[YeGoblynQueenne]

Yeah, I miss Terry Pratchett too, but what I miss even most is reading an article and not wondering how much of it was written by AI. Imagine if Terry Pratchett was born in the 2000's and wrote in the 2020's. Well, he wouldn't. That's the thing. Imagine all the future Discworlds we'll never read because nobody ever writes anything anymore, because they've given up, and even if they did write there's so few chances to publish anyway, even before AI.

When there is clearly a huge demand for great stories and writing like Terry Pratchett's then why is it so hard to make a living out of it? And what happens now we made it even harder?

[gorgmah]

I apologize for making you sad, seeing all the comments made me realize that I should have been way less aggressive with the AI proofreading ; I wanted the sentences to feel a bit more Terry Pratchetty and thought a lot of Claude's suggestions were really better than what I had made. I actually agree to your point too

[mohamedkoubaa]

I write science fiction as a hobby and am in writing critique groups. One of the first rules of critiquing writing is not to suggest how to say things, but only to say what a certain phrase made you feel (confusion, boredom, etc).

LLMs harnesses try to make them useful to suggest things, but this is the most destructive thing you can do to a writer. You can work around it by just feeding Claude a writing critique skill.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

You should have done it by hand man. It would have been so much more <3 <3 <3

And Terry Pratchett would have loved it too. Even if it were clumsy.

But thanks for being kind in taking criticism.

[gyomu]

> way less aggressive with the AI proofreading

It’s funny how anytime an article gets called out for being AI slop on HN, the author’s reaction is something like that: “oh yeah sorry I used AI but just for proofreading I swear, I should’ve done just a tiny bit less”.

No one seems to get the message that relying on AI at all is what makes writing shit. Good writers have confidence in what they produce. The fact that you’re willing to incorporate any AI suggestion at all means you’ve already lost the battle.

[probably_wrong]

I'm not a writer but I do write quite a bit for scientific reasons. I'd like to add a small tweak to your comment.

The people I know have no confidence whatsoever in their writing, rewriting and rephrasing the same paragraph over and over until they either run out of time or give up. They also circulate their drafts among colleagues and ask for their opinions too.

It's not the confidence what makes good writing, but rather putting in the work.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

At least in technical writing if your English is not too good you can replace some of it with math formulae and get away with it. Ish.

Tbh my first couple research papers were brutally savaged by reviewers until I spoke to a lady at my university's Academic English department. In fact I was sent there by an internal reviewer who refused to pass my early-stage report otherwise. The lady at the Academic English dept pointed out one thing I was doing and it immediately clicked and I've only got good words about my writing style since.

Know what that One Simple Hack was? I spent my youth writing Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror as a hobby. So naturally when it came to writing papers, I thought, hey, I know how to write. It's like literature.

Shockingly, it is not. Like, at all! In literary writing it's basically sacrilege to write the same thing in the same words twice. In technical writing that is what you must do. Unless you want to confuse everyone about what you mean. So I was trying to make my technical writing "not boring" by not repeating the same expressions and instead finding new, creative ways to refer to the same concepts in different places, and that just made reviewers really angry because they never knew what I meant. I stopped doing that -and also generally tightened up my use of terminology- and that was it. Now every paper gets at least one reviewer that says "this is a well-written paper".

Then they brutally maul me anyway on all the rest, of course but, eh, what can you do :D

P.S. Dunno, maybe "that's a well-written paper" is what everyone says when they're looking for something nice to say before they let rip. I sometimes do it too. People do that all the time, don't they? I had calcific tenonditis and I went to a doctor and he told me "you are really brave, others in your condition would be screaming their heads off" (from the pain). And I remembered that my father had the same thing when I was a kid and he'd gone to a doctor and come back bragging that the doctor told him he was so brave, others would be screaming their heads off. I wish people didn't do that, I'm fine being just like everyone else, honest. Just don't make me doubt my mediocrity, you know?

[amluto]

I’m reasonably sure that one can use AI as a fancy spellcheck plus grammar check — this of it as a copy editor, not a co-author. Even professional authors have beta readers and copy editors.

[atrus]

Is the next Terry Pratchett not writing because AI exists, or because they'll just get accused of being AI?

This is a little like saying no one will ever paint anymore because cameras exist.

It might be harder to make a living off art now (which...debatable), but at no point, ever, was it easy.

[flir]

There was a great story about a helicopter a couple of years ago and the author was basically hounded out of the SFF community. These days, for anything that's written it seems like there's a specially tailored mob waiting to pounce on it. Very hard to go pearl fishing in your own psyche in that environment - best to get a sensitivity reader instead, I wouldn't want to dip my toe in such toxic waters.

