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- Hacker News
- Good.
AI is great for some things. It is not currently great (or even remotely passable) at writing interesting magazine articles.
by georgemcbay - The article explicitly says "no text that is generated by AI" but is a bit more ambiguous on whether AI can be used as an aide to writing. There's this section:
>This doesn’t mean nobody doing work here can ever use any of the softwares that are broadly lumped together as AI. Much as we respect the Luddites around here, we’re not against technological innovation. Nothing in our rules prohibits writers from using a new tool to help them research something, or prevents an artist from using a tool to, say, add a texture or change a color, or make some kind of small element.
As someone trying to pickup writing fiction after years of doing technical writing, I use LLMs for fast feedback to see if my words are having the intended effect (i.e., are they inducing emotions? am I describing things in interesting ways? or is it a slog to read? etc...). Since Current Affairs is a commentary magazine and not just straight facts reporting, I could imagine authors wanting similar feedback. Would this kind of usage be permitted? Seems... yes? But I'm not completely sure.
by TDelta2258 - I think one thing to keep in mind as to why all of the other media empires are so quick to roll over and embrace AI - all of these companies are survivors of the massive media purge of the late 2000s, when blogs and cheap online news just completely gutted the traditional news and publishing world.
Outside of a few standouts, the companies that survived did not do so by embracing quality journalism and independent reporting.
Now the bloggers and upstart publishers that killed traditional media are the incumbents.
by legitster - In the creative arts and writing space, many the arguments against generative AI keep circling around the issue of jobs being replaced.
I think the far bigger and more important issue is that through generative AI hallucinations and lies become more and more part of our written media.
Albertatech told a humorous, light-hearted story[1] about how this affected her personally, but the results could be far more devastating:
by adamddev1 - I kind of respect that. Ok using AI for researching and whatnot, and for their core thing which is writing and illustrations using human work.by kolinko
- Bravo. I’ve never read anything by AI that’s worth reading. I would only subscribe to a magazine or publication that makes a similar pledge.by samwiseg
- Our workplace are heavy users of AI for nearly everything, but we still hold to the rule that if the audience of text is a human, it should be written by a human.
AI generated text is still exhausting to read.
by ryanbrunner - I don’t know why some are offended so much by this. There’s an endless stream of AI generated stuff on the internet already. You can also generate your own stuff and don’t need every single outlet to mass produce and publish LLM output. It’s ok that some remain human centric.by geraneum