The year is 2110, and two human writing powerhouses are pitched against each other in mortal confrontation. In Alexandria, Egypt, there's Writers' Street, where both seasoned and aspiring novelists type stories at street cafes, using self-invented codes in chromatic scales that they pluck on their guitars, in front of tourists and ubiquitous survtech that unwillingly--or not so much--witness. Others simply sing their tales. Not for the faint of hearing.
Off the shore of Italy, in Montecristo, the Benedictines have regained full control of the island. No Internet or AIs are allowed there, but their hospitality business rents mechanical typewriters by the hour. More than once, a famous writer has jumped from the island's cliffs, unable to bear the shame of being accused of using AI to produce their magnum opus.
For the unwashed masses, AI-produced literature is free and abundant. The discerning, however, have gotten a taste for manually bound tomes exclusively inked with the output of human brains.
Only reason these two writing powerhouses have a duopoly in 2110 is because the Irish Poet's Club will choose to throw themselves off the Cliffs of Moher in 2085.
But the worst of it was, all the third-rate poets emerged unscathed; being third-rate, they didn't know good poetry from bad and consequently had no inkling of their crushing defeat.
I can’t help but be eternally impressed by Lem’s ‘The Cyberiad’. Partly for Lem’s prescience and creativity. But mostly because of just how damn funny he can be.
GenAI that imitates human art is the definition of an anti-invention. If an invention is a new innovation that improves something for the human experience, an anti-invention is a new innovation that makes life worse.
This is just one of several areas where GenAI has been harmful and should start getting regulated like digital drugs.
I don't think that definition meets what people would consider an invention.
The AK47 is an invention. The inventor "would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work - for example a lawnmower", but people still consider it an invention. Inventions do not have a polarity in the axis of quality of life.
There is no consensus on if GenAI is overall harmful or not. In general people are optimistic but concerned.
The last thing we need is another war on drugs.
I would rate A/B testing on human behaviour, or advertising to be more harmful to the overall human experience than GenAI.
Guns makes lives better if you are the disadvantaged and is at the receiving end of the abuse by the powerful. It makes the playing field even for you, which makes your life better..
I think that, in the history of the world since guns have been invented, they have mostly been used to the advantage of the powerful, not the powerless.
That is true of, I think, literally everything. Powerful people get first pick of things and go for higher quality so everything advantages them more than others. Modern powerful people are the most powerful in history thanks to technology.
But guns are an equaliser. If powerful people let situations get too out of hand the personal risk to them is staggering. Guns make political or revenge-based assassinations relatively easy in a way knives do not. Arguably that is a bad thing, although experiments like the US suggest it is good in practice.
> Guns make political or revenge-based assassinations relatively easy in a way knives do not.
Yes, the US has been very well known for its politicians (instead of e.g. middle schoolers) being routinely murdered by the gunners.
Seriously. Even in the places like Brazil, or Sub-Saharan Africa, the "powerful people" rarely get killed by the lynching mob — it's almost always the hired guns sent by some other powerful people. So, no, the general populace very rarely gets to exercise its violence on the elite, historically speaking. Sometimes it happens, but that's an aberration of the normal way of things.
You could indeed argue that. I think that just enforced the argument that the means do not have a moral aspect, and it is the instances where they are used that causes the goodness or badness of the event. How they are used comes from decisions.
You could also steal something and your life might be better for having a thing, possibly more so than how much worse it makes for the person you took it from.
The thing that distinguishes theft from taxation is a societal convention. Adding consensus around how, what, and why things are taken makes it more consentual. Individuals may disagree with having to pay tax, but as a society it is generally agreed upon (even if the methods of agreeing a flawed)
Things need to be an extreme case for guns to come into that process. It implicitly means the goal of reaching consensus has failed and one group is enforcing their will upon the other. That's usually not a good path for the disadvantaged because the powerful by definition have more capacity to enforce their will. Reaching consensus, whilst slower, is the one that supports the disadvantaged better.
> Guns makes lives better if you are the disadvantaged and is at the receiving end of the abuse by the powerful.
...only if you have the gun, you know. Which the disadvantaged people tend not to. In fact, let's generalize your statement a bit: "Tools of power and coercion make lives better if you are the disadvantaged and is at the receiving end of the abuse by the powerful". No, they don't! They do the opposite for very obvious reasons.
“What about guns and bombs” is not a counter-argument that matters much, because you have to consider context. We can get into the weeds: guns and other weapons were used by various liberation movements to free the world from fascism and other forms of tyranny, and also to kill feral hogs attacking humans. The only real use for AI novel generation is if you’re stuck on a desert island with nothing else to read. But such a scenario is absurdly unrealistic and served better with a library full of real books. Anything an AI novel can do is done better by a human novel, without all the harms. Whereas a gun is the best way to kill a feral hog. A gun might be an anti-invention, but AI art generators are definitely anti-inventions.
As others have said I took this to mean generative AI as this is the convention used, and by context was clear here (precisely because AGI has not been claimed by most providers)
>You likely are referring to plagiarism slurry
The option that this generative AI is plagiarism is not supported by the law, not the majority of public opinion. There are many, probably a majority, who wish there to be a form of compensation for having their works trained upon. Quite a large number believe that consent should be required. From what I have experienced, only a few consider this to rise to the level of plagiarism.
To pass off a work as wholly your own would require claiming no generative AI use. While this is done occasionally. Few instances of AI use declare that it has not been used.
There is a mistaking of nomenclature here, but it may be purposeful by the tech oligarchs. Artificial general intelligence is usually abbreviated "AGI". The "GenAI" shorthand is usually meaning "generative AI", but it may have been coined intentionally as a nod to supposed future general intelligence built on the same technology.
>Delegating the thinking and feeling parts of the human experience, mechanizing human creativity itself, is a direct attack on human dignity.
And I'm honestly sad for anyone who disagrees because it indicates they don't have a deeper relationship to art. For me, art is fundamentally about communication. It's someone sharing a little bit of themselves. AI might be able to produce pretty images and sounds, but it has no experience or feelings so the art it creates lacks that magic of a shared human connection. Pardon the crass analogy, but it's like if someone said "I don't need any intimate partner, I have internet porn". It's a depressing mindset because it indicates that people can't even see what they are missing.
I guess I could have been clearer on the connection between the original comment and my reply. In my opinion, the "direct attack on human dignity" comes when someone starts projecting the depressing mindset I described outward. To continue the analogy, it's not just being satisfied with internet porn for yourself, it's telling someone else "you don't need an intimate relationship because you can always access internet porn" and I think it's fair to categorize that as a "direct attack on their human dignity".
> so the art it creates lacks that magic of a shared human connection.
I keep hearing this point, and the thought that comes up first is 'but blood diamonds'. Let me explain, you can buy a cheaper 'inauthentic' lab-grown gem that's chemically/physically identical to a (nearly hypothetical) flawless diamond, but we buy the 'natural, and imperfect' diamonds at a much higher price. The blood of the orphans that pulled the diamond rough from the minds soaked into the diamond raising it's value. The value isn't the blood, but the effort it took to produce that diamond, the story of how hard it was to mine is the value, not the end product (a shiny rock), which in the end, is all anyone can see.
The second thought I had was that what people find meaningful, beautiful, important varies wildly, to the point that landscapes are meaningful. Meaning can be found in anything, regardless of the existence of intent.
The third thought I had is communication does not survive the translation of art unscathed or unchanged. There is this disconnect, between the artist and the viewer. The viewer only ever sees a finished product. The viewer extracts meaning from the work entirely without the author/artist's involvement. This isn't communication, this is a soliloquy, frozen in time, the artist can not expand, explain, or sharpen (except in another works) those ideas once released into the world.
This disconnect is the rub. There are no 'magic' pixels that dictate secret meaning. There is no 'human color' that indicates intent. Meaning itself can't be painted. What relationship can ever take place between artist and viewer through those works alone. It's a 1-way conversation. And considering my second though, that intent isn't even needed to extract meaning, you can see the apathy and rise of the use of AI in art.
The point of making art isn't to make money, or to impress other people, or even change other people's thinking. It's to express yourself. That can't be taken by AI.
The point of viewing art is to reflect on how you perceive it. That's true regardless of the artist/author, and regardless of the blood (effort) (or not {AI}) used to craft it.
>The point of viewing art is to reflect on how you perceive it. That's true regardless of the artist/author, and regardless of the blood (effort) (or not {AI}) used to craft it.
"Art" as a term becomes meaningless with this definition. Once you disconnect art from its creation, everything becomes art. A sunset can be beautiful, but it's not art if a human doesn't capture it in some way. A pile of dog shit on the sidewalk can evoke emotions, but perceiving it doesn't turn it into art. The decisions of an artist are central to the whole endeavor and that is what is communicated. That communication doesn't have to be unambiguous, intentional, or conscious, but it has to be there to make something "art".
no, by your proposed definitions, an error occurs: pixel exact identical images, byte for byte, yet one is art and one is not based on 'how' it was created. This is nonsense.
Is it? This distinction already occurs in law: a sequence of bytes might be illegal, or it might not, depending on how you obtained it. Humans observe distinctions that computers do not.
If you find yourself wanting to say this in the future, maybe give the other person some benefit of the doubt and take it as a sign to reassess your interpretation of what was said. I truly have no idea how you got to where you did from what I wrote, so I don't even know where to start to dispute it.
I did some logical jumps, but stepping through it holds up.
> "Art" as a term becomes meaningless with this definition. Once you disconnect art from its creation, everything becomes art.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not in the beholden.
> A sunset can be beautiful, but it's not art if a human doesn't capture it in some way
If it is not 'captured in some way', agreed. I disagree with the human label being needed.
> The decisions of an artist are central to the whole endeavor and that is what is communicated.
This is the crux, what I disagree strongly with.
If the intention by the artist truly mattered, then a hypothetical double blind experiment can confirm this. If we have two works of art, one created by a human, and one created by a machine, (they just so happen to be byte for byte identical), and you have people one at a time decide which one is 'art' and which one is 'meaningless'.
We don't need to actually do this experiment because we all know how it would go. Because we can not measure 'intention' at all, we can not actually perceive intention. which is why we have things like the watchmaker fallacy. we are extraordinarily bad at assuming we can perceive things we we actually can't...
So if this is your position, then it is nonsense, if I have missed your position, correct me.
>> The decisions of an artist are central to the whole endeavor and that is what is communicated.
>This is the crux, what I disagree strongly with.
>If the intention by the artist truly mattered...
That is also the crux of your misinterpretation and it shows the flaws in this type of line by line communication that we're all guilty of doing because your point is refuted by the very next sentence of my original comment: "That communication doesn't have to be unambiguous, intentional, or conscious, but it has to be there to make something 'art'."
"Intentions" are motivations while "decisions" are actions. The decision by the photographer to frame a photo of a sunset in a specific way is what turns it from merely something beautiful into art. The specific motivation behind that decision is often unknowable even sometimes to the artist themselves, but a decision is knowable and communicates something. AI doesn't make decisions it just generates something based off statistics.
An artist can certainly use AI as a tool, but that doesn't make the AI output art, it makes the curation of AI output a form of art. But to mix in my other thread of comments, engaging with the AI output as its own art would be like primarily judging Duchamp's Fountain on the aesthetic qualities of the curves of the porcelain when the actual art is his decision to present that porcelain as "art".
Well, Duchamp's fountain is a great illustration that "art is fundamentally about communication." does not entail that a cultural/artistic artifact has to be created by the author at all. I as well can create a short story with help of an LLM and say - this is my vision and what I always wanted to say.
I have actually referenced Duchamp's Fountain before in similar conversations about AI art because I think it's a great example of what makes art art. The art itself isn't the toilet, it's the act of elevating a toilet to the status of art. If you don't know the context of the physical item, it loses all artistic merit because the item itself is not the art. The whole thing is more performance art than sculpture.
