[Aditya_Garg]

I’ve said this many times before

AI is just a tool

If you used a fancy auto bake cake machine instead of an oven, you still get to claim that you made the cake.

100 years ago someone would be making the claim that using an oven to make cakes “doesn’t count”

All AI did was raise the bar

It’s quite clear here that the author spent a lot of time on this so he absolutely gets credit as the author

[Wowfunhappy]

I think there's a distinction.

Imagine if you had an auto cake making machine that decides on its own the best time to make cake. It adds the ingredients, stirs, turns the oven on, and leaves the finished cake on the counter for you.

People start opening bakeries consisting entirely of cakes baked by the automatic machines. The owners of these machines have no idea whether the cakes have a bit too much flour or were slightly over-stirred. In some cases, they haven't even tried the cakes.

Who gets to claim they made the cake?

By contrast, there are others who carefully tune their machines to make sure everything is perfect. They adjust the mixing settings and ingredient proportions. They experiment and iterate. They taste test throughout the process. And what they give to the public tastes every bit as good as a homemade cake.

The first group is creating slop. The second group, I think, is baking. And OP is in the second group.

[withinboredom]

Replace "oven" with a dish washer or a washing machine for your clothes. Those things do exactly all of this. Yet we still complain about washing clothes and doing the dishes, even though it is far less effort than anything our parents did, or their parents before them.

[fzeroracer]

If you commission a baker to bake you a cake, did you make the cake? What if you added sprinkles on top?

[vintermann]

If you commission a baker, another person, with wants and desires of their own, is involved.

If you use an AI, there isn't.

Either way, it's clear that the author (yes, the author) put a lot of work into this by iterating and shaping it to what he wanted, and that's a lot more than sprinkles.

[fzeroracer]

> If you commission a baker, another person, with wants and desires of their own, is involved.

> If you use an AI, there isn't.

What is the functional difference here? You are commissioning (see: prompting) someone (see: an AI) for a piece of work, or artwork or whatever. The output is out of your control; and I don't think the existence or lack thereof of a human on the other end materially matters.

If we had hyper-advanced ovens from The Jetsons where we could type a prompt using a fold-out keyboard and it would magically generate whatever cake we ask of it: did we or did we not bake that cake? And I do not think it is clear the author put a lot of work iterating and shaping it into what he wanted; we have zero insight into that.

[vintermann]

I didn't say the difference was functional. If you don't think the presence of a human on the other end matters (materially or not), feel free to continue this conversation with an LLM simulation of me. You can even prompt it so that you logically triumph and convince "me".

[fzeroracer]

I'm asking you to explain what the actual difference is and you're avoiding the question.

If we had a complete black box where you submitted Prompt and out came Thing, and you had zero clue what said black box actually did, could you claim creation over Thing? What does knowing that it's a human vs LLM make materially different in terms of whether or not you created it?

[vintermann]

And I - or did I turn this thread over to an LLM already? - am asking you a question in return, whose answer should give you the answer you want.

[tripzilch]

No please, I also agree with parent poster. Talk to the LLM, cause the human ain't listening.

[intended]

Eh.

Why would I give him the same credit I would give a writer.

Or why would I give a writer the same credit I would give someone who created the AI prompts and scaffolding to generate this?

Being unhappy about not being able to call oneself an author, ends up betraying a lack of confidence in the work or process.

In the end writer, dancer, actor, whatever - these titles come from their impact.

There will be a different name for this, and eventually there will be something made that is good enough that people will be spell bound. At which point its going to be named something else.

At which point.

[ijk]

Ironically, the story can be read as gesturing in that direction, as it's ostensibly about giving a new title to a particular job.

In general, though, I think part of the mistake people keep making is that they try to imitate what would be value to engage with if a human wrote it, in an attempt to claim the role of an author of a book or whatever. There's likely artforms that are unique to what an LLM can facilitate, but trying to imitate human artforms is going to give you stunted results. The AI is very good at imitating the form but not the substance.

Once we stop trying to generate and pass off AI essays, novels, choose your own adventure stories, and all the other human genres as being human writing, we'll have a chance to figure out actually interesting artistic forms.

[intended]

Yes. In the end what mattered truly was the expression.

However - since we are humans - we also care about the artist.

Creating something without the effort previous works involved, can and do affect the context and understanding of it.

Hah - just thought of one good example: how would people feel about talking to only fans creators, if they didn’t know it was AI.

[chii]

> Creating something without the effort previous works involved, can and do affect the context and understanding of it

not really. Unless you place value on _effort_, rather than be objectively outcome based. Someone digging a hole with a spoon doesn't make it a better hole than a jackhammer.

I maintain that the work itself - that is, the contents of what is being expressed - is the sole judgement of how good the works is. Not the authorship, LLM-usage or otherwise.

[intended]

Eh, by that same argument, how would LLMs fair when the content of the work itself is about “Something made by a human”.

A core fact about information, is that signal only exists in the right context.

As an illustrative example: A string of static or gibberish numbers converts to signal when we have the right tools to interpret it.

You could see a bunch of rocks arranged on a beach, while someone who understands the local language may see an SOS.

Culture itself keeps evolving, and teenagers reuse language to create jargon that makes sense to them, but is opaque to others.

I am arguing that your point is true, but its phrasing focuses on the Platonic ideal, and avoiding the messy practical context of communication.

[chii]

The context exists whether it's LLM generated or not, because the context sits broadly in society, culture, and manifests in the mind of the reader.

> how would LLMs fair when the content of the work itself is about “Something made by a human”.

it would fair just as well as if the same words had been written by a human, provided the contents are sound and has good meaning - conversely, slop is slop, regardless if it was written by an LLM or human.

My point at the grandparent post is that there's a lot of blind discrimination on the origin of a works - if it was written by or with the help of LLM, then it automatically deserves less attention, and/or its content's worth diminished. All without actually discussing the content.