[thwarted]

> I think this is similar to AI generated images: it puts a new creative tool in the hands of people who might have had good ideas, but didn't have a mastery of the medium.

Reading this sentence reminded me of the classic HN position of "ideas are worthless, what matters is the execution", usually mentioned in the context of an "ideas person" looking for their "technical cofounder" and the ideas person thinking they deserve at least 50%, often more, of the ownership of what would be built because without them there'd be no idea.

> if you had a great idea for a sci-fi story but no talent for writing, and if an LLM let you realize your vision, that's neat.

If your "vision" is only the "idea for a sci-fi story", is that really a vision? Good books leave the reader changed/influenced in some fashion, through the way the idea is presented and developed over the course of the story, not just from a blurb on the book jacket.

> overall, more creativity is hardly a bad thing.

Is coming up with an idea for a for a sci-fi story the meat of creative act such that that flooding the market with ideas counts as an increase in creativity overall?

[vunderba]

Agreed. Have a read through the 10 dragon stories - the majority of them are rich in spices, but bereft otherwise.

LLMs seem to revel in throwing layer after layer of decorative paint in the hope that people will fail to notice that they're not actually painting anything.

As a writer, the best advice that I can give is to build your house upon the rock and not upon the sand.

[thwarted]

> LLMs seem to revel in throwing layer after layer of decorative paint in the hope that people will fail to notice that they're not actually painting anything.

Length or duration is considered, erroneously IMO, to be a measure of completeness or thoroughness. Pithiness is valuable, and is a skill that can be honed. I guess padding out your writing using an LLM is equivalent to adjusting the font size and margins on a "three page essay" to meet the minimum requirements.

[d0100]

> If your "vision" is only the "idea for a sci-fi story", is that really a vision?

We have art, games and movie directors

AI just enables anyone to be a "director", but most people can't direct anything worthwhile

[kronatus]

I agree with your point that most of us probably couldn't direct much worthwhile, but surely art/game/movie directors have more than an "idea". Granted the only creative directors that I know of are the ones that did an exceptional job, so that might be a skewed perspective. I guess my objection is largely that the creative process is the fumbling around, treating LLMs as a shortcut to a creative product because you "haven't mastered the medium" is skipping the whole creative process; if you haven't bothered to fail at it, why should I be bothered to read it?

[cgriswald]

I use AI to generate lists of ideas. And then, if my idea is in the list I know it’s at best not novel and at worst cliche. There are many short cuts like this that aid the process but aren’t replacing it with dreck.

[perching_aix]

It's also not a static process. It is reasonable to expect that through interaction with AI, just like through the usage of any tool, people can get better at this. Especially since AI can explain people concepts about the thing they're trying to make, teaching them about it, even if it cannot apply them consistently at scale on its own.

[colechristensen]

Having tried to use AI as a technical cofounder (in small scale experiments), nah it's not there yet. It's more like having a herd of interns. With close supervision there can be a lot of productivity but without a good deal of taste and expertise it's just going to be garbage unless you're very lucky.

[hyperadvanced]

I also think that just having “an idea” isn’t exactly the same as increasing net creativity. Oftentimes with art, the impact of something truly creative results in changing the parameters of the medium or genre itself, not merely sticking to the script and producing a new work in the style of X. If you take, for example, J Dilla and his impact on hip-hop, the fact that there’s an entire subgenre or two focused on some of his hallmark innovations (micro-rhythm/wonky beats, neo-soul, lofi sampling/creative use of samples) speaks to that kind of “real” creativity. I frankly think that kind of genre-bending is possible with the use of LLMs, but if you just say, “here’s my story idea, make it so”, without any eye towards the actual technique or craft, you won’t be getting the next Blood Meridian out of it.

[voidhorse]

I completely agree. If nothing else, the discourse around LLM use in the creative space has just shown me that many people in technology simply have little to no comprehension of the arts and humanities and have no clue what it is that artists actually do, or even how to intelligently engage with artistic works. The 20th cen transformation of art into time-filling idle entertainment by way of mass media has been a great success. The internet helped reset some of that, but not by much. I guess that shouldn't necessarily be surprising, but I am always kind of astonished at the fact that our society has produced a large number of specialists who are profoundly good at what they do but who clearly lack exposure to other spheres of life.