I'll freely admit that LLMs can be used in art in a similar way. You can certainly make LLM output the core of some performance art piece, but that doesn't make the LLM's output art itself or make it interesting on any level outside the context of its creation. Engaging with that short story as its own art would be like primarily judging the Fountain on the aesthetic qualities of the curves of the porcelain.
Even if we consider Duchamp's creation an outlier - one may say if it were created, say by some random plumber, instead of Duchamp, this urinal would not be as important of art piece as it would be if made by Duchamp, there is a plenty of other artistic niches - say DJ or an interior designer, where the author does not create a thing by themselves, just combine existing items, yet we judge the art piece purely by aesthetic merit, irrespective of the who exactly was the author.
I mean it is as simple as saying - here is my statement, it was generated by an LLM, but I had prompted and edited it, or even simply chose a single generation out of 500 and this conveys my feelings and therefore is art.
> AI might be able to produce pretty images and sounds, but it has no experience or feelings so the art it creates lacks that magic of a shared human connection.
Who cares? I want it to do my taxes for me, it doesn't need to be Picasso
>I want it to do my taxes for me, it doesn't need to be Picasso
It sounds like you are commenting in the wrong thread then. This article and thread is about what happens when people try to make it Picasso (or experience Picasso's work for them.)
Computers have been mechanizing people's jobs away for god knows how many years now. Everybody on this site is guilty of it to some degree. I'm a doctor, and automating me out of a job has been one of the wettest dreams of programmers since the expert systems of the 20th century, and that dream is palpable in every HN thread about medicine.
But now that computers have come for the "creatives", it's suddenly an attack on human dignity? No.
Programmers are not special. Artists are not special. Humans are not special.
The person you're responding to isn't talking about automation or jobs, they're talking about creating being fundamental to the human experience. And they're 100% correct. Humans have been creating since ancient times; the earliest cave painting discovered is 67,800 years old [1]! By comparison, how old is modern capitalism?
Work and art have existed long before emperors, kings, feudal lords, and capitalists and they'll exist long after them. Any economic or political system that misuses technology to disrupt the ancient human need to create is fundamentally anti-human. The biggest fault with our current socioeconomic system is it prioritizes the worst aspects of humanity (greed, hoarding, consumption) over the best aspects (building and creating). That's why people are upset.
> creating being fundamental to the human experience
Fundamental, I can agree with. Exclusive? Clearly not. Not anymore.
People can still create now, even in spite of AI. Will anyone pay for it? Who knows. Doubtful.
> The biggest fault with our current socioeconomic system
I can agree with this. I believe that at this point the only hope left for humanity is to leverage AIs to the max and achieve a post-scarcity society. It's our only chance, and things are gonna get ugly if we fail.
The socioeconomic argument is sound, just don't let it get twisted into "but think of all the creators, the super special noble humans, they deserve protection against the AI onslaught".
Nobody cared about all the countless skilled labourers who were disrupted and automated away by technology. Asking us to shed tears for artists now is honestly offensive, doubly so when the people asking are programmers who literally make bank by automating away the jobs of others.
We are job destroyers. Our work inherently reduces the set of people who are still economically valuable. We are all about getting more done for less. Our only hope lies in finishing our journey, and making it possible to do everything for nothing at all.
The harm of generative AI runs much deeper than economics.
Creating is communication. When you share your work, you're sharing your mind. You're demonstrating mastery of a craft. You're inspiring others. The linked article is specifically about how AI is actively harming the relationship between readers and writers, and not in a hypothetical future, but right now.
Even if we enter a "post-scarcity" society, I'm concerned fewer people will create. Why speak if your voice is silenced under a sea of synthetic outputs? Yes, you can create because you enjoy the mechanics, but the communication will be gone.
Generative AI is a long term concern as it hurts something fundamentally ancient.
You're not exactly winning me over with these "but these specific humans with noble professions are special and shouldn't be replaced" takes either.
I mean, what's this supposed to mean? It's totally fine to replace all those blue collar labourers with mass production factories, but replacing programmers and artists with AI is somehow a crime against humanity? Absolute nonsense.
This discourse does nothing but betray one's own sense of superiority over the lesser humans. Enlightened thought workers who thought their positions were unassailable and their leverages secured, but were proven wrong by the very technologies they helped create.
It's got nothing to do with preferences and everything to do with reality, and the reality is AIs are changing the world and the only hope left for us humans at this point is that they will somehow enable us to achieve a post-scarcity society.
> This discourse does nothing but betray one's own sense of superiority over the lesser humans
What are you even talking about?
The comment you were responding to said:
> Delegating the thinking and feeling parts of the human experience, mechanizing human creativity itself, is a direct attack on human dignity.
Everyone can and should engage in creativity, on whatever scale. No one in this thread you're responding to privileged a certain type of worker or even a certain type of creativity (let alone the "experience" and "dignity" the comment broadened it to).
Also just real weird post. The relative worth as humans of doctors and blue collar labourers vs artists and programmers was not the matchup I was expecting, but I guess it's ok because we're all equally garbage in your eyes? FWIW, I'm hoping for more from us than accidentally ending up in a human zoo.
> Everyone can and should engage in creativity, on whatever scale.
But not everyone will, absent economic incentives.
Calling the mechanization of human creativity a "direct attack on human dignity" is a revealing moral judgement.
What makes human creativity so special that it must be so thoroughly protected against technological progress?
Why "human creativity" specifically, and not any of the other categories of human activity?
Why is it "an attack on human dignity" to mechanize it?
What if it's the opposite? What if this is the technology that will finally free us from all the other indignities we suffer? What if it's the technology that could create a post-scarcity society?
> No one in this thread you're responding to privileged a certain type of worker or even a certain type of creativity
Somehow I just don't see anyone make these kinds of sad posts about displaced skilled craftsmen or poor factory workers or any other economically displaced human.
People make a few documentaries here and there so that history is documented, but we all accept that they are gone as a byproduct of the inevitable technological march.
Why should "creatives" be an exception?
> but I guess it's ok because we're all equally garbage in your eyes?
I never said we are all equally "garbage". I said we are all equally replaceable, and that to believe otherwise is to betray a sense of superiority over those who were replaced.
Even the CEOs will meet their match in the end. Stopping before their replacement would be the true crime against human dignity.
I’ve seen lots of AI-generated pictures and videos that I found insightful or funny. Also lots in bad taste. It’s not black or white. Like any other technology it can be used for good or bad.
For art, "good" is always at least partly subjective. As such, your "good" might not be the same as my "good". It seems reasonable, or at least not morally wrong, to admit no good use of the technology for one's personal taste.
There's art and there's taste. People with good taste may now be able to bypass the artist by getting the AI to create something. In some ways it's equivalent to the product person being able to bypass the programmer.
I think there are other digital technologies that are also a lot like drugs and deserve similar regulation. I.e. if your social media company decides it wants to be a platform and insert stuff to inflame you or generate more engagement....it's a drug, not a tool for social connection..
I think there are ways you could serve ads and make money as a business, just not as much money, and not be basically a drug. The social media giants choose not to do this of course and will have to be forced.
I am distinctly less libertarian/classically liberal/etc. than the average user of HN though. So I understand that this opinion is likely to get me downvoted. I prefer to think that I live in the real world and have seen the damage these things have caused and am not in a tech-only friend group bubble.
Social media still connects real humans to real humans (sure often badly and trying to profit from it at the expense of users). This however takes the other human out and plugs you into itself, which is a simulated average of humans based on their work taken without consent
No it doesn't[1], except perhaps by turning a bunch of thoughful humans into an online mob. Social media amplifies humanity's worst impulses for clicks. The connection part is purely incidental and is going away now that AI can just generate whatever 30s conspiracy theory video you want to watch instead of having a person do it.
The connection thing maybe was incidental before but it's now the main value proposition of social media. we all can now generate sh#t by ourselves so why would we need social media at all if not connection. I have dozens of real people i know whom i keep in touch with through social media
unfortunately humans have shown themselves to be completely unable to properly restrict manipulative drugs like alcohol, caffeine (which doesn't need to be in sodas at all, the sugar is already addictive enough), nicotine, advertising, social media, and so on when capitalism would suffer as a result... we should not get our hopes up too high.
I think genAI has been strictly worse for humanity. It's destroying the quality of our industry, it turns creative fields into slop, etc. It is all downside and no benefit, in my opinion.
The last season of Poker Face was really bad, especially the last few episodes. Come to find out Natasha Lyonne is big into AI and I have no doubt they had their AI slop out the plot and writing for the last few episodes. The writing went off a cliff, it was really, really bad compared to the first season. The show ended with me thinking WTF did I just waste my time watching? I have no doubt it was AI slop.
Strong disagree. Even the original Dall-E was great for visual prototyping for our wedding. My wife is an artist and now creative director and she really enjoyed using it to set up things. Even the pattern embroidered onto my wedding coat was prototyped in Dall-E and cleaned up in Adobe Creative Suite.
I listen to a lot of AI generated music and our AI personal assistant has helped a ton in our life. Quite happy with the way things have turned out in this new technological revolution.
Why do people listen to new music when there is so much music already?
Perhaps they just enjoy it. Do you reject a beautiful sunset because it was not human generated, or because there have been trillions of sunsets before?
Ok i was nerd sniped by the phrase "trillions of sunsets"
how do you count sunsets? is it from one vantage point? in that case, the earth is about 1.7 trillion days old, so there have been roughly that many sunsets. but is someone standing in the opposite hemisphere at the same longitude line seeing the same sunset? maybe, maybe not. also, someone two time zones behind me will see a different sunset; maybe there have been an infinite number of sunsets? maybe just one continuous one that's moving? This is more fun to think about then the things I'm supposed to be thinking about, and more fun then worrying about AI.
Sorry for the rant hackernews, needed to get this impulsive line of thought out.
Depends on your perspective, with a good spacesuit on mercury you could walk at 3.6kph and have one permanent sunset, Judge it just right and you could actually have a decent temperature.
I listen to music because someone went to the trouble of making music to express themselves, and I'm interested in knowing something of them. You have to put something of yourself into any artistic work for it to have much merit, so what use is the 'art' of something which has no self to me?
The statistical average of what hundreds of millions of artists did cannot be art, because there's no intentionality behind it. There's no statistically average person after all, everyone is a unique collection of memory and temperament which is apparent in the art they create. There is a part of what it means to be human in even the meanest artistic act which I think the output of statistical models necessarily lacks.
>I listen to music because someone went to the trouble of making music to express themselves, and I'm interested in knowing something of them. You have to put something of yourself into any artistic work for it to have much merit, so what use is the 'art' of something which has no self to me?
I'm totally fine with your reasons for listening to music. Do you have a problem with other people's reasons to listen to music?
I'm not saying people are somehow morally defective if they prefer generative AI output to music someone sat down and wrote, I'm just completely baffled by it.
The question was not, "why do you think this is art?"
The debate of what is and isn't art is older than art and almost as old as art critics.
I like to think of art as "An invitation to consider" and not as a binary value. On this scale a banana taped to a wall is elevated above some paintings, A human drawn tree as a background of a video game that ends up always obscured by a house would be lower on this scale than an AI generated image crafted to make people think about an idea. The worth, financial, aesthetic, or moral, of the axis is purely a projection of human ideology.
That's a side issue to why someone might like it. Something doesn't have to be art to be liked, or enjoyed.
Because generation for the specific tastes I have when I’m in a specific mood is easier than search for a match. I listen to human-generated music too.
Maybe this is a hot take, but I strongly suspect that having "an endless supply of [thing that perfectly suits my taste]" is going to be really bad for people in the long run.
So at least I’ve got my story straight for that period. As for the neurological condition, I’m not diagnosed with anything neurological. This machine functions fine as far as the doctors are concerned :)
> Amazon lets individuals upload a maximum of six books a week, allowing for endless churn.
That's a book a day (give or take), per account. No human author is publishing a book per day.[0]
It's interesting to me how little the incumbent platforms for digital content seemingly have been able to do in combating the tidal, exponential shift in submissions.
