Everyone borrows or steals from prior art but I'm still amazed by the people that build on what came before to create something new. I just don't have that experience if I know it's generated by a LLM. I appreciate that it will be harder to know the difference as time goes on, and I'll need to be careful not to cast a side-eye at a lot of legitimate stuff unfairly in the future because of that.
There is this other way of looking at art (which probably dominated my worldview) where you don't care much about where it comes from. An extreme example is reading Harry Potter fanfiction, which in some way feels like reading math proofs, namely you continuously wonder what else can be done in a largely fixed setting.
It makes sense, but is the opposite of the OP.
I just want to mention that this is not a bad thing
Often we just call this "inspiration". All our genres are music have their origin in taking stuff from other genres. We wouldn't have reggae if not for ska, rocksteady and R&B.
Always thought that was interesting, because if the lies weren't exposed the readers would have remained inspired.
Also, if someone lies about using genAI I discover it, that makes the "artist" a liar who cannot be trusted.
At the same time, blatant copying was excepted, painters today can take Rembrandts like you wouldn't know the difference. But art fruits in a time and place.
I still think LLMs won't generate art worth anything, of course I make genai pictures of my dog with a pet bird.
We are products of our environment, we learned what art is by having other peoples art as reference to "what art is". So it's only natural that our own art is inspired by other peoples work. People usually do not directly steal an artstyle though and if so, they are usually called out for that. LLMs directly steal from artists works hallucinating them into a pile of stolen bullshit that roughly fits the given prompt.
This is a bit "woo" but I've always thought of this experience/phenomenon as souls touching across time and space. LLMs either don't have souls or they've stolen them but, either way, that experience (if still possible with slop) would be tainted and perverted.
Many people with fully-functional taste buds genuinely find gruel delicious. Oatmeal is a variety of gruel.
People like what they like and aren't ever "wrong" for having their own tastes. I think claiming that other people have no or bad taste isn't really a supportable stance. It's totally valid to say that someone doesn't share your tastes, but not that either of you are right or wrong for having those tastes.
Also, tangentially related, you know that cliche "the customer is always right"? That's only the first half of the sentence that is a quote of. The second half is "in matters of taste". The reason the cliche is obviously wrong is because it omits that.
Probably the way people in the 20th century envisioned AGI rising out of GOFAI (also quite impossible in its own way) would have produced an "alien" entity with the properties you desire
But that is just me, having studied literatur and fallen into a school of literary studies that held Roland Barthes' claim of the death of the author [1] in high regard.
That might just be a German thing, but in school I hated the question of teachers asking: "What does the author wanted to tell us with this story." Because -> The author never wrote that down. And deriving their intentions from a fictional text felt just like making shit up. You either hit the interpretation of your teacher or received a bad grade.
So when entering university and learning, that to analyse a text, to understand how structures within a text enable us humans to interpret and generate meaning, regardless of what the author originally might have intended, was freedom to me.
To make a long story even longer: As long as the story is good - I don't give a rat's ass if an LLM wrote this, a monkey on a typewriter or a human being (or a group of authors writing under a pseudonym).
It’s an exercise in engaging intellectually with the work. It’s not about knowing for a fact what the author wanted to communicate. Art is about engaging with human emotions and thoughts, not about deriving specific facts.
Exactly. Still, that does actually not contradict what I wrote. You can still do this from a viewpoint of Structuralism, Formalism, Reader Centric Schools of Interpretation and Author Centric Schools of Interpretation.
Non of those are less intellectually" engaging with the work. Differently - and in my personal opinion more or less intellectually rewarding - yes. But not less or more.
I think this might be the most pernicious strain of anti-intellectualism online: the idea that there is no subtext, that a text only communicates exactly what it lays out on the surface level. That's not at all what Barthes was saying; you've misunderstood him.
Writing is not a noiseless transmission of thoughts, and thoughts themselves are not totally uninfluenced by the outside world, and people do not always state exactly what they mean in the simplest possible words, and words are understood by the reader in ways that writers did not intend. At every stage, there is the possibility of subtext and context being present.
Your teachers weren't trying to get you to fix on the one perfect interpretation, because that idea (Barthes would agree) doesn't really make sense. Instead, they wanted you to interpret, explain, and justify in a complex and ambiguous space.
Thanks for misrepresenting me. Or willfully miunderstanding me. But hey. No qualms here.
Just that I never said: > the idea that there is no subtext, that a text only communicates exactly what it lays out on the surface level.
Not sure though, what made you read that into my writing (and I am aware of the ironiy here). I actually read Barthes. And not only him. I actually used him and his ways of looking, together with thelikes of Genette and others when doing my thesis work (and before).
Because their depth and their way of looking at the depth within text was what fascinated me.
I always compared them to trying to understand the bones, the organs, the muscles and sinues of a text, compared to a surface level way we were taught in school. Combine that with a more culturally anthropologic way of looking at topics in literature and outside of it, more like Focault did (as an example) and my time in university was actually one that I cherrish deeply.