[thwarted]

> the discourse around LLM use in the creative space has just shown me that many people in technology simply have little to no comprehension of the arts and humanities and have no clue what it is that artists actually do, or even how to intelligently engage with artistic works

While shitting on "people in technology" is the pastime du jour, the technologists may be boosters, but non-technical, non-creative people also have "little to no comprehension of the arts and humanities and have no clue what it is that artists actually do, or even how to intelligently engage with artistic works". And that's because they are mainly consumers of the creative output.

[voidhorse]

Your point being? The characteristics of that group have no bearing on my claims about the other group. Non-technical people are not the ones, by the way, actively pushing forward technologies that directly compete with small time artists.

I'm a "technical person" myself. I'm not shitting on us, I'm just stating what I've perceived to be the case. Maybe instead of getting upset and trying to absolve ourselves because some other group is "just as bad" a better response is to encourage us to learn more and understand people better before we actively try to disrupt their livelihoods.

[hyperadvanced]

I am a musician, visual artist, and software engineer. I think the other guy is correct insofar as most (American) engagement with art has more in common with pigs and troughs than it does with grand ideas and novel concepts that depart from convention. I additionally agree that as a software creator, you shouldn’t make things that destroy culture or cause mass psychic damage. I think LLM and social media do both presently

[xenotux]

I think that's an odd way of viewing creativity: unless you can pull off the whole thing, you're not really creative/

What about people who are not native speakers? Who are dyslexic? Do we deny them the spark of creativity because they can't write perfect prose without help? Heck, what about most sci-fi writers? Their editors often do a lot of heavy lifting to make the final product good.

If you have a killer idea for a meme or a really clever concept of a four-panel comic strip, but don't know how to use Photoshop or can't draw very well, is it a sin to ask a machine to help? Is your idea somehow worthless just because you previously couldn't do that?

I'm not disputing that a lot of people don't use these tools this way. In fact, that was exactly my point. If your "idea" is to crank out deceptive drivel, I'm not defending that.

[thwarted]

> Do we deny them the spark of creativity because they can't write perfect prose without help?

If you don't create anything, you're not being creative. My assertion is that just coming up with an idea is not sufficient to create something; an idea alone isn't manifest. An idea without expression, in whatever medium, isn't very useful.

Why does prose need to be "perfect" (whatever that means) in order for the act of writing to be "creative"? Much poetry isn't "perfect prose", and that it doesn't follow a known, accepted grammatical standard is often its defining quality as poetry.

Have you created a joke if you just think of it (the "idea") and it is never told to anyone (the "execution")?

Have you created a joke if someone is exposed to it but they don't laugh? (You may have created something by telling it to someone, but it probably isn't a joke if no one finds it funny, and delivery is a good portion of what can make a joke funny, and delivery is part of the execution).

If your intent is to exercise your creativity by writing a book, but all you do is come up with an idea and have an LLM write it, did you write a book? If you intend to write a joke and say "it would be funny if we had a joke for this" and someone else comes up with a joke, did you write the joke because you had the idea of it?

> If you have a killer idea for a meme or a really clever concept of a four-panel comic strip, but don't know how to use Photoshop or can't draw very well, is it a sin to ask a machine to help?

Asking for help isn't a sin (nor do I know why one would use that word). But claiming you did something that you didn't do is a lie, and lying is a sin.

If it's the idea that is killer, then the quality of the output doesn't matter as long as the idea is communicated, so one's ability with Photoshop isn't relevant. A well drawn four-panel comic doesn't turn a shit idea into gold. But a lot of meme gold isn't gold because of the quality of drawing — which means you don't need to draw to some arbitrarily high standard to produce meme gold. The assertions that somehow it's not creative unless it's "perfect" and the use of an LLM can result in "perfection" are ideas that have to die.

> Is your idea somehow worthless just because you previously couldn't do that?

Well, my original observation at the top of the thread is that HN has considered ideas to be largely worthless if they don't have meaningful execution. In the case of writing — books, jokes, or memes — expression is the execution.