journey, all variations of the hammon-cycle. AI by being trained on the corpus, is average - which makes it better than 80 % of mankind.
But we are tired of many stories. We see "new" movies until we are around 20 - then the repetition sets in- we get a refined taste and long for the exotic (-30) until finally, we search for outliers, for anything new, desperate under the sun.
AI can not provide that. But also humans can not provide that. Every bard, every writer, every poet, every band rises every morning to compete against the beatles. Most of them loose and thus abandon the craft to win bread elsewhere.
by 21asdffdsa12 - > But also humans can not provide that. Every bard, every writer, every poet, every band rises every morning to compete against the beatles. Most of them loose and thus abandon the craft to win bread elsewhere.
Most, but not all. For every 99 who give up and go and do something else, one transcends.
AI cannot create. Humans can. Most do not, but the possibility is always there that they could.
by codeduck - If you seriously dig into literature or film you'll find that many of the stories don't fit into the hero's journey at all--or only fit if you make the "journey" so generic as to be practically tautological.
As for the claim about people's lives. People who are serious about art almost invariably keep enjoying the "basic" classics; many musicians keep listening to Bach all their lives. Faulkner claimed to read Don Quixote over again every year. It is possible to find novelty in the well-worn.
by maldusiecle - The real question to be debated is how do you deal with a new kid on the block, who is better than you at [whatever].
Denial seems to be the general human default, it's easy and free, but at best it can only delay the inevitable.
Accept and adapt is probably the most logical approach, but that requires a lot of effort and risk taking, and still will likely leave you net worse off.
I suppose hostility and violence is another human favorite, but that almost never has gone over well.
by WarmWash - stories below. they were generated with chatgpt 4.0.
pair 1: https://osf.io/d8f6m/files/yjahv
pair 2: https://osf.io/d8f6m/files/sjph3
pair 3: https://osf.io/d8f6m/files/4pfw3
- They are not very representative. I absolutely hate the subjects and plots and writing all over and would have voted randomly.by afdl-1176
- Honestly much more curious to know about the human written stories were here! Feels at least pretty important to the study. With the AI, the specifics feel less important, because the relative input is going to be so small, so the researchers can probably just do it themselves. But how do you choose which works to stand in as pieces of human writing in general? How did they make sure the subjects weren't aware of the authors they chose?
- Yes! Reading all samples really drives home the study's conclusion that “people generally prefer predictability, because difficult material requires more brain power.” I could blow through the AI generated versions as I do Brandon Sanderson or JK Rowling because my brain was saying "yada yada yada, yeah I get it, how many sentences do you need to say the same thing."
- I cannot judge fairly given that the stories are labeled, but the story about the koi is dreadful. It is about a supposedly mysterious subject—the machine at least insists it's mysterious—but it is so dull, so pedestrian, so cut-and-dry. "My mommy dying makes me sad but the peaceful koi pond helps me find peace". Blech.
Perhaps it only seems so banal because the competition is so engigmatic.
And what does it mean for something to smell of "sterile detachment"?
by asoidfgnion - At first I was impressed by the “generated” stories and wondered about the prompt used to get such human sounding writing, except then I read further and saw they put the human written stories first and the AI stories after, which are all full of the familiar stylistic constructs (and banality) of AI written works.
- I don't think reading isolated stories holds much value. The value of the emotion it elicits is much lower than knowing the person who wrote it or in what historical or social background they did so.
Reading stories written by humans is one of the ways we can keep ourselves grounded to other humans: be it through fantasy, lyrics, or autobiographies. I can only describe reading AI stories as emotional indulgence.
by xpct - > The value of the emotion it elicits is much lower than knowing the person who wrote it or in what historical or social background they did so.
Then the value of many ancient texts must be close to zero, because we often know nothing about the people who wrote them. In many cases even our guesses for where and when they were written differ by multiple centuries or thousands of kilometers.
by p-e-w - I’m in both a lot of art based communities and programming based communities (like HN). The one blind spot many HN readers have is that the quality of something is one facet of an artwork.
Humans make minute decisions in their art whether to tell a story or represent something. When someone generates something, at some point you as the viewer/reader could assume that arbitrary choices were made in places. Those arbitrary decisions just aren’t interesting. I’ve quoted this before, but Kane Parsons highlights exactly this thing:
> If I see an element of the environment has been, you know they used generative fill or whatever to change something about the scene, even if--. It just shuts the part of my brain that wants to know more about that world and wants to look for details, 'cause I would assume if they're willing to make an arbitrary choice there, they can make an arbitrary choice with literally anything.
It’s just less interesting to our minds, I think because there’s less to ponder and explore. It can be a masterpiece in quality but when I know something in that piece was just made up by a machine, why would I care? I can’t wonder why the artist would include it. I can’t think about what it’s trying to tell me because it’s likely not telling me anything.
by cautiouscat - I think it’s a blind spot to a lot of people not just programmers. If you don’t have experience understanding and not just viewing you’ll almost always prefer the shinier object. I don’t really think this is particularly new even generative AI has just ramped up the speed that shiny objects can be produced. Most people aren't trained to do the understanding part so most media has always been about maximizing the shininess.by trescenzi
- YES. Well said. This is why I want to know which text is from human thought labour. To read text or to consume outputs of human minds is to learn about those minds and how those minds might work.
There's a deep loss in having no mind to learn about in the subtext of the specific knowledge content written... I never knew this potential was there (for me) until it started to disappear as a domain of my interest and enthusiasm
I'm definitely a collectivist. Maybe this is related to that value system, or some other subtle thing that I didn't know varied in experience until a fracture and unbundling started. It feels a like how COVID introduced new fracture points in worldview and value systems that became less tenable to ignore, or at least harder to bridge and work across
by patcon