Edit: > Your teachers weren't trying to get you to fix on the one perfect interpretation, because that idea (Barthes would agree) doesn't really make sense. Instead, they wanted you to interpret, explain, and justify in a complex and ambiguous space.
I have to disagree here. My university teachers mostly did. In school, my experience sadly was quite different. In school there was in most cases and with most teachers only one correct way of interpreting a work of literature. Regardless how well you argued your interpretation.
But I actually love the discussion. Thanks for engaging my opinion.
I could probably enjoy certain LLM-generated art, but in far fewer ways.
Then why does anyone write anything? Why did Orwell write 1984 instead of just making a 2 page bulleted list about how authoritarian regimes are bad?
Sure, an author can write something that is interpreted totally differently from what they meant, but that doesn't detract from the fact that they did have some intention behind what they wrote and it's worth exploring that.
I feel very sorry to any budding new authors. Maybe we are entering a literary dark age?
But the thing is, bad art dissappears. People simply forget, because bad art just is not interesting. Maybe it has a nostalgia comeback or two, but eventually it just dies away with the people who made it, who sold it and who read/experienced it. The great art stays, because it is found again and again by yet another generation. I heard kids have somehow found Count of Monte Cristo again. They are still making movies of Homeros’ texts. Joyce never went out of fashion, neither did Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes nor Proust.
So only thing you need to do is wait, really. Meanwhile there is more classic’s around no-one reads in a lifetime.
Maybe I'm a bit too reactionary though. Thinking about it some more I would absolutely read something if it was recommended by a trusted source (which in my case is almost always a human I know in the physical world).
We really have gone full circle! It's quite upsetting.
"Hey ChatGPT here is a checklist of some facts, here are some sources, write a text about this"
Ultimately resulting in the same boring writing style over and over again for non-fiction.
Personally I enjoy the personal note in non-fiction. Political Girl by Maria Aljochina wouldn't be the same if it was produced by AI.
I don't oppose LLM fiction on principle, and I don't think McCormick does either, but it's just too damn boring to be worthwhile, and I think McCormick hits the nail on the head as to why. This seems like it'll be the last frontier for LLMs, good fiction requires a departure from LLM nature, and that'll inherently be difficult to solve.
I do wonder if you could do something like style transfer on texts? I'm not a very good author either, but occasionally I'll get an idea for a story and wish I had the skill to write it in a way that'd be worth reading, but my poor prose tends to get in the way. Would be cool if I could feed it my poorly written attempts and say basically "this story but in the style of [insert great author]" the way you can snap a photo and get it in the style of a Van Gogh painting.
If nothing else I think I'd enjoy a Tolkien sci fi story, or a Asimov high fantasy.
Why does that have to be solved? There isn’t a problem with art being a human thing. AI doesn’t have to take over all spaces humans occupy just because it is technically possible to do so. We don’t have to push things that way, we can say stop
Having the city guard dynamically react to what you do, stay in character, and even point you to new POI from those conversations seems like a very cool new dimension in storytelling.
I took a creative writing class back in the day, and we talked about how fiction writers often have a massive "canon" backstory to many characters and worlds, and draw from that to create the story. That same backstory details can be use to flesh out a very immersive world. You still have guidance and handwritten essential lines, just use LLMs to enhance the world.
Now, will there be lots of projects that use LLMs to take shortcuts and be far from this idealized narrative, yes. But not all of them. Some will stand out for getting it right.
And imagine the PR horror when people start jail breaking the NPC LLMs
Cost: LLMs fitting into local GPUs, in addition to the memory required for game textures, are too constrained for the quality, latency, and concurrency required. Connecting to the cloud would be too expensive, and even if it would work, it would indeed be the death of local offline gaming, and it would give a valid reason for a subscription to keep the servers running as opposed to a buy-once play-forever game business model.
Unreliability: You don't want to miss a major quest because the LLM did not decide to hand it out. It might be workable with some proper "agentic harness", with some hardcoded world lore, long-term memories, goals, midterm memories, some deterministic actions, and a short-term free-form loop that gets cleared every now and then. For OpenClaw instances, it would be the SOUL.md, but it would have to be read-only. Some logic might have to be hardcoded outside of LLMs, e.g., to start a new narrative branch powered by a new character memory when a keyword has been mentioned or a quest item has been given. Similar to agentic frameworks, it would have tool calls such as `offer_quest`, `give_reward`, etc.
These ideas seem to converge onto the Westworld mechanics of backstories, cornerstone memories, reveries, narratives, and loops, at least as far as I remember them from the series. Thinking about it, given enough investment, I feel like the amusement park of Westworld should already be somewhat possible to implement with the recent advances in LLMs and robotics.