I just spent a month developing a Shopify App, on the side, for fun. When I launched it a couple of weeks ago, I discovered an app doing the same thing as mine with an identical name had also been approved and released a week prior.
How do people think that distribution will change now that supply has increased (at least) tenfold? If the consensus on X.com is to be believed, it's all about personal brand. This used to be the case, but perhaps 80% of it. Is conventional discovery dead now?
[0] - If this includes organisations, like publishing houses, then fair enough. But realistically we should be able to distinguish actual authors.
> That's a book a day (give or take), per account. No human author is publishing a book per day.
Suppose you're a 50 year old human author who has published a book a year since you were 18, and would now like to start selling them on Amazon for the first time. Should they hold you up for multiple years because you're rate limited to uploading one a month?
Surely Amazon could invest in some form of support for niche case authors? Especially since there are not going to be very many legitimate "I have an enormous backlog of work" authors who aren't represented by a legit publisher.
Not saying there are zero, but if you're faced with a thousand scammers and one niche-case author... you go with blocking the scammers if you're serious about it.
The vast majority of authors are not represented by any publishers, and KDP is built around exactly those. The KDP limits does not affect anyone represented by larger publishers - only indies and small press (and genuine small press as opposed to imprints of larger publishers are few)
Except that's not the trade off, because the slop producers would then just create more accounts instead of uploading more books on the same account. Which is probably what they're doing even with the existing rate limit.
So all you'd be doing is inconveniencing the actual human who just wants to use one account for all their books. Of which there could easily be more than one.
Moreover, trying to justify things with ratios like that proves too much, because slop can give anything a ratio like that. They can generate trillions of books, any number. If you banned everything then you'd be banning millions of pieces of slop for every one human-authored book, but you'd also be banning every human-authored book.
What you need is the thing that minimizes false positives, because the base rate of true positives is now so high that even a negligible false positive to true positive ratio would swallow most of the real books.
It has nothing to do with hoarding. There are lots of authors who have published works using something other than Amazon, and for each one that uses Amazon there is a first time they started doing so. Amazon didn't even exist 50 years ago.
Tell us you're a software developer without telling us you are software developer. The real world doesn't have to follow strict algorithms. The 50 year old with a long history of publishing books, who now wants to sell those books on Amazon, has provenance to justify his case for exception.
Amazon is a website that follows strict algorithms. And what "provenance" are you supposed to have that their support staff could verify over the internet? Anybody can set up a website with made up dates on it.
That's such an unreasonably niche and unlikely situation to justify letting the rest of your customers drown in slop
That'd be like saying a forum can't have rate limits for posts because someone may write 10,000 discussion topics over a year and post them all at once.
> That's a book a day (give or take), per account. No human author is publishing a book per day.[0]
Note that it is 2 per week per format. So if you want to publish an e-book, print book and audiobook of your title, you can publish 2 titles, not 6.
Still more than most humans will typically sustain but it does change publishing patterns.
E.g. on Kindle+ (formerly Kindle Unlimited) a lot of people would publish short stories or short novellas. You absolutely can turn around more than 2 short stories per week.
The changes may push some writers to change what they write or bundle up stories.
> How do people think that distribution will change now that supply has increased (at least) tenfold? If the consensus on X.com is to be believed, it's all about personal brand. This used to be the case, but perhaps 80% of it. Is conventional discovery dead now?
For books, I'm hearing there are literary agents who now won't even sign anyone unless they have a sizeable social media following.
Conventional discovery for books will get you a very slow drip. But Amazon massively reward you if you publish lots and often by showing each of your works if someone clicks on one, letting you link series, and letting you do giveaways that are actually quite heavily promoted.
This, of course, incentivises people without a budget for promotion to push hard to release often. E.g. shorter titles, short-stories/novellas.
And that as noted above is being affected by the reduced limit.
> [0] - If this includes organisations, like publishing houses, then fair enough.
It includes anyone who is not large enough to get Amazons attention to get access to send them feeds directly.
I have a client that runs a small press, and basically their only option for Amazon is going via aggregators (and that too is relatively limited) and only pushing their top titles direct as until/unless they sell a lot more than they do now it seems they won't even get to talk to someone with any power to even escalate to anyone with authority to let them bypass KDP.
For e.g. Google on the other hand they got ONIX feeds set up no questions asked (ONIX is an XML format for feeding larger book catalogues to retailers) and pushed their entire ca. 200 book backlog right out of the gate. But Google e-book sales are tiny compared to Amazon - last I heard it was about 5% of their revenue.
The problem for Amazon - and for everyone else - is that for anyone but the biggest publishers Amazon is so dominant that most of the effort from people who want to push out high volume will continue to target Amazon.
> Amazon spends a lot of time and effort trying to prevent these [fake] books from getting posted,” Mary Rasenberger, the CEO of the Authors Guild, told me, “but it’s always a game of catch-up.”
Do they really? They take a cut; they have incentives to let people get scammed.
Paraphrasing as I've not uploaded a book for a while, but Amazon has a button for "AI was used to help create this cover or content" I wonder how many authors actually tick it? I'm guessing none.
AI text classifiers are pretty good. Surely on a book-length text, they could get it right nearly 100% of the time. Seems to me that Amazon could easily ban AI-generated books if they wanted to.
Yes, it's a naive assumption that quality of the presented material doesn't impact consumer behavior, if they get flooded with loads of garbage books and people can't find good book they enjoy they'll stop shopping at Amazon and it doesn't matter if they make money off the slop. It's the same reason Youtube has quality filters for algorithmic feeds, if the stream gets too polluted with bad videos people will watch fewer videos.
It's exactly the same process that's causing people to avoid expensive purchases on Amazon due to the number of fake products that have infiltrated their supply. People move on if they're sold a lot of bunk goods from a place.
I don't know. For years Amazon has had a fraudulent item listing problem to the point where it's hard to trust them. They have made no effort that I have seen to solve it. I mean, why would they, their sales haven't declined.
So, I am skeptical books will be any different than all those knock-off drop-shipped items.
I think you're proving his point: You've identified that the fraudulent items make it hard to trust the marketplace, and (reading between the lines) that has affected your habits in relation to the marketplace.
Yes, but I am one person. Their overall sales numbers show that I am a rare breed. With how bad Amazon has gotten in this regard, I would have expected sales to decline if people cared about it as well. Until they feel it in their pocket book (and it doesn't look like they are) they won't do a whole lot about it.
I often trust AliEx more than Amazon these days. At least one of the two isn't pretending not to be what it is.
Plus Amazon has a long history of screwing over sellers. TL;DR if your product is actually successful, they'll make their own "Amazon Basics" version of your product, then deprioritize you (or even ban you over an excuse). They do this a lot. There's a lot more than just this, it's just an example.
I'd say that's hard to judge from the top line sales numbers, their broad sales could remain fine even when they lose larger rare purchases if they're bringing in enough new customers that are fine with only buying the slop.
Sales may not have declined, but returns have skyrocketed. I return at least as much stuff as I keep. Sometimes they tell me to just keep the crap because they know it's crap and it costs them more for me to return it than to just refund me and let me keep the crap thing.
And yet look at all the non-book products being sold on Amazon that are all garbage. Its the same slop problem and has been for a while, but they don't seem to be addressing that either. I have to assume it doesn't impact their bottom line as much as we think it should, consumers don't (or can't) care as much as we would hope.
There are two categories of (physical) products I buy on Amazon.
Regular “brand name” items sold in pretty much any big box retail store. I have more or less the same experience with Amazon as I do Walmart or Target or wherever for that category. Over thousands of orders I’ve never received a fake or had an issue outside of very rare packaging issues like damaged boxes.
The other category is “trash I need faster than aliexpress” and it’s basically exactly as-advertised for that junk. I usually get the item in two days or less where I am, and the quality level is more or less the same as ordering direct from China. Just trading expense for quicker latency. Useful for that last component for a project or whatnot.
I get that I might not be normal though. If I went to Amazon and searched for “grow lights” and got presented with what you get via that search I’d be quite frustrated. But I tend to research exactly what I want for those product categories and never had a problem getting what I expected.
sample size of one, but I cancelled my spotify after the non-stop AI music slop.
Not out of principle, but because it's so incredibly distinctive and annoying. There's the composition that's bad (it's like all soul and gospel which was fun the first few times but got really old), but also the actual sound quality on a lot of AI generated music is awful.
Same thing with anything that's AI written. I just can't do it. It's like really bad fanfiction where someone tries too hard with forced metaphors and really stitlted pacing.
How do you use Spotify to get exposed to AI music? An honest question. I mean, I'm sure it's chock full of it but at least my usage patterns don't expose me to it.
There are a couple sound-quality based tells that I've noticed, off the top of my head
1. Usually weird little "flickers" of sound - like how a candle gives you mostly constant light but there are little flashes of bright and dark. AI generated music tends to have little distortions scattered throughout like that. As the models have improved they're less obvious but still absolutely there if you try to listen to any individual 'instrument' or 'track'
2. very low dynamic range - loud sounds and quiet sounds are much more similar volume than you'd expect from most real music, and things that are supposed to fade or taper-off in volume are unnatural
Hi-hats. When testing sound quality, pay attention to the hi-hats. Once you notice the shimmer introduced by audio compression to a hi-hat you can't unhear it, and for whatever reason AI generated music replicates this.
>and for whatever reason AI generated music replicates this.
Its within the training set I believe. The AI is being trained off compressed audio
I was listening to a podcast last year (forget which, or I'd attribute credit) and one of the tells AI researchers look for when trying to determine if music is AI generated or not is the compression artifacts. AI likely has gotten better at hiding it since then, but AI would include compression artifacts on the final product because of the prevalence of it in training data.
Scams aren't even the worst problem for trust between readers and writers.
LLMs allow "writers" to generate prose faster than readers can read it. This is a fundamental break in the bargain between readers and writers: However long it takes someone to consume a piece of writing, it almost certainly took the author longer to write it. Even if the prose is crap or the premise awful, the author had to think it was worth sinking real time into making it.
My colleagues and I have implemented a little guideline, which is that you should spend more time writing something than you expect the audience to spend reading it. Anything less is disrespectful.
That might be useful for business communication, but it's error prone. For art, well, I could go watch a movie or I could pay someone else to go watch a movie.
I don't think the universal applicability of Sturgeon's Law necessarily leads to a contradiction here.
My incredibly, almost insultingly oversimplified model for what I, a lifelong consumer of text, feels is happening here goes like:
90% of culture is "bad". 10% is "good". Previously, we'd iterate on the 10% and (I remind you: oversimplified) discard the 90%, but `derive :: culture -> culture` still follows Sturgeon's Law, so at the next iteration, 90% is "bad" and 10% is good. But now what's happening is we're iterating on the whole sample, and a polished turd is still feculent. So in the next iteration, 90% + 90% of 10% of the culture is "bad". And so on.
Most content is slop, whether books or TV shows or movies or journalism.
That's why we have IMDB Top 250 lists, and books called "Classics". Curating collections and having taste has always been important, and is even more important now.
AI hasn't really changed that. There is good investigative AI-assisted writing today and there is also fully AI-slop fly-by-night websites made in 15 minutes with Claude.
Curation and the creation of canons requires enough people to have a shared context and be able to build community among themselves. This has been undermined by the shift from early-internet arts websites to social-media platform's algorithmic feeds where people are easily atomized into personal silos. And once atomized, they don't know there are alternatives to slop.
For-profit taste-making websites either got acquired and extinguished, or are in dire straits now, and in any event their influence over core audiences (especially young people with time for discovery) has waned to almost nothing. The non-profit blogosphere blogging about arts and literature largely grayed out and was never replaced; you can still set up a blog today, but you'll be talking to the void, you won't attract any real slice of your topic's fandom community like you once could. A putative scene hangs on at Substack, but if you look closely it's largely hustling and grifting.
All in all, curation just isn't there any more at a societal level in the same way it was in the twentieth or early twenty-first centuries.
