[jorvi]

To me the magic is in generating things that would have had too much right issues or would not have been economically viable.

A series that is a variant of the stories of “The Wire”, but taking place in the Harry Potter universe? Coming right up.

Obscure prog rock band from the 90s put out one album? Now its two.

I can understand people their apprehension, feeling like art is losing something essential without the human touch behind it, but I saw an article a few days ago where people thought generated Shakespeare was better than actual Shakespeare. Until it was revealed which was generated.

If AI can generate me another, better Illmatic, I’m all here for it.

[Freak_NL]

The conclusion to draw there is that Shakespeare honestly doesn't make for very good reading today unless you are also delving into the historical context or considering the major impact of his works on humanity's culture from the arts to language. LLM generated output has none of that.

'Ah ha! LLMs are better than Shakespeare!' is a meaningless statement.

Besides, no one reads Shakespeare for pleasure; there is no need to generate more. ;)

[vundercind]

I bet you could get a random person off the street to fairly-consistently pick (curated) AI works over an amalgamated top-5 of great jazz recordings selected by jazz super-fans.

> Besides, no one reads Shakespeare for pleasure

Exactly (kind of). Lots of rewarding works take effort to learn to appreciate, for a bunch of reasons that may include (as in Shakespeare's case) that they're old and their context and vernacular is not ours. Lots of people (I'd say a large majority, in my experience) dismiss entire genres and forms of art that they weren't heavily exposed to as children, often going so far as to judge them bad, simply because it would take some time and effort to learn how to enjoy them and to be able to discern what's good or remarkable about a given work.

What proportion of the population has ever in their lives enjoyed the experience of reading a Shakespeare play? Even once? It's gotta be tiny. Of course you can get them to choose AI junk over Shakespeare, it's not a kind of thing they understood or enjoyed to begin with, in most cases.