In the end, I am not sure how much sense it makes for games. Maybe it would suffice to only make companion characters LLM-enhanced while NPCs stay pre-programmed in order to let the game stay deterministic. Games should simplify real life in order to increase enjoyability. Making all characters backed by LLMs might decrease enjoyability because of forgetfulness or confabulations inconsistent with the game world and actions. It would need to be heavily constrained and trained or prompted to say "I don't know about that.". It might also be questionable how much needs to be dynamic. E.g., when thinking about the NPCs in The Witcher, which are talking about random stuff, maybe you only need to pregenerate much more random stuff for them to talk about so that you don't notice the repetition, but there might be no need to have this completely dynamic and burn through GPU power for every action. The question would be what to cache and what really needs to be dynamic.
if (responses > 3) prompt.md += "Divert the conversation to bring up QUEST4.md"
I look at it a lot like procedural generation. It can be done well if used in the right spots and enough handwritten/tweaked stuff to make sure it feels right.
Theoretically, a sufficiently skilled and dedicated prompter could guide AI precisely enough to produce a good result, but
1. There are no examples of this.
2. Anyone with the focus & talent to do that would rather not.
As a result, AI produces--and is likely to continue to produce--extremely bad fiction (though bad in totally distinct ways from bad human writers).
Can LLMs distinguish between non-fiction and fiction, i.e., true and false
The literature on LLMs states that LLMs sometimes output falsehoods irrespective of whether the persons using them have prompted for non-fiction or fiction
The papers imply that it is up to the person using the LLM to distinguish what is true from what is false
There are too many texts generated by LLM on Internet now.
The experience of exploring Internet is very bad now.
[^1]: https://tropes.fyi/
4 out of 5 were marked as suspicious, mostly citing short punching sentences, negative parallelism, and content duplication.
It's very sad, but I have to view any recently-created work from an unfamiliar artist with great suspicion. It does make me less interested in recent works by default, because of the work of vetting the artist.
Each to their own but to me a large part of music was always the life experience of the person making it. I'm listening to their life, their love, their pain in music form.
Without an interesting human behind it, art loses all magic to me.
That's why it's beyond annoying that my own brother absolutely loves generated music. He just wants the general ambient groove of reggae or blues, he doesn't care one bit for the artists.
I have no idea if most new pop playing at the gym is genetated with this or that machine learning aid and I don’t care. It is all meh. And so is AI-generated music and therefore we will forget it.
I think this is a hallmark of successful art. The point of art is emotional communication. If someone reacts very negatively to a piece of art, that still means an emotional communication happened. If it's an honest and resonant emotional communication, then some people will react negatively to it and others positively.
Every artist I've ever known would prefer to get negative reactions to their art over not getting a reaction at all.
A good novel can have you laughing out loud or crying to yourself, they can introduce new ideas that can totally change your outlook on the world. I've read books I've continued to think about for months after I've finished them.
Great music, whether classical or contemporary, particularly when experienced live, can be transcendental.
Both can be wonderful ways of connecting with humanity. To read The Leopard is to inhabit the soul of a minor Sicilian noble, putting on Ride the Lightning is a viceral experience, like hitting a line of speed.
Cinema can evoke these intense experiences, but VFX is but a minor component, and much of the best uses no CGI.
Regardless, as a man who dabbles in AI in his own creative practice, I remain utterly unconvinced that AI is capable of eliciting the response we get from great music or literature. It may produce some filler around the edges, but that great line, the chorus that drives the heart to the sky with a fist raised in the air like an antenna to heaven, this will always be human.
This is for the simple reason that art is fundamentally about human connection and empathy, the transmission of emotion and energy from one sentient being to another.
No LLM could ever write Hallelujah, because no LLM has witnessed heartbreak, contemplated the divine, or practiced bondage.
No diffusion model could paint Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, which incidentally took over a decade, as no machine has ever laughed in contempt of its enemy.
Sure, we can say that there's a human behind each machine, but AI places a wall between the creator and their work. The momentum, inspiration, creative blocks and breakthroughs in the shower, these form the basis of great art.
Re-reading the parent, I've digressed, and perhaps somewhat misinterpreted. I guess I just wanted to write what I've written. Very human.
Yeah, "good" AI blends into the background? No, good art is never in the background. It grabs us, pours into us, and leaves us changed.
God, spent too long on this and need to get some shit done. I'll go put on Ride the Lightning.
If this happens then I'll take some solace in that at least we have a very large existing collection of older music guaranteed to be made by people, so I won't have to do without.
This, like elevator or contact center waiting music, has very little to do with "music" itself. It's just something to signal the waiting time and ease a bit of anxiety. While I'm saddened that somebody lost their income with automated background generation, I don't find the end product interesting at all, so whatever. However. However, listening to my genres does definitely need the connection to a human. No, I won't "hate" AI because of it, I will just ignore or press "skip" (where I can). Freedom of choice, baby.
Thanks for mentioning this. I have been in so many arguments with tech savvy people who simply can't grasp this concept.
Additionally to that, if you're taking shortcuts with AI rather than actually learning a skill (writing, painting, drawing, producing music, etc...) how can you even feel good about your "art"? It's not special, it's stolen effortless slop. It's like playing a video game and getting that "early access equipment" that just lets you steamroll through the game without challenge.