[chongli]

"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

-- Yogi Berra

Writing is hard now, not because AI exists, but because there are so many writers out there and everyone's competing for attention, not just with other writers, nor with books from the past, but with all forms of media. Loads of people today, who might otherwise be reading novels for entertainment, are too busy scrolling their phones or watching TikToks or playing video games.

We don't have another Terry Pratchett because all the would-be Terry Pratchetts are toiling in obscurity, and possibly giving up on writing as a result.

[yw3410]

Pratchett himself spent years as a journalist for a local newspaper before Colour of Magic.

These writing jobs in print media have mostly disappeared in the UK. It's certainly harder to make a living as a writer today than it was in the 70's and 80's.

[noir_lord]

There are some writers around who capture some (at least in the humour side) of the essence of what made Pratchett my favourite writer.

The Clovenhoof Series by Heide Goody and Iain Grant gets to Good Omens.

[saghm]

I've seen this point before, and it's a reasonable one, but I think there's an important distinction: some people are interested in seeing paintings in a museum but not photos, and others might be the opposite, and this is fine because it's pretty easy to distinguish between them and people who are operating in one of the missing mediums rarely try to pretend to be producing something from the other. The consensus view on "is this a painting or a photograph" is way more uniform than "is this piece of writing from AI or not", and I think that changes things.

You could totally argue that if people can't tell the difference, it's irrational for them to care which one they get, and I don't totally disagree with that either, but it's not like personal tastes have ever really been a rational thing either. Our ability to enjoy something is the result of a bunch of signals in our brains, and it's not that crazy that adding another signal (or removing one) can change that result in a way that makes it more or less desirable to seek out. Some people might literally like a piece of writing more if they have reason to believe it's from a human than they would if they read the same exact thing but had reason to believe it's from an AI, and while I would find a study showing that as fascinating, I wouldn't see that as an argument that people like the wrong things, because "right" or "wrong" don't really seem like they apply to that sort of thing. If someone told me that knowing there's a human on the other end and that having some sort of indirect, one-way emotional connection to them is an important part of what makes them enjoy it, who am I to tell them that's wrong?

[atrus]

Your points are valid, but they're also on the wrong side of what I'm saying; however, you're speaking from the consuming side, I was talking from the producing side.

AI is never going to stop people from creating new things. Will it make it harder or different to make a living? Sure, but ai isn't the first thing to do that, nor will it be the last.

But making a living off of your art is incredibly, incredibly difficult, and always has been. If AI doubled, or halved, your chances of winning the lottery, it still wouldn't really change your odds of winning.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> AI is never going to stop people from creating new things. Will it make it harder or different to make a living? Sure, but ai isn't the first thing to do that, nor will it be the last.

I concede that I don't have data to base this on but there's plenty of anecdata. AI companies brazenly steal artists' work and reproduce it, and automate its production, without those artists' permission. How is this going to make things not worse for artists? I think you're saying it doesn't matter because it's a drop in the ocean. Well, how did we get to the ocean? How did artists' work get devalued? Maybe it's all the technological advances that everyone brings up in those conversations, to justify the use of yet another one to do the work that until recently only human artists could do: photography, typography, CAD, computer graphics etc etc. Maybe the more we automate the more we take away from the value of artists' work, and that's why we're where we are now, where if you're an artist, you better find a day job?

I used to write a lot as a teenager. Hours and hours spent writing and overwriting, and correcting, and re-writing, drafts upon drafts. In Greek, mind, because that's my native language. I once passed some drafts to a big-name literary critic who was controversial for having said once that Kazantzakis had no talent; and he told me "write! Because you have talent!". He told me I got talent and he called Kazantzakis talent-less. What.

But of course I didn't become a professional writer. I didn't even try. I mean I kind of almost half-tried but it was obvious I could never write what I wanted (sci-fi and horror mainly with a smattering of fantasy) and still make a living. Not least because it was all written in Greek and those genres don't have a huge following in Greece. Or didn't back when I was a teenager, it's probably a bit better now. But still not enough to make a living out of. I could tell. Bad idea. Find a day job.

And then I got a job ...writing. Code. Ahem.

But I mean I'm bitching about the fact that we keep making all this new tech and none of it seems to make the life of artists any easier, and why not? Don't we all want to enjoy good art? Who's going to make it? Even if we replace human artists now, who's going to train the AI of the future to make new art, once the recombinations of the art they're already trained on stops being interesting? We enjoy novelty, right?

[npinsker]

Your English writing seems to be quite excellent as well.

We have to draw the line somewhere with art, of course, and that usually comes down to a combination of what consumers value, and broader perceived cultural merit. Nobody really cares about the well-being of artists who specialize in making pretty paper airplanes, or drawing pictures using only the MSPaint pencil brush.

I think the audience, not the tools, deserve the most scrutiny here. Look around at this very thread, and all the people defending what the LLM wrote. Their feelings can't be argued with. But they make me feel sad and alienated, because I see a vast difference, so vast and so obvious, and they see none at all.