"AI is forcing a re-configuration of the ways trust is established between writers and readers" --> there, I fixed the title
There are many ways that I think what we are currently referring to as "AI" is disrupting existing relationships in society.
To the extent that that disruption is forced by external, pointed, injection of capital (e.g. russian bot farms, heritage foundation bots, etc.), it's pernicious. It has undoubtedly made those bad actors more powerful.
But, to the extent that that disruption is the result of asymmetrical power relationships (e.g. the outsized influence that publishers have), I think it's welcome.
I know who writes the things I read (because almost everything I read is over a thousand years old! but, that's beside the point...) because it's important to me to know who I am connecting to through the written word. I doubt my relationship to writing will ever be disrupted by AI because it's so important to me to know the history of the people whose ideas I'm consuming.
The one thing that we can prove with reasonable ease is that the time it took to write was compatible with the author being a human, and that the writing signature is that of a human. You can still fake it, but it is much more annoying and it will take you at least as long as it would take a human.
I wrote Possibly Made by a Human just for fun to do this, after I failed the Turing test in a comment here.
Of course it makes for awkward editing! I've just realized that "the writing signature" does not mean much. I mean the histogram of delays between keystrokes.
We could just say "AI has destroyed trust" and it's accurate.
First hand experiences myself:
I can't commission an artist without questioning if they are using AI, which isn't acceptable in the projects I am commissioning for.
I can't trust that my coworkers are actually testing the crap they're generating before wasting my time with runbooks that aren't even validated. It was bad enough that people miss important steps with assumed knowledge, but now we have that amplified by these types of documents that are no being AI generated.
I can't trust that my code wont be sucked up by some money greedy company at speeds unheard of before and benefit someone with out any credit to me doing something novel or interesting.
Even worse, I can't trust the smart people to not be idiots either. How many engineers do you know that have completely outsourced all the thinking to the robot, while we know fully that it's closer to a slot machine than it is a thinking machine?
Maybe even worse than that is the companies thinking they can reduce 10% of their workforce and compensate with LLMs. It's absolutely laughable, because I witnessed it first hand. Company I worked at fired my recruiter and the guy that was going to be my boss before my start date. My onboarding was practically non-existent and nobody wants to train their newbies anymore. The fear of being axed from your job at the first thing that MIGHT make a profit is also high. To every company that retained me through their layoffs, joke is on them, people like me want to see stability and that's just fiscal irresponsibility they're signalling.
Just some thoughts to illustrate it's not just writing. Trust is destroyed in any creative and professional en devour at this point.
We pretty much never only judged the output. An oil painting is valued because it's an oil painting among other things. If people know you have worked on something for a long time, it's valued more than something you just came up with this afternoon. A chair crafted by a woodworker, even if it's worse in some ways, is valued over an IKEA chair produced in a fraction of the time.
Generative models are like outsourcing to cheap mass production factory, not an advanced woodworking tool in your basement.
Both of those things are visible in the output. An Ikea chair isn't denigrated because we're such snobs, but because it's made of inferior materials. If Ikea started selling solid hardwood bookshelves tomorrow at the same price as their other stuff, I'd be driving right over there!
No, because you can get indistinguishable hand painted oil clones of famous paintings from Vietnamese rep shops and they obviously sell for far less than the originals.
Barring AI generated art and prose assets is valid, if for example you don't want to have the AI generation marker on steam, or you object to the use of AI for various ethical reasons. Also there's apparently quite the market of motivated purchasers that want to signal their anti AI values by buying from projects that don't use AI.
Hmm, I don't know that time invested inherently equates to quality. I would place FAR more value on a comfortable functional mass-assembled chair than some wobbly piece of crap some guy spent two weeks cobbling together in his garage.
It's not just time, it's also effort and other non obvious things like supporting a real human being
> I would place FAR more value on a comfortable functional mass-assembled chair than some wobbly piece of crap some guy spent two weeks cobbling together in his garage
If it's wobbly then sure, but what if it was made by someone with a modicum of expertise to make it not wobbly.
then again, i don't mind a good wobble, it's a fidget opportunity and i like to fidget
I suppose we're talking about "craft" vs "art." Making chairs is a craft. There are objectively "right" ways to do it. You can still be artistic about it, so long as the craftsmanship is sound. That being said, I will take a well-crafted chair over one that is not every time over the "artistic" one.
With regards to writing, I can't just throw word salad together and call it a day. But my writing style is my own voice - I pretty much write the same way I speak. With AI... well, after you've read enough of it, you notice that it, too, has its own voice. Like, I can distinguish the writing style of Gemma4 real quick. It smells like ozone.
I don't necessarily mind, so long as its telling me something coherent and accurate. You could argue it lacks originality, and it certainly lacks agency: But it IS usually well-crafted. I'll take it. Won't stop me from reading, say, PKD novels. But miss me with the artistry of, say, Finnegan's Wake, or even Ulysses, I'm apparently way too dumb for those (yes, I've tried). PKD would crank out multiple novels every year, Joyce took like decade to write incomprehensible nonsense.
> We've always judged the output, so why stop now. AI is just a tool. The artist still owns the output.
Who are we? What output? Organic certification has a long history in agriculture. To get certified requires more than just judging the output. My process are regulated or judged, and have been, using criteria other than the blinded output.
Even if this were true, it doesn't address the other element of the problem, which is that flooding the zone with horrible crap makes it harder to find the good stuff, and forces you to waste a lot more of your own time filtering crap.
Yes, I can usually identify AI slop within a couple paragraphs, but it still wastes my time to encounter it, and if it's my entire feed, it's going to drown out the good stuff I'd actually want to read. Same for literature at a larger scale, to say nothing of the countless scandals where obvious AI-written crap wins various writing competitions.
Imagine a relative passed and you commission someone to draw a portrait of them to show at the funeral. The artist has good reviews and all their work looks impressive; their portfolio has hundreds of amazing photorealistic portraits. It's expensive, but nothing is too good for a passed loved one.
After weeks of waiting, you finally get the portrait ...aaaaand it looks nothing like them. There's weird artifacting all over it and it looks like a supermodel imposter with meat-moss hair. You try to contact the artist, but they've completely vanished: socials deleted, emails unreplied, just gone.
High trust environments are inherently more efficient and cheaper so the destruction of trust will act like a tax on all activity. But that'll probably make the GDP go up so it will be read as an economic improvement, just like wrestling with health insurance companies.
Even when they are honest about it there's a cost. I keep receiving status emails where the first line says "Generated with AI, be sure to check for accuracy". Apparently, it's more efficient to send an email with unverified information to twenty people and tell them to each individually check it than it is for the sender to just make sure it's accurate before they send it out. Maybe they're just asking their agent to do the check for them though.
"Maybe even worse than that is the companies thinking they can reduce 10% of their workforce and compensate with LLMs"
It's significantly dumber than that. Companies are paying to pour all of their domain and institutional knowledge, processes, and data into the training pipeline of tools their competitors use. Even better, they ignore the fact that as these tools gain competency the owners of these systems are guaranteed to start spinning up integrated industry verticals in direct competition.
Tried to tell that to my executive suite and they told me I was being ridiculous. Showed them OpenAIs "digital program management" for USG projects and it was like they suddenly went blind. Half a beat later it was like I never uttered a word and they were back to talking about "becoming a leader in AI." We're a fucking consulting company that can't even put small, hand written projects written by domain experts in front of the client because of our joke of an IT department. We're never going to credibly be "leaders in AI."
The charitable interpretation here is your executive suite all have exit strategies with < 2-5 year timelines. All alternative interpretations suggest profound incompetence.
Whoa! It's like a lightbulb turned on over my head. Can you say more about this? How do you see those larger patterns? I am missing social cues like this at my workplace and this is my first experience on a sinking ship of a business.
A lot of writing was suspect already, but many are oblivious.
Novels, op-eds, memoirs and songs are written by ghostwriters, often uncredited. Journalism is written by intelligence operatives or PR professionals with an agenda. Bills and public policy are written by lobbyists and professional advocates, not lawmakers or administrators.
A greater general awareness and vigilance of whether authorship/provenance is suspect or not, is not a bad thing in my view.
In the case of a ghostwriter, a novel was still written by a human -- just not necessarily the human whose name is on the cover. A ghostwritten song is still a song created by a human... I don't know how common ghostwriting is for songs; it's common for artists to record songs written by someone else, but I'm not sure how common it is for artists to use a ghostwriter for that without giving any credit at all.
"A greater general awareness and vigilance of whether authorship/provenance is suspect or not, is not a bad thing in my view."
Greater scrutiny of journalism, etc., is definitely to be desired. What is not to be desired is yet another reason why people cannot trust a fundamental thing like "the author who claims to have written this actually wrote this".
I've gotten to the point that I am having to question "should I consider reading this book or is it slop?" for anything published past about 2024, and I don't really appreciate that.
As someone who works with freelance authors, I now have to wade through far more pitches than before and probably 90% are LLM generated. And I have to worry with new authors that they'll use LLMs to generate content -- something our subscribers would very much not appreciate if we let one through. (Miss me with any "if it's good, it doesn't matter" takes. It very much matters. We pay people to research and write articles, and our subscribers pay us in part because they trust that humans are behind the content we publish.)
It sucks to have yet one more reason to distrust others. There were far too many as it was.
I posted this article yesterday in my company's book club channel
Also yesterday I went out for some beers with a friend who has recently completed a science fiction trilogy, result of years of work, self-publishing it and selling a few thousand copies. It's pretty good stuff and definitely a life achievement! Anyway we discussed that article. He said that things got really bad in between his first book 6 years ago and third one just now, the amount of self-published slop that's denial-of-servicing everyone is just humongous. He said there are people publishing 50 books a year! 50! I mean, that's a below lifetime's output for a most really good writers! As he put in "5 dollars in compute to make a garbage book to publish on amazon to produce 30 bucks of revenue from unsuspecting half a dozen people is worth the squeeze so scammers/sloppers do it". That's why we can't have nice things.
Its the reverse turing test: can a human convince another human (or bot screener) that they are human?
We need legislation banning ai from imitating/impersonating humans and creating confusion about whats real. And people using ai to make their art need to label it or else theyre just plagarizing
I mean, even ghost writers arent making the world a better place
> We need legislation banning ai from imitating/impersonating humans and creating confusion about whats real.
The obvious problem is that if there is an unambiguous way to tell that something is AI-generated then you don't need the law, and if there isn't then you can't enforce it.
Is that a slam dunk? Why should someone have a right to prevent you from criticizing them by using their likeness? Should a billionaire be able to sue the newspaper for a satirical editorial cartoon?
With appropriate disclosure of AI use and non monetization. But I should not be able to clone elvis' voice and make new songs and music videos for my personal financial gain, in my opinion.
>I mean, even ghost writers arent making the world a better place
I think people should be allowed to put their name on anything, be that hired work or AI generated. It’s only their own credibility and good name at stake.
Sure, but I disagree when you’re selling that thing.
In a large society trust is necessary because you can’t know everyone. So I think it’s reasonable that at least if you’re selling something you can’t lie about it, including whether you wrote it or not.
And yes, I’m aware ghost writing is a long established practice and I think it’s always been deceitful.
> Ever since, I’d worried that the misrepresentation might somehow have a real-life impact
Doubt is good for the brain & mind.
But either the author is AI or she--Rachel Kadish, born in '69--needed something AI related to write about.
There is no trust between writers & readers. People either distrust and scrutinize or they like or dislike how the reading went. Some don't even judge but just shrug it off whatever impact the reading might have had.
The problem is that the AI conversation is reinforcing cultural polarity, especially among experts and people who are at least well enough off, so any methods to ignore the actual problems, which have been ignored in the past by most people almost by convention, are welcome and this article seems, at least to me, to be the result of one of these applied methods.
> There is no trust between writers & readers. People either distrust and scrutinize or they like or dislike how the reading went. Some don't even judge but just shrug it off whatever impact the reading might have had.
