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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.
[1] https://hpmor.com/notes/progress-14-05-01/
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.
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.
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).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
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 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
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.
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.
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
People want tropes, sure, but that's not the same as wanting trash; our culture is built on satisfying narratives treading well-worn paths, and there's a skill to it. Pratchett, for example, was only able to do what he did because he was deliberately playing with existing expectations; his work wouldn't exist without the stuff you denigrate to build off.
For example the good old Harlequin books were pretty much trash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlequin_Enterprises
But when the expectation is trash, they deliver. They're the Hallmark Movies of books. It's not Citizen Kane, but sometimes you just want a predictable plot of a big city girl coming back to her home town and falling in love with the rugged local man.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Enjoy this "boring LLM" era while it lasts.
I think a lot of people might be creating AI generated content, books, videos, etc as a kind of side hustle unfortunately.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
Why do people write personal blogs? Why do some people read them? Why some people discuss those personal writings on- or even offline? Why do we write? Why do we do anything at all? Why do monkeys hang on trees and go yak tak?
Maybe AI boosting is just a collective Death Wish where we hope for some lobotomised barely existing humanity, where machines in loving grace write poetry of deers strolling past peacefully, and do everything else we humans used to.
In that sense, I sometimes feel like logical flaws might actually be a signal of humanity
I suspect readers keen for the latest installment of "Clive Cussler's MacGuffin Files" or [Cover picture of nerdy, barely legal girl gazing adoringly at buff, smug, confident dude] will happily welcome their LLM overlords, without noticing any difference at all.
There will come a time, very soon, where you wont be able to tell the difference, and what then?
People have been saying this for a while, and--particularly with long-form fiction--we're not getting any closer.
We'll stop buying new books, sticking to things written before 2022.