I think many people forget that the vast majority of books aren't high art.

Your mind goes to Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, N.K. Jemsin, or Pratchett.

My mind goes to Ice Planet Barbarians[0] or Crimson Worlds[1] (both written by actual humans, but I think they are good representations of their genres)

There are so many books in the romantasy genre specifically that could be just mad libs templates for AI Generated books.

The people who read them don't care about the plot, they want specific kinds of tropes in the book. They look for enemies-to-lovers, 7 foot tall men, tiny women and other very focused traits (ages, races, LQBTQIA+) in the books. They are consumable fun, not something anyone expects to be stored in the Library of Congress for future generations because they were so earth-shatteringly insightful.

Yes, AI authored (or assisted) books won't bring us the next Culture books by Iain M. Banks, but the next generic romantasy or self-published military scifi books could very well be. And nobody will notice - or care. It's 200-300 pages of entertainment that hits just the specific itch you had.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/series/151379-ice-planet-barbarian...

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/series/97149-crimson-worlds

Whenever I read something that's LLM generated without knowing it, and it's actually interesting, I have questions for the author. After they read my emails and reply back, I realize that they have no answers for me. It's all because both me and the author are reading the article/story/code for the first time.

worth noting you don't usually read _that_ many books in your lifetime. e.g. 20 a books a year for 40 years is just 800 books

side note: i've noticed people writing with no caps, unusual grammar, splling mistakes, etc. which does differentiate their output from typical llm output - although ofc llms can probably imitate that

I have come across a lot of AI-generated youtube videos lately, most of them about trivialities and clearly aimed at a not very critical audience. A few of them also contained hallucinations.

I think a lot of people might be creating AI generated content, books, videos, etc as a kind of side hustle unfortunately.

This effect will disappear when, instead of having 4-6 big models that everyone uses, we'll have trillions of models with memory / continual learning, each independently developing its own voice / personality, drowning all human expression.

Enjoy this "boring LLM" era while it lasts.

I feel like LLMs could produce some pretty cool fiction - like cranking up the temperature setting like you can with many models to produce nonsensical garbage that isn't even real sentences during a planning stage to end up with some ideas that human writers wouldn't commonly come up with, and then letting a model that is less lobotomized do the actual writing.

The problem is that regardless of all of that RLHF and positivity bias and slop has essentially ruined any and all LLM writing for the foreseeable future: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/ai-slop-is-a-self-inflicted-tra...

In short, the writing could be good if it wasn't fucking bullshit.

English teachers around the world have loathed that "The curtains were blue" meme, and are absolutely right to do so, but what happens when you ask what an author meant by the blue curtains and the answer is a fairly definitive "it's just the probabilistic output of the model the author used, it doesn't mean anything"?

Sure some people are just piggies lining up at the trough to consume content like it's the custard machine from tellitubbies, but the greatest works will be human written, and I don't see that changing. What will change is the discovery mechanism for a book or any art is shot to bits right now, I could see curation of books and reviews becoming much more important.

It's not impossible to skew an LLM into a specific style of writing, one to reflect the author's intentions.

I think that LLMs made everything easier, as in, lowered the barrier. With that, comes a natual inscentive to be lazy, and not implement your style of writing into it. This will mean the production of more "slop" articles but also a chance for great novels with the help of LLMs. As I say, both human and AI slop exists, as well as truly great things from both. Similarly to how before AI, we had "little to no code!" promises, "make your app with no experience", as well as the endless WordPress/"PHP scripts" promising "SEO optimization" and likes from everyone.

Except all these pre LLM methods were limited and could easily be ignored; now the machine can truly get "smarter" and output new content to the point where beginners can truly become something better (or output beginner quality work at mass) with little to no work, exactly as promised before.

What strikes me about (some, or most of, as I see nowadays) Anti AI is that you never really cared about the human before AI, it was all about quality. But only now do you decide to care about the human? If you truly did, won't you have cared about the human before?

I can't tell if I'm getting old, or if this is a reaction purely to people making blog-posts saying they don't like AI, but, I am filled with "who cares?".

Unambiguously the point of view is valid. I don't share it, but whatever.

But why are you writing this, and why is it getting upvoted? We're several years in. Is there new ground being covered here? Is there something special or unique to this take that we haven't read 1,000 times before? Are we doomed to these identical "I don't like it and I need to tell someone" posts forever? Yes, it's a valid view point, but so is not liking Meta, and yet we don't get a "I don't like Meta as a company!!" post upvoted every single day.

I think people read novels because they want to connect with the author on some level. LLM generated text is actually more logically airtight than human writing. For non fiction, I think the information dense LLM style is often better. But human writing leaves space for the reader to breathe. There are gaps scattered throughout.

In that sense, I sometimes feel like logical flaws might actually be a signal of humanity