In the future, perhaps people will enjoy LLM work -- genuinely enjoy it -- as much as I've enjoyed Vonnegut or more. It may be the inevitable result of a broader cultural shift away from reading and writing. I guess with time, maybe we'll find out how valuable it actually is to have a strong command of one's language... I imagine, at least, people today are much better at other things to compensate.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Your English writing seems to be quite excellent as well.

Gosh! Thanks!

>> In the future, perhaps people will enjoy LLM work -- genuinely enjoy it -- as much as I've enjoyed Vonnegut or more. It may be the inevitable result of a broader cultural shift away from reading and writing. I guess with time, maybe we'll find out how valuable it actually is to have a strong command of one's language... I imagine, at least, people today are much better at other things to compensate.

I guess there's been a cultural shift away from literacy and towards technological prowess and science, at least in the anglophone world in the last couple decades? It seems so to me but I think it might be because I, myself, turned to tech and science, and away from literature, in that time.

What I remember from my school years is that most kids treated reading and writing as a chore. If I think about it, besides myself, there were just one or maybe two other kids I knew who read books other than what the school recommended, and for our own pleasure. I was the only kid I knew who wrote *.

Which is weird because, at a certain level, everyone can write, right? Like, at a certain level, everyone can sing, and if they really put themselves into it, most people can sing pretty decently after all. I would think it's the same with writing. There's plenty of people who write stuff, in the press, in books, online, for movies or theater etc. I always thought that was the main weakness of choosing a career as a writer: you do not have a moat. And like you suggest, taste is subjective so sometimes all you have to do to make a living as a writer is to capture the zeitgeist or get lucky.

Take J. K. Rowling as an example. I've absolutely read all of the Harry Potter series, but the writing is atrocious, the plot is trite and the world-building is unoriginal and shallow. Yet she's ... what, the best selling author ever or something like that? Like I say way above, people really want to read good stories. Or even not that good stories.

Will that change? I really don't think so. But will authors be replaced with chatbots? Will we all end up asking our favourite chatbot to generate a story like we want it? That makes me sad, too, and I feel like something will be lost that we don't want lost. But ... who knows. I also think we've lost something the way everyone is constantly on their phones now, but that's how the world works. Things change. Sometimes it's hard to see that they really change for the better.

__________________

* Although other kids were possibly at it but where too shy to share. I was... not a shy kid.

[veidr]

i miss smart people writing blog posts

that stopped after twitter

and went asymptotically downhill from there

approaching, but never quite literally getting to the point of eating a dog shit sandwich

(despite the same nauseous feeling and bad taste in your mouth)

[simonw]

I frequently joke with people that the reason I have influence in the AI world is that I'm blogging like it's the early 2000s, when everyone else gave up on blogging as a medium.

It's only partly a joke.

[veidr]

And, haven't you also been doing so since around the turn of the millennium?

So, you might also be repped writ large in their their training data...

  (;^_^)

[throwaway27448]

Substack is thriving, btw. Curiously I simply have less desire to read the thoughts of "smart" people than ever. Either write a proper book or distract me from the horrors of the world.

[veidr]

yeah, but substack is mostly just another twitter low-engagement farm

also, your last-line worldview... i mean i get it, but...

just basically sounds like the twitter origin story (T_T)

[st3phvee]

> but substack is mostly just another twitter low-engagement farm

That, plus it's also full to the brim with LinkedIn-esque AI slop. There are still some decent writers there, for sure, but Substack is going downhill fast as more grifters join the platform in the hopes of making a quick, easy buck.

[throwaway27448]

How are you using it such that you even encounter writers you don't know?

[st3phvee]

Via Substack's own recommendation algorithm, Substack Notes, and by perusing the leaderboards, both of which have been a thing on the platform for a while now. Substack's social media side is very Twitter-esque. Writers you follow "restack" publications (some of which are full of AI slop, unbeknownst to the restacker) and the algorithm also inserts "writers" you haven't encountered into your feed. ("Writers" is in scare quotes for a reason.)

[gessha]

Just like how the small web never disappeared, people writing will not disappear. Your ability to find them will be impeded but it won’t be impossible.

[booleandilemma]

Stop, you're making me sad :(

[YeGoblynQueenne]

:(

[singpolyma3]

We've not had an economy that rewarded doing things people want or need within my lifetime. Possibly we never did

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

Wait, that doesn't make sense. Are you saying you don't want or need any man-made thing? I assure you, many, many people were rewarded for designing, building, and selling the things you need and want to live your modern life.

[pastel8739]

However, I think it’s true that many more people were rewarded (likely even more) for things that people do not want. Facebook, etc

[singpolyma3]

Indeed I do need such things. The fact that reward does not accrue to those who provide it feels strange