I interpret this more as an underlying social contract: Both writing a book and reading it used to be laborious. Now they're not.
Reaching out to an author about specific details used to mean you've deeply engaged with the work. Writing a book used to mean you spent lots of time understanding and writing about the topic.
Neither is now true, so it makes it harder to distinguish what's worth paying attention to.
I've definitely seen this happen with myself. When I shop for books, I do extra research into the author and publisher for anything published after 2022.
Agreed I also think, what unique perspective am I getting if it's just AI? If I want to know what AI thinks I could ask it myself, I want more diverse opinions.
> what unique perspective am I getting if it's just AI?
It is entirely possible for existing AI tools to introduce you to a perspective on something that is neither new or unique to the world, but which IS new to you.
Whether what represents is a wholly unique perspective or not is kinda irrelevant, so long as it's unique to you.
For example - most popular science or history books aren't offering up wholly unique perspective that nobody in that field of study has ever thought about before / ever committed to paper. Most of them are providing an engaging overview of widely studied topics in a way that is accessible and engaging to the average enthusiast.
Sure, the more in-depth your knowledge of a subject is the harder it is for those books to give you a unique perspective...but that is true of human authors too (as anybody who has read multiple books on the same subject will surely attest).
Also - without getting all Rumsfeldian...there are things you don't know that you don't know...and whilst with the right approach you could get AI to enlighten you, there can be value in someone/something having already curated that content together for you.
Just to be clear here - i'm not arguing in favour of AI books or suggesting they are as good/equivalent to human-authored books. I don't believe they are, i'm mostly questioning the logic that because Ai isn't producing some unique perspective it's therefore of no value).
> It is entirely possible for existing AI tools to introduce you to a perspective on something that is neither new or unique to the world, but which IS new to you. Whether what represents is a wholly unique perspective or not is kinda irrelevant, so long as it's unique to you.
True, but then the but then the question becomes why you bought a book instead of just asking AI yourself and getting a personalized version.
Buying an AI-generated book just puts an intermediary between you and the AI.
> There isn’t one—broadly—for sharing the outputs.
And there probably won't be. If I want something made by AI, I can get something tailored to my exact tastes and without the delta that typically exists between a product on the market and the specifications I'd hand to someone to make something for me.
> There is no trust between writers & readers. People either distrust and scrutinize or they like or dislike how the reading went. Some don't even judge but just shrug it off whatever impact the reading might have had.
That suggests that writer reputation and the reader’s past experience are of no importance. But before you even get to read something, you have to decide to do so. On what basis? And how might a bad experience colour future decisions?
Things are ogre in the fanfiction and webserial scene. Everything written after 2024 REEKS of AI, and most of them, over 90% are obvious AI. It's very easy to spot if you're advanced reader, AI style has a lot of tells and idiosyncratic phrases (and please don't disclose them). There are meta tells as well: unrealistic output volume for a human writer, having a patreon for fanfiction, etc.
Well, this was all foretold in 2019 when OpenAI held back GPT-2, an
unusable model by today's standards, for fear of making misinformation
and fraud too easy. I remember when the internet, once the preserve for
businesses and universities, came to the home, and I said, wow, kids are
going to watch a lot more porn. As with any life-changing technology,
you take the good with the bad.
The problems in AI writing, IMO are due to the following factors:
1. Information density. LLM love to shovel in so much packed information in a paragraph.
2. Stiffness in writing style, especially influences from academic writing. Things like "it is not A, it is B" is clearly stemming from dialectic. (man I wish LLM can use more dialectics like syllogism)
3. Following the roots in dialectic, the way that "chat bots", or dare I say, Socratic dialogue, required both the speaker and the responder to have a very high understanding of the topic to be effective. Yet most people are just plain simple, let alone being subject experts, so both the LLM prompter generates slop， and the reader only reads slop
4. The great ADHDification of the society due to tech-addiction. The rise of TikTok or short-form clips, gives an average human a great gratification in dopamine in the terms of fast and infinite visual of information at your fingertip. The attention span of most human now was dragged down from the mean few years ago, and especially apparent in the new generations of students and children. Many people just go for tl;Dr and want to watch clips or play games after, because reading is deemed painful.
While ironically I do have clinical ADHD Type-I since childhood, and I do used to binge play and binge programming (since I started writing game cheats and botnets, boy if I had a goal I will not stop unless my body stopped me), but I'm completely immune to social media (except during the pandemic when it is necessary for communication).
But again, I think those 4 factors are what causing distrust in this new modern version of producer-consumer problem: the fact that your dopamine receptors can't keep up
AI has destroyed my trust in pretty much all content. It sucks. I used to enjoy watching video content online (YouTube, Instagram, whatever) but now, whenever I'm watching something, I'm always thinking, "Is this more fake-ass AI slop?" I spend more time trying to find a person with six fingers on one hand or whatever than I spend consuming the actual content. Same goes for new music. AI has ruined online content for me. Honestly, now that I think of it, I should probably be grateful. I waste a lot less time watching YouTube Shorts now. So yeah, thanks AI.
This is multi-faceted and I agree that AI is destroying some levels of trust, but many of the publications on the Internet were never deserving of trust anyway so I'd describe it as formalizing or recognizing distrust or lack of credibility and, in a manner of speaking now that the tide is going out we can see who has been swimming naked.
One of the other facets is the idea that trust is now being lost due to AI. It's unfortunate that it seems that publications like The Atlantic (and others) are now going to scapegoat the lost of trust that they've earned over the last decade or so to be about AI when it's actually about bad, biased writing with a default point of view, and lack of intellectual honesty and an inability to facilitate intellectual debate and discussion.
As some of these publications continue to spiral into irrelevancy I think what is a bit tragic is they'll never really understand why. They'll blame AI, which will likely destroy all but the top-tier sites, but in reality the quality of the writing and honesty went down the drain next to their ad-filled garbage pages and other spam.
Trust in media corporations died a long time ago, AI has just accelerated the trend. When human ‘journalists’ write to a script handed to them by the media’s editors and owners (eg ‘write articles that convince our readers to maintain their confidence in the <dot-com, subprime, AI> market’ or ‘write articles that convince our readers that <regime change, tariffs> is needed’), and the result is a debacle, then trust is eroded and questions arise about the journalist’s integrity and/or intelligence. Then the owners and editors find new fresh journalists to generate new stories to ‘restore trust’.
With AI, the editors and owners can just send their scripts to a machine and it’ll write the narrative as requested - but without a human face on that article. However, most readers would not accept such material as trustworthy.
There is another reason that AI reduces trust in media, which is that AI now makes it trivial to trace media ownership up the tree to the consequential owners, look at their other economic interests, and examine if the articles they print tend to favor those economic interests. Applying this analytical framework to the Atlantic itself is an interesting exercise.
Q1: Would it be entirely unfair to characterize the Atlantic as ‘yet another mouthpiece of the neoliberal project instantiated in the United States in the 1970s’?
I don't think there ever was generic trust between writers and readers.
Trusting the written word just because it's written by someone or published by some newspaper was a huge mistake before AI was in the picture.
The trust was exploited by many actors with agenda - politicians, journalists, academics and just plain grifters publishing another "self-help" book.
You could get a glimpse when a newspaper, even a very respected one published an article about your domain of expertise - I am sure I wasn't the only one who realized that if an incomplete, simplistic or just plain wrong text could be reviewed and published then probably a big part of other work is of similar quality - you are just not in position to judge it so you naturally trust it.
Sadly the same goes for academic world - millions of papers gets published - a lot of them not worth the paper they are written on. You are just rarely in position to say.
What AI has done to it is actually a favor: it exposed what was always there but covered well enough to deceive big part of the population.
Now we need to reevaluate. Come back to fundamental mechanisms. Can the claims be verified? Maybe in formal manner. If not who the author or someone authorizing the text is. What did they achieve in their life? What experiences they have lived through? What work have they done? What incentives do they have to publish it? If you can't answer those questions the text is irrelevant as a source of information. It turns out not everyone is worth listening to.
It was always the case. It's just easier to see now.
While lacking in kindness, this comment does point the dropping trust in the institution of journalism.
AI feels like a red herring as I've always considered the root of the problem to be cultural, ie. journalists adding story (ala New Journalism) because that gets attention but often results in sloppy arguments or subpar investigative work.
If you don't trust the Atlantic, don't read the Atlantic. Do you honestly believe every journalist is out here lying to you? Who do you trust to provide information to you, if not journalists, and what about the people you do trust makes them different from journalists?
Additionally, I'd say this argument doesn't really address the point that chatbots, AI news farms, and rapid copycat books being generated by LLMs flooding the market cause confusion in every conceivable market.
I believe that most journalists are writing stories that confirm their own priors because that’s what all humans have done since forever.
I also believe that today’s journalists cut their teeth in the Buzzfeed era when industry incentives were to write as much clickbait as fast as possible.
Journalism is eroding its own credibility. Or, market incentives are. I don’t think journalists are cartoon villains, simply humans who have been put on a pedestal that is no longer earned.
If I want to know about something now, I go find an expert in that thing and read their book, not a beat reporter.
Look, it is incredibly easy to say "all journalist are lying"
The problem is, normally that opinion is pushed by a specific group who will benefit from those journalists being discredited.
Now, with genai getting really rather good, there isn't really much between us and fully automatic bullshit as a service. Bad twitter, reddit & bluesky are very good examples of that. There are legions of people who are convinced that x is y, because someone spend some money to spread shit.
Sure, bad journalists need to be called out, as do bad networks (doesn't help that monopolies are fucking US journalism now)
but writing everyone off, without cause? thats just gonna let the grifters win.
Off the shore of Italy, in Montecristo, the Benedictines have regained full control of the island. No Internet or AIs are allowed there, but their hospitality business rents mechanical typewriters by the hour. More than once, a famous writer has jumped from the island's cliffs, unable to bear the shame of being accused of using AI to produce their magnum opus.
For the unwashed masses, AI-produced literature is free and abundant. The discerning, however, have gotten a taste for manually bound tomes exclusively inked with the output of human brains.
https://gwern.net/doc/ai/poetry/1974-lem-cyberiad-trurlselec...
I can’t help but be eternally impressed by Lem’s ‘The Cyberiad’. Partly for Lem’s prescience and creativity. But mostly because of just how damn funny he can be.
edit: allegory augmenter
This is just one of several areas where GenAI has been harmful and should start getting regulated like digital drugs.
The AK47 is an invention. The inventor "would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work - for example a lawnmower", but people still consider it an invention. Inventions do not have a polarity in the axis of quality of life.
There is no consensus on if GenAI is overall harmful or not. In general people are optimistic but concerned.
The last thing we need is another war on drugs.
I would rate A/B testing on human behaviour, or advertising to be more harmful to the overall human experience than GenAI.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/355429-whatever-happens-we-...
But guns are an equaliser. If powerful people let situations get too out of hand the personal risk to them is staggering. Guns make political or revenge-based assassinations relatively easy in a way knives do not. Arguably that is a bad thing, although experiments like the US suggest it is good in practice.
Yes, the US has been very well known for its politicians (instead of e.g. middle schoolers) being routinely murdered by the gunners.
Seriously. Even in the places like Brazil, or Sub-Saharan Africa, the "powerful people" rarely get killed by the lynching mob — it's almost always the hired guns sent by some other powerful people. So, no, the general populace very rarely gets to exercise its violence on the elite, historically speaking. Sometimes it happens, but that's an aberration of the normal way of things.
You could also steal something and your life might be better for having a thing, possibly more so than how much worse it makes for the person you took it from.
The thing that distinguishes theft from taxation is a societal convention. Adding consensus around how, what, and why things are taken makes it more consentual. Individuals may disagree with having to pay tax, but as a society it is generally agreed upon (even if the methods of agreeing a flawed)
Things need to be an extreme case for guns to come into that process. It implicitly means the goal of reaching consensus has failed and one group is enforcing their will upon the other. That's usually not a good path for the disadvantaged because the powerful by definition have more capacity to enforce their will. Reaching consensus, whilst slower, is the one that supports the disadvantaged better.
