Posted by Stwerner 16 hours ago
Over the last couple months, I've been building world bibles, writing and visual style guides, and other documents for this project… think the fiction equivalent of all the markdown files we use for agentic development now. After that, this was about two weeks of additional polish work to cut out a lot of fluff and a lot of the LLM-isms. Happy to answer any questions about the process too if that would be interesting to anybody.
Because of a bad habit reading comments before the link I knew it was AI. I read it regardless, and... I still enjoyed it!
I'm very much not a writer or a critic, so my definition of good writing is likely very low. Yet I can't shake off this weird feeling that I truly enjoyed the writing and felt the emotions, _while_ knowing it's LLM.
I'm guessing that human after touch is what made it pleasant to read. I'd love to see the commit history of the process. Fun times we live in!
All I found was a human name given as the author.
We might generously say that the AI was a ghostwriter, or an unattributed collaboration with a ghostwriter, which IIUC is sometimes considered OK within the field of writing. But LLMs carry additional ethical baggage in the minds of writers. I think you won't find a sympathetic ear from professional writers on this.
I understand enthusiasm about tweaking AI, and/or enthusiasm about the commercial potential of that right now. But I'm disappointed to find an AI-generated article pushed on HN under the false pretense of being human-written. Especially an article that requires considerable investment of time even to skim.
"... LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.
If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?"
As such, we can’t comprehend the world they live in. A world in which you ask your device to give you any story and it gives you an entire book to read. I’d like to think that as humans we inevitably want whatever is next. So I’d like to think this future generation will learn to not only control, but be beyond more creative than current people can even imagine.
Did people who used typewriters imagine a world with iPhones? Did people flying planes imagine self landing rockets? Did people riding horses imagine electric cars? Did people living in caves imagine ocean crossing ships?
Yes, science fiction writers and readers have, since before any of us were born.
And also be surprised by some of the uses to which it's put. And horrified by some of the societal backsliding despite what should be utopian technology.
This is my common issue from building websites for SMEs. It's not until Google updates their algorithm - killing their ranking and their sales leads slow that you hear from them.
There is wisdom in constantly up-selling to your customers (we offer management services, SEO and are cautiously moving in AIO), they may say no, but you have a fall back that you offered things that would have mitigated their current crisis.
It's written like this is a dystopia but billing $180/45 minutes in rural low cost of living area sounds awesome. And the choreographer billing "more than a truck" for three weeks? The dream!
Well, then, you gotta move on to reading better science fiction. Because this is pretty damn bland. I gave up after 2 minutes because of it. Kinda feel vindicated after coming to the comments.
I can see it working for casual readers, which is why it's already an editorial problem. Imagine having to sift through a growing number of faux writers sending publishers AI generated prose.
Edit: got it right!
30 minutes ago it was on the front-page, now I can't find it listed in the top 200.