...only if you have the gun, you know. Which the disadvantaged people tend not to. In fact, let's generalize your statement a bit: "Tools of power and coercion make lives better if you are the disadvantaged and is at the receiving end of the abuse by the powerful". No, they don't! They do the opposite for very obvious reasons.
At least in part because it does not exist, oligarch marketing notwithstanding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
You likely are referring to plagiarism slurry.
>You likely are referring to plagiarism slurry
The option that this generative AI is plagiarism is not supported by the law, not the majority of public opinion. There are many, probably a majority, who wish there to be a form of compensation for having their works trained upon. Quite a large number believe that consent should be required. From what I have experienced, only a few consider this to rise to the level of plagiarism.
To pass off a work as wholly your own would require claiming no generative AI use. While this is done occasionally. Few instances of AI use declare that it has not been used.
It makes people dumber, less self-sufficient and (maybe worst of all) less interesting.
And I'm honestly sad for anyone who disagrees because it indicates they don't have a deeper relationship to art. For me, art is fundamentally about communication. It's someone sharing a little bit of themselves. AI might be able to produce pretty images and sounds, but it has no experience or feelings so the art it creates lacks that magic of a shared human connection. Pardon the crass analogy, but it's like if someone said "I don't need any intimate partner, I have internet porn". It's a depressing mindset because it indicates that people can't even see what they are missing.
I keep hearing this point, and the thought that comes up first is 'but blood diamonds'. Let me explain, you can buy a cheaper 'inauthentic' lab-grown gem that's chemically/physically identical to a (nearly hypothetical) flawless diamond, but we buy the 'natural, and imperfect' diamonds at a much higher price. The blood of the orphans that pulled the diamond rough from the minds soaked into the diamond raising it's value. The value isn't the blood, but the effort it took to produce that diamond, the story of how hard it was to mine is the value, not the end product (a shiny rock), which in the end, is all anyone can see.
The second thought I had was that what people find meaningful, beautiful, important varies wildly, to the point that landscapes are meaningful. Meaning can be found in anything, regardless of the existence of intent.
The third thought I had is communication does not survive the translation of art unscathed or unchanged. There is this disconnect, between the artist and the viewer. The viewer only ever sees a finished product. The viewer extracts meaning from the work entirely without the author/artist's involvement. This isn't communication, this is a soliloquy, frozen in time, the artist can not expand, explain, or sharpen (except in another works) those ideas once released into the world.
This disconnect is the rub. There are no 'magic' pixels that dictate secret meaning. There is no 'human color' that indicates intent. Meaning itself can't be painted. What relationship can ever take place between artist and viewer through those works alone. It's a 1-way conversation. And considering my second though, that intent isn't even needed to extract meaning, you can see the apathy and rise of the use of AI in art.
The point of making art isn't to make money, or to impress other people, or even change other people's thinking. It's to express yourself. That can't be taken by AI.
The point of viewing art is to reflect on how you perceive it. That's true regardless of the artist/author, and regardless of the blood (effort) (or not {AI}) used to craft it.
"Art" as a term becomes meaningless with this definition. Once you disconnect art from its creation, everything becomes art. A sunset can be beautiful, but it's not art if a human doesn't capture it in some way. A pile of dog shit on the sidewalk can evoke emotions, but perceiving it doesn't turn it into art. The decisions of an artist are central to the whole endeavor and that is what is communicated. That communication doesn't have to be unambiguous, intentional, or conscious, but it has to be there to make something "art".
If you find yourself wanting to say this in the future, maybe give the other person some benefit of the doubt and take it as a sign to reassess your interpretation of what was said. I truly have no idea how you got to where you did from what I wrote, so I don't even know where to start to dispute it.
> "Art" as a term becomes meaningless with this definition. Once you disconnect art from its creation, everything becomes art.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not in the beholden.
> A sunset can be beautiful, but it's not art if a human doesn't capture it in some way
If it is not 'captured in some way', agreed. I disagree with the human label being needed.
> The decisions of an artist are central to the whole endeavor and that is what is communicated.
This is the crux, what I disagree strongly with.
If the intention by the artist truly mattered, then a hypothetical double blind experiment can confirm this. If we have two works of art, one created by a human, and one created by a machine, (they just so happen to be byte for byte identical), and you have people one at a time decide which one is 'art' and which one is 'meaningless'.
We don't need to actually do this experiment because we all know how it would go. Because we can not measure 'intention' at all, we can not actually perceive intention. which is why we have things like the watchmaker fallacy. we are extraordinarily bad at assuming we can perceive things we we actually can't...
So if this is your position, then it is nonsense, if I have missed your position, correct me.
>This is the crux, what I disagree strongly with.
>If the intention by the artist truly mattered...
That is also the crux of your misinterpretation and it shows the flaws in this type of line by line communication that we're all guilty of doing because your point is refuted by the very next sentence of my original comment: "That communication doesn't have to be unambiguous, intentional, or conscious, but it has to be there to make something 'art'."
"Intentions" are motivations while "decisions" are actions. The decision by the photographer to frame a photo of a sunset in a specific way is what turns it from merely something beautiful into art. The specific motivation behind that decision is often unknowable even sometimes to the artist themselves, but a decision is knowable and communicates something. AI doesn't make decisions it just generates something based off statistics.
An artist can certainly use AI as a tool, but that doesn't make the AI output art, it makes the curation of AI output a form of art. But to mix in my other thread of comments, engaging with the AI output as its own art would be like primarily judging Duchamp's Fountain on the aesthetic qualities of the curves of the porcelain when the actual art is his decision to present that porcelain as "art".
I'll freely admit that LLMs can be used in art in a similar way. You can certainly make LLM output the core of some performance art piece, but that doesn't make the LLM's output art itself or make it interesting on any level outside the context of its creation. Engaging with that short story as its own art would be like primarily judging the Fountain on the aesthetic qualities of the curves of the porcelain.
I mean it is as simple as saying - here is my statement, it was generated by an LLM, but I had prompted and edited it, or even simply chose a single generation out of 500 and this conveys my feelings and therefore is art.
And that's the central conflict here. That "we" might include you, but it doesn't include me. The question of "Why?" is central to art for many of us.
Who cares? I want it to do my taxes for me, it doesn't need to be Picasso
It sounds like you are commenting in the wrong thread then. This article and thread is about what happens when people try to make it Picasso (or experience Picasso's work for them.)
But now that computers have come for the "creatives", it's suddenly an attack on human dignity? No.
Programmers are not special. Artists are not special. Humans are not special.
Work and art have existed long before emperors, kings, feudal lords, and capitalists and they'll exist long after them. Any economic or political system that misuses technology to disrupt the ancient human need to create is fundamentally anti-human. The biggest fault with our current socioeconomic system is it prioritizes the worst aspects of humanity (greed, hoarding, consumption) over the best aspects (building and creating). That's why people are upset.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/world/asia/indonesia-hand...
Fundamental, I can agree with. Exclusive? Clearly not. Not anymore.
People can still create now, even in spite of AI. Will anyone pay for it? Who knows. Doubtful.
> The biggest fault with our current socioeconomic system
I can agree with this. I believe that at this point the only hope left for humanity is to leverage AIs to the max and achieve a post-scarcity society. It's our only chance, and things are gonna get ugly if we fail.
The socioeconomic argument is sound, just don't let it get twisted into "but think of all the creators, the super special noble humans, they deserve protection against the AI onslaught".
Nobody cared about all the countless skilled labourers who were disrupted and automated away by technology. Asking us to shed tears for artists now is honestly offensive, doubly so when the people asking are programmers who literally make bank by automating away the jobs of others.
We are job destroyers. Our work inherently reduces the set of people who are still economically valuable. We are all about getting more done for less. Our only hope lies in finishing our journey, and making it possible to do everything for nothing at all.
Creating is communication. When you share your work, you're sharing your mind. You're demonstrating mastery of a craft. You're inspiring others. The linked article is specifically about how AI is actively harming the relationship between readers and writers, and not in a hypothetical future, but right now.
Even if we enter a "post-scarcity" society, I'm concerned fewer people will create. Why speak if your voice is silenced under a sea of synthetic outputs? Yes, you can create because you enjoy the mechanics, but the communication will be gone.
Generative AI is a long term concern as it hurts something fundamentally ancient.
Really winning me over with this take. Definitely prefer this vs checks notes human experience, creativity, and dignity.
I mean, what's this supposed to mean? It's totally fine to replace all those blue collar labourers with mass production factories, but replacing programmers and artists with AI is somehow a crime against humanity? Absolute nonsense.
This discourse does nothing but betray one's own sense of superiority over the lesser humans. Enlightened thought workers who thought their positions were unassailable and their leverages secured, but were proven wrong by the very technologies they helped create.
It's got nothing to do with preferences and everything to do with reality, and the reality is AIs are changing the world and the only hope left for us humans at this point is that they will somehow enable us to achieve a post-scarcity society.
What are you even talking about?
The comment you were responding to said:
> Delegating the thinking and feeling parts of the human experience, mechanizing human creativity itself, is a direct attack on human dignity.
Everyone can and should engage in creativity, on whatever scale. No one in this thread you're responding to privileged a certain type of worker or even a certain type of creativity (let alone the "experience" and "dignity" the comment broadened it to).
Also just real weird post. The relative worth as humans of doctors and blue collar labourers vs artists and programmers was not the matchup I was expecting, but I guess it's ok because we're all equally garbage in your eyes? FWIW, I'm hoping for more from us than accidentally ending up in a human zoo.
But not everyone will, absent economic incentives.
Calling the mechanization of human creativity a "direct attack on human dignity" is a revealing moral judgement.
What makes human creativity so special that it must be so thoroughly protected against technological progress?
Why "human creativity" specifically, and not any of the other categories of human activity?
Why is it "an attack on human dignity" to mechanize it?
What if it's the opposite? What if this is the technology that will finally free us from all the other indignities we suffer? What if it's the technology that could create a post-scarcity society?
> No one in this thread you're responding to privileged a certain type of worker or even a certain type of creativity
Somehow I just don't see anyone make these kinds of sad posts about displaced skilled craftsmen or poor factory workers or any other economically displaced human.
People make a few documentaries here and there so that history is documented, but we all accept that they are gone as a byproduct of the inevitable technological march.
Why should "creatives" be an exception?
> but I guess it's ok because we're all equally garbage in your eyes?
I never said we are all equally "garbage". I said we are all equally replaceable, and that to believe otherwise is to betray a sense of superiority over those who were replaced.
Even the CEOs will meet their match in the end. Stopping before their replacement would be the true crime against human dignity.
it's rather baffling to see early 2023 delulu still being clung onto in late 2026. no one's going to regulate that genie back into the bottle.
I think there are ways you could serve ads and make money as a business, just not as much money, and not be basically a drug. The social media giants choose not to do this of course and will have to be forced.
I am distinctly less libertarian/classically liberal/etc. than the average user of HN though. So I understand that this opinion is likely to get me downvoted. I prefer to think that I live in the real world and have seen the damage these things have caused and am not in a tech-only friend group bubble.
I listen to a lot of AI generated music and our AI personal assistant has helped a ton in our life. Quite happy with the way things have turned out in this new technological revolution.
Perhaps they just enjoy it. Do you reject a beautiful sunset because it was not human generated, or because there have been trillions of sunsets before?
how do you count sunsets? is it from one vantage point? in that case, the earth is about 1.7 trillion days old, so there have been roughly that many sunsets. but is someone standing in the opposite hemisphere at the same longitude line seeing the same sunset? maybe, maybe not. also, someone two time zones behind me will see a different sunset; maybe there have been an infinite number of sunsets? maybe just one continuous one that's moving? This is more fun to think about then the things I'm supposed to be thinking about, and more fun then worrying about AI.
Sorry for the rant hackernews, needed to get this impulsive line of thought out.
The statistical average of what hundreds of millions of artists did cannot be art, because there's no intentionality behind it. There's no statistically average person after all, everyone is a unique collection of memory and temperament which is apparent in the art they create. There is a part of what it means to be human in even the meanest artistic act which I think the output of statistical models necessarily lacks.
I'm totally fine with your reasons for listening to music. Do you have a problem with other people's reasons to listen to music?
The debate of what is and isn't art is older than art and almost as old as art critics.
I like to think of art as "An invitation to consider" and not as a binary value. On this scale a banana taped to a wall is elevated above some paintings, A human drawn tree as a background of a video game that ends up always obscured by a house would be lower on this scale than an AI generated image crafted to make people think about an idea. The worth, financial, aesthetic, or moral, of the axis is purely a projection of human ideology.
That's a side issue to why someone might like it. Something doesn't have to be art to be liked, or enjoyed.
Bands make albums with 1 or 2 good songs. AI can crank out an endless supply of what I want to hear.
I like both.
Art bridges gaps between people, if everyone is just generating their own AI slop music then culture will just die.
So at least I’ve got my story straight for that period. As for the neurological condition, I’m not diagnosed with anything neurological. This machine functions fine as far as the doctors are concerned :)
That's a book a day (give or take), per account. No human author is publishing a book per day.[0]
It's interesting to me how little the incumbent platforms for digital content seemingly have been able to do in combating the tidal, exponential shift in submissions.
I just spent a month developing a Shopify App, on the side, for fun. When I launched it a couple of weeks ago, I discovered an app doing the same thing as mine with an identical name had also been approved and released a week prior.
How do people think that distribution will change now that supply has increased (at least) tenfold? If the consensus on X.com is to be believed, it's all about personal brand. This used to be the case, but perhaps 80% of it. Is conventional discovery dead now?
[0] - If this includes organisations, like publishing houses, then fair enough. But realistically we should be able to distinguish actual authors.
Suppose you're a 50 year old human author who has published a book a year since you were 18, and would now like to start selling them on Amazon for the first time. Should they hold you up for multiple years because you're rate limited to uploading one a month?
Not saying there are zero, but if you're faced with a thousand scammers and one niche-case author... you go with blocking the scammers if you're serious about it.
So all you'd be doing is inconveniencing the actual human who just wants to use one account for all their books. Of which there could easily be more than one.
Moreover, trying to justify things with ratios like that proves too much, because slop can give anything a ratio like that. They can generate trillions of books, any number. If you banned everything then you'd be banning millions of pieces of slop for every one human-authored book, but you'd also be banning every human-authored book.
What you need is the thing that minimizes false positives, because the base rate of true positives is now so high that even a negligible false positive to true positive ratio would swallow most of the real books.
That'd be like saying a forum can't have rate limits for posts because someone may write 10,000 discussion topics over a year and post them all at once.
Note that it is 2 per week per format. So if you want to publish an e-book, print book and audiobook of your title, you can publish 2 titles, not 6.
Still more than most humans will typically sustain but it does change publishing patterns.
E.g. on Kindle+ (formerly Kindle Unlimited) a lot of people would publish short stories or short novellas. You absolutely can turn around more than 2 short stories per week.
The changes may push some writers to change what they write or bundle up stories.
> How do people think that distribution will change now that supply has increased (at least) tenfold? If the consensus on X.com is to be believed, it's all about personal brand. This used to be the case, but perhaps 80% of it. Is conventional discovery dead now?
For books, I'm hearing there are literary agents who now won't even sign anyone unless they have a sizeable social media following.
Conventional discovery for books will get you a very slow drip. But Amazon massively reward you if you publish lots and often by showing each of your works if someone clicks on one, letting you link series, and letting you do giveaways that are actually quite heavily promoted.
This, of course, incentivises people without a budget for promotion to push hard to release often. E.g. shorter titles, short-stories/novellas.
And that as noted above is being affected by the reduced limit.
> [0] - If this includes organisations, like publishing houses, then fair enough.
It includes anyone who is not large enough to get Amazons attention to get access to send them feeds directly.
I have a client that runs a small press, and basically their only option for Amazon is going via aggregators (and that too is relatively limited) and only pushing their top titles direct as until/unless they sell a lot more than they do now it seems they won't even get to talk to someone with any power to even escalate to anyone with authority to let them bypass KDP.
For e.g. Google on the other hand they got ONIX feeds set up no questions asked (ONIX is an XML format for feeding larger book catalogues to retailers) and pushed their entire ca. 200 book backlog right out of the gate. But Google e-book sales are tiny compared to Amazon - last I heard it was about 5% of their revenue.
The problem for Amazon - and for everyone else - is that for anyone but the biggest publishers Amazon is so dominant that most of the effort from people who want to push out high volume will continue to target Amazon.
Do they really? They take a cut; they have incentives to let people get scammed.
It's exactly the same process that's causing people to avoid expensive purchases on Amazon due to the number of fake products that have infiltrated their supply. People move on if they're sold a lot of bunk goods from a place.
So, I am skeptical books will be any different than all those knock-off drop-shipped items.
Plus Amazon has a long history of screwing over sellers. TL;DR if your product is actually successful, they'll make their own "Amazon Basics" version of your product, then deprioritize you (or even ban you over an excuse). They do this a lot. There's a lot more than just this, it's just an example.
I get NVMes from them now, 2.5G Ethernet switches, and lots of other random items for a fraction of a cost of playing the Amazon lottery.
There are two categories of (physical) products I buy on Amazon.
Regular “brand name” items sold in pretty much any big box retail store. I have more or less the same experience with Amazon as I do Walmart or Target or wherever for that category. Over thousands of orders I’ve never received a fake or had an issue outside of very rare packaging issues like damaged boxes.
The other category is “trash I need faster than aliexpress” and it’s basically exactly as-advertised for that junk. I usually get the item in two days or less where I am, and the quality level is more or less the same as ordering direct from China. Just trading expense for quicker latency. Useful for that last component for a project or whatnot.
I get that I might not be normal though. If I went to Amazon and searched for “grow lights” and got presented with what you get via that search I’d be quite frustrated. But I tend to research exactly what I want for those product categories and never had a problem getting what I expected.
Not out of principle, but because it's so incredibly distinctive and annoying. There's the composition that's bad (it's like all soul and gospel which was fun the first few times but got really old), but also the actual sound quality on a lot of AI generated music is awful.
Same thing with anything that's AI written. I just can't do it. It's like really bad fanfiction where someone tries too hard with forced metaphors and really stitlted pacing.
All the playlists that Spotify generates for me are made of songs from actual humans and matches my taste.
The only times I'm exposed to slop is when I listen to generic playlists from Spotify or dodgy sources.
I feel like I don't quite know what to listen for here.
1. Usually weird little "flickers" of sound - like how a candle gives you mostly constant light but there are little flashes of bright and dark. AI generated music tends to have little distortions scattered throughout like that. As the models have improved they're less obvious but still absolutely there if you try to listen to any individual 'instrument' or 'track'
2. very low dynamic range - loud sounds and quiet sounds are much more similar volume than you'd expect from most real music, and things that are supposed to fade or taper-off in volume are unnatural
Its within the training set I believe. The AI is being trained off compressed audio
I was listening to a podcast last year (forget which, or I'd attribute credit) and one of the tells AI researchers look for when trying to determine if music is AI generated or not is the compression artifacts. AI likely has gotten better at hiding it since then, but AI would include compression artifacts on the final product because of the prevalence of it in training data.
LLMs allow "writers" to generate prose faster than readers can read it. This is a fundamental break in the bargain between readers and writers: However long it takes someone to consume a piece of writing, it almost certainly took the author longer to write it. Even if the prose is crap or the premise awful, the author had to think it was worth sinking real time into making it.
My colleagues and I have implemented a little guideline, which is that you should spend more time writing something than you expect the audience to spend reading it. Anything less is disrespectful.
Paying someone to watch a movie for you is a good idea, like getting an electric monk.
My incredibly, almost insultingly oversimplified model for what I, a lifelong consumer of text, feels is happening here goes like:
90% of culture is "bad". 10% is "good". Previously, we'd iterate on the 10% and (I remind you: oversimplified) discard the 90%, but `derive :: culture -> culture` still follows Sturgeon's Law, so at the next iteration, 90% is "bad" and 10% is good. But now what's happening is we're iterating on the whole sample, and a polished turd is still feculent. So in the next iteration, 90% + 90% of 10% of the culture is "bad". And so on.
That's why we have IMDB Top 250 lists, and books called "Classics". Curating collections and having taste has always been important, and is even more important now.
AI hasn't really changed that. There is good investigative AI-assisted writing today and there is also fully AI-slop fly-by-night websites made in 15 minutes with Claude.
For-profit taste-making websites either got acquired and extinguished, or are in dire straits now, and in any event their influence over core audiences (especially young people with time for discovery) has waned to almost nothing. The non-profit blogosphere blogging about arts and literature largely grayed out and was never replaced; you can still set up a blog today, but you'll be talking to the void, you won't attract any real slice of your topic's fandom community like you once could. A putative scene hangs on at Substack, but if you look closely it's largely hustling and grifting.
All in all, curation just isn't there any more at a societal level in the same way it was in the twentieth or early twenty-first centuries.
Maybe a revolution like the blind taste testing of fine wines needs to happen in literature.
There are many ways that I think what we are currently referring to as "AI" is disrupting existing relationships in society.
To the extent that that disruption is forced by external, pointed, injection of capital (e.g. russian bot farms, heritage foundation bots, etc.), it's pernicious. It has undoubtedly made those bad actors more powerful.
But, to the extent that that disruption is the result of asymmetrical power relationships (e.g. the outsized influence that publishers have), I think it's welcome.
I know who writes the things I read (because almost everything I read is over a thousand years old! but, that's beside the point...) because it's important to me to know who I am connecting to through the written word. I doubt my relationship to writing will ever be disrupted by AI because it's so important to me to know the history of the people whose ideas I'm consuming.
I wrote Possibly Made by a Human just for fun to do this, after I failed the Turing test in a comment here.
Actually made by a human: https://possiblymadebyahuman.com/H1LfVy72BZ
First hand experiences myself:
I can't commission an artist without questioning if they are using AI, which isn't acceptable in the projects I am commissioning for.
I can't trust that my coworkers are actually testing the crap they're generating before wasting my time with runbooks that aren't even validated. It was bad enough that people miss important steps with assumed knowledge, but now we have that amplified by these types of documents that are no being AI generated.
I can't trust that my code wont be sucked up by some money greedy company at speeds unheard of before and benefit someone with out any credit to me doing something novel or interesting.
Even worse, I can't trust the smart people to not be idiots either. How many engineers do you know that have completely outsourced all the thinking to the robot, while we know fully that it's closer to a slot machine than it is a thinking machine?
Maybe even worse than that is the companies thinking they can reduce 10% of their workforce and compensate with LLMs. It's absolutely laughable, because I witnessed it first hand. Company I worked at fired my recruiter and the guy that was going to be my boss before my start date. My onboarding was practically non-existent and nobody wants to train their newbies anymore. The fear of being axed from your job at the first thing that MIGHT make a profit is also high. To every company that retained me through their layoffs, joke is on them, people like me want to see stability and that's just fiscal irresponsibility they're signalling.
Just some thoughts to illustrate it's not just writing. Trust is destroyed in any creative and professional en devour at this point.
We've always judged the output, so why stop now. AI is just a tool. The artist still owns the output.
Generative models are like outsourcing to cheap mass production factory, not an advanced woodworking tool in your basement.
Yes, they are different, but even with woodworker's one worse we still value it more for HOW it's made, not just what it is at this moment in time
Barring AI generated art and prose assets is valid, if for example you don't want to have the AI generation marker on steam, or you object to the use of AI for various ethical reasons. Also there's apparently quite the market of motivated purchasers that want to signal their anti AI values by buying from projects that don't use AI.
better go quick, they'll end up losing a lot of money selling more expensive furniture at a cheaper price...
> I would place FAR more value on a comfortable functional mass-assembled chair than some wobbly piece of crap some guy spent two weeks cobbling together in his garage
If it's wobbly then sure, but what if it was made by someone with a modicum of expertise to make it not wobbly.
then again, i don't mind a good wobble, it's a fidget opportunity and i like to fidget
I suppose we're talking about "craft" vs "art." Making chairs is a craft. There are objectively "right" ways to do it. You can still be artistic about it, so long as the craftsmanship is sound. That being said, I will take a well-crafted chair over one that is not every time over the "artistic" one.
With regards to writing, I can't just throw word salad together and call it a day. But my writing style is my own voice - I pretty much write the same way I speak. With AI... well, after you've read enough of it, you notice that it, too, has its own voice. Like, I can distinguish the writing style of Gemma4 real quick. It smells like ozone.
I don't necessarily mind, so long as its telling me something coherent and accurate. You could argue it lacks originality, and it certainly lacks agency: But it IS usually well-crafted. I'll take it. Won't stop me from reading, say, PKD novels. But miss me with the artistry of, say, Finnegan's Wake, or even Ulysses, I'm apparently way too dumb for those (yes, I've tried). PKD would crank out multiple novels every year, Joyce took like decade to write incomprehensible nonsense.
But we didn't. We relied heavily on a mix of trust and maybe occasional sampling. Having to verify everything is inefficient and exhausting.
Who are we? What output? Organic certification has a long history in agriculture. To get certified requires more than just judging the output. My process are regulated or judged, and have been, using criteria other than the blinded output.
Yes, I can usually identify AI slop within a couple paragraphs, but it still wastes my time to encounter it, and if it's my entire feed, it's going to drown out the good stuff I'd actually want to read. Same for literature at a larger scale, to say nothing of the countless scandals where obvious AI-written crap wins various writing competitions.
After weeks of waiting, you finally get the portrait ...aaaaand it looks nothing like them. There's weird artifacting all over it and it looks like a supermodel imposter with meat-moss hair. You try to contact the artist, but they've completely vanished: socials deleted, emails unreplied, just gone.
Oh well, they owned the output, right?
Even when they are honest about it there's a cost. I keep receiving status emails where the first line says "Generated with AI, be sure to check for accuracy". Apparently, it's more efficient to send an email with unverified information to twenty people and tell them to each individually check it than it is for the sender to just make sure it's accurate before they send it out. Maybe they're just asking their agent to do the check for them though.
It's significantly dumber than that. Companies are paying to pour all of their domain and institutional knowledge, processes, and data into the training pipeline of tools their competitors use. Even better, they ignore the fact that as these tools gain competency the owners of these systems are guaranteed to start spinning up integrated industry verticals in direct competition.
Novels, op-eds, memoirs and songs are written by ghostwriters, often uncredited. Journalism is written by intelligence operatives or PR professionals with an agenda. Bills and public policy are written by lobbyists and professional advocates, not lawmakers or administrators.
A greater general awareness and vigilance of whether authorship/provenance is suspect or not, is not a bad thing in my view.
"A greater general awareness and vigilance of whether authorship/provenance is suspect or not, is not a bad thing in my view."
Greater scrutiny of journalism, etc., is definitely to be desired. What is not to be desired is yet another reason why people cannot trust a fundamental thing like "the author who claims to have written this actually wrote this".
I've gotten to the point that I am having to question "should I consider reading this book or is it slop?" for anything published past about 2024, and I don't really appreciate that.
As someone who works with freelance authors, I now have to wade through far more pitches than before and probably 90% are LLM generated. And I have to worry with new authors that they'll use LLMs to generate content -- something our subscribers would very much not appreciate if we let one through. (Miss me with any "if it's good, it doesn't matter" takes. It very much matters. We pay people to research and write articles, and our subscribers pay us in part because they trust that humans are behind the content we publish.)
It sucks to have yet one more reason to distrust others. There were far too many as it was.
We need legislation banning ai from imitating/impersonating humans and creating confusion about whats real. And people using ai to make their art need to label it or else theyre just plagarizing
I mean, even ghost writers arent making the world a better place
The obvious problem is that if there is an unambiguous way to tell that something is AI-generated then you don't need the law, and if there isn't then you can't enforce it.
I think people should be allowed to put their name on anything, be that hired work or AI generated. It’s only their own credibility and good name at stake.
In a large society trust is necessary because you can’t know everyone. So I think it’s reasonable that at least if you’re selling something you can’t lie about it, including whether you wrote it or not.
And yes, I’m aware ghost writing is a long established practice and I think it’s always been deceitful.
Doubt is good for the brain & mind.
But either the author is AI or she--Rachel Kadish, born in '69--needed something AI related to write about.
There is no trust between writers & readers. People either distrust and scrutinize or they like or dislike how the reading went. Some don't even judge but just shrug it off whatever impact the reading might have had.
The problem is that the AI conversation is reinforcing cultural polarity, especially among experts and people who are at least well enough off, so any methods to ignore the actual problems, which have been ignored in the past by most people almost by convention, are welcome and this article seems, at least to me, to be the result of one of these applied methods.
I interpret this more as an underlying social contract: Both writing a book and reading it used to be laborious. Now they're not.
Reaching out to an author about specific details used to mean you've deeply engaged with the work. Writing a book used to mean you spent lots of time understanding and writing about the topic.
Neither is now true, so it makes it harder to distinguish what's worth paying attention to.
I've definitely seen this happen with myself. When I shop for books, I do extra research into the author and publisher for anything published after 2022.
It is entirely possible for existing AI tools to introduce you to a perspective on something that is neither new or unique to the world, but which IS new to you.
Whether what represents is a wholly unique perspective or not is kinda irrelevant, so long as it's unique to you.
For example - most popular science or history books aren't offering up wholly unique perspective that nobody in that field of study has ever thought about before / ever committed to paper. Most of them are providing an engaging overview of widely studied topics in a way that is accessible and engaging to the average enthusiast.
Sure, the more in-depth your knowledge of a subject is the harder it is for those books to give you a unique perspective...but that is true of human authors too (as anybody who has read multiple books on the same subject will surely attest).
Also - without getting all Rumsfeldian...there are things you don't know that you don't know...and whilst with the right approach you could get AI to enlighten you, there can be value in someone/something having already curated that content together for you.
Just to be clear here - i'm not arguing in favour of AI books or suggesting they are as good/equivalent to human-authored books. I don't believe they are, i'm mostly questioning the logic that because Ai isn't producing some unique perspective it's therefore of no value).
True, but then the but then the question becomes why you bought a book instead of just asking AI yourself and getting a personalized version.
Buying an AI-generated book just puts an intermediary between you and the AI.
There may be a market for sharing useful prompt ideas. There isn’t one—broadly—for sharing the outputs.
And there probably won't be. If I want something made by AI, I can get something tailored to my exact tastes and without the delta that typically exists between a product on the market and the specifications I'd hand to someone to make something for me.
That suggests that writer reputation and the reader’s past experience are of no importance. But before you even get to read something, you have to decide to do so. On what basis? And how might a bad experience colour future decisions?
I can't see the article and I've stopped reading archive.is/.today etc., so can you explain what you mean there — are you just snarking at her age?
If you are coming for Gen X like that, I can tell you that you are going to have a rough time of it.
The absolutely fraudulent blog post to nonfiction "bestseller" pipeline already crushed nonfiction writing over the last decade or more.
Good fiction has always been niche. The rules are the same, read the best.
1. Information density. LLM love to shovel in so much packed information in a paragraph.
2. Stiffness in writing style, especially influences from academic writing. Things like "it is not A, it is B" is clearly stemming from dialectic. (man I wish LLM can use more dialectics like syllogism)
3. Following the roots in dialectic, the way that "chat bots", or dare I say, Socratic dialogue, required both the speaker and the responder to have a very high understanding of the topic to be effective. Yet most people are just plain simple, let alone being subject experts, so both the LLM prompter generates slop， and the reader only reads slop
4. The great ADHDification of the society due to tech-addiction. The rise of TikTok or short-form clips, gives an average human a great gratification in dopamine in the terms of fast and infinite visual of information at your fingertip. The attention span of most human now was dragged down from the mean few years ago, and especially apparent in the new generations of students and children. Many people just go for tl;Dr and want to watch clips or play games after, because reading is deemed painful.
While ironically I do have clinical ADHD Type-I since childhood, and I do used to binge play and binge programming (since I started writing game cheats and botnets, boy if I had a goal I will not stop unless my body stopped me), but I'm completely immune to social media (except during the pandemic when it is necessary for communication).
But again, I think those 4 factors are what causing distrust in this new modern version of producer-consumer problem: the fact that your dopamine receptors can't keep up
One of the other facets is the idea that trust is now being lost due to AI. It's unfortunate that it seems that publications like The Atlantic (and others) are now going to scapegoat the lost of trust that they've earned over the last decade or so to be about AI when it's actually about bad, biased writing with a default point of view, and lack of intellectual honesty and an inability to facilitate intellectual debate and discussion.
As some of these publications continue to spiral into irrelevancy I think what is a bit tragic is they'll never really understand why. They'll blame AI, which will likely destroy all but the top-tier sites, but in reality the quality of the writing and honesty went down the drain next to their ad-filled garbage pages and other spam.
With AI, the editors and owners can just send their scripts to a machine and it’ll write the narrative as requested - but without a human face on that article. However, most readers would not accept such material as trustworthy.
There is another reason that AI reduces trust in media, which is that AI now makes it trivial to trace media ownership up the tree to the consequential owners, look at their other economic interests, and examine if the articles they print tend to favor those economic interests. Applying this analytical framework to the Atlantic itself is an interesting exercise.
Q1: Would it be entirely unfair to characterize the Atlantic as ‘yet another mouthpiece of the neoliberal project instantiated in the United States in the 1970s’?
You could get a glimpse when a newspaper, even a very respected one published an article about your domain of expertise - I am sure I wasn't the only one who realized that if an incomplete, simplistic or just plain wrong text could be reviewed and published then probably a big part of other work is of similar quality - you are just not in position to judge it so you naturally trust it. Sadly the same goes for academic world - millions of papers gets published - a lot of them not worth the paper they are written on. You are just rarely in position to say.
What AI has done to it is actually a favor: it exposed what was always there but covered well enough to deceive big part of the population. Now we need to reevaluate. Come back to fundamental mechanisms. Can the claims be verified? Maybe in formal manner. If not who the author or someone authorizing the text is. What did they achieve in their life? What experiences they have lived through? What work have they done? What incentives do they have to publish it? If you can't answer those questions the text is irrelevant as a source of information. It turns out not everyone is worth listening to.
It was always the case. It's just easier to see now.
And how could I trust if their article is not written by AIs at this point?
AI feels like a red herring as I've always considered the root of the problem to be cultural, ie. journalists adding story (ala New Journalism) because that gets attention but often results in sloppy arguments or subpar investigative work.
Additionally, I'd say this argument doesn't really address the point that chatbots, AI news farms, and rapid copycat books being generated by LLMs flooding the market cause confusion in every conceivable market.
I also believe that today’s journalists cut their teeth in the Buzzfeed era when industry incentives were to write as much clickbait as fast as possible.
Journalism is eroding its own credibility. Or, market incentives are. I don’t think journalists are cartoon villains, simply humans who have been put on a pedestal that is no longer earned.
If I want to know about something now, I go find an expert in that thing and read their book, not a beat reporter.
Look, it is incredibly easy to say "all journalist are lying"
The problem is, normally that opinion is pushed by a specific group who will benefit from those journalists being discredited.
Now, with genai getting really rather good, there isn't really much between us and fully automatic bullshit as a service. Bad twitter, reddit & bluesky are very good examples of that. There are legions of people who are convinced that x is y, because someone spend some money to spread shit.
Sure, bad journalists need to be called out, as do bad networks (doesn't help that monopolies are fucking US journalism now)
but writing everyone off, without cause? thats just gonna let the grifters win.