[slibhb]

> In my mind, it's pretty simple: I'm a human, LLMs are not. If a human writes a novel, it's inherently worth more.

While I appreciate you laying it out so plainly, I disagree. A novel is a bunch of words and I don't care if they were written by one person, five, an AI, or infinite monkeys on typewriters. What's valuable in a novel (or a poem) is in the words.

[dml2135]

Wow, I could not disagree with this more. What’s valuable about a novel is the social relationships it fosters, both in relation to the author, and also all the others that have read it. I read a book to better understand what other people are thinking, how they see the world — both directly from the author, and indirectly, in discovering what other readers may have found valuable.

I can maybe understand finding value in a machine-written novel if others also read it and enjoyed it, but having an LLM spit out a novel and reading it in isolation, that would be a complete waste of time to me.

[ericfr11]

What if the original idea/concept was from a human, who used an LLM to extend and write the book?

[beej71]

For me in that case, I'd value the story but not the writing. I want to know that a human has had the experience of writing what I am having the experience reading.

If I find out after the fact that an AI wrote it, the writing becomes bland, like a magic trick exposed.

[slibhb]

It seems to me that you don't like reading (which is fine). Some people enjoy reading words strung together in a certain way. The value comes from the simple relationship between the text and the reader, not on some kind of social connection.

[beej71]

It seems to be that you don't appreciate the relationship between the author and the reader and the author and the text, which is fine, but is a bit tragic.

Not that I doubt that one day people will simply gather around the AI infinite story creation bot. They just won't know what they're missing. :(

[mapontosevenths]

I once read Ben Franklin's autobiography. I have yet to experience any great blossoming of our relationship.

More seriously, the novel is a unidirectional medium of communication. Not a relationship. That said, it is meant to convey a perspective. I don't care if it's a human, a robot, or a little green man's perspective. It just has to be an interesting, useful, or enlightening perspective that I didn't already share.

Right now LLM's don't really have unique perspectives, that may change. So I withhold judgement. As of today, I wouldn't read an LLM's novel. In 10 years, who knows?

[beej71]

> I once read Ben Franklin's autobiography. I have yet to experience any great blossoming of our relationship.

I've also read it, and got to know the man that much better. It especially added a great deal of texture to the experience of visiting his home site, his church, and his grave.

I'd argue that humans rarely have unique perspectives, being highly influenced by their environment and experience. And have we not seen AI coming up with novel math?

I don't think unique perspectives are necessarily the compelling part. I think the words are just a medium for thoughts. AI only produces the former, not the latter.

That's my relationship with Ben Franklin. It's not that I read what he wrote; it's that I know what he thought.

[mapontosevenths]

> I think the words are just a medium for thoughts. AI only produces the former, not the latter.

I think this is exactly what I was trying to say above when I talked about perspective Reading is a form of telepathy, and there's just nothing INSIDE of most AI writing today. When that changes, I'll take it more seriously. I do suspect that it will very soon though.

As you say, AI's are already coming up with novel math and I've seen some glimmers of purely mechanical brilliance in the writing already.

[slibhb]

When you read a book, you hypothesize a writer and have some kind of inner relationship with the hypothetical writer. But it's not a real relationship. It's in the words, not outside them.

[confidantlake]

Ah I always felt like novels were a partnership in a way. He is putting down words and I am using that to create a world in my mind. 2 people reading the same novel are creating 2 different worlds.

[mapontosevenths]

I've always been fond of calling it telepathy. That's really what it is. Further, it can even let us see into the minds of the long dead. Humanities superpower is that it is the only race which can preserve knowledge beyond a single lifespan.

With LLM's we can also now preserve actual thought patterns and skills beyond a single lifespan. I can't wait to see what the future brings.

[jagenabler2]

Reading is beautiful because of language's inability to fully capture emotion and reality. Every author tries to tell a story in the way they think captures their perspective best. Every author and book you read is a different perspective on the world that shapes your own.

Reading writing from an LLM loses all that. It's just words, there is no expression. It's literally the most boring parts of reading.

[dml2135]

I love reading, and I was explaining precisely why I love it.

[dwaltrip]

Ironic, as you didn’t read their comment…

> The value comes from the simple relationship between the text and the reader

This is not some universal truth, yet you state it as such.

People can get different things from a text.

[runarberg]

You do care though. You may not think you care but you absolutely do. If somebody tells you that in the Hood canal west of Seattle, there is a population of endangered tree octopuses, who are unique among octopuses in that they climb up to land and lay their eggs under fallen tree trunks in old growth forests, and that they are now endangered because road construction is cutting their access to the old growth forests, so they cannot lay more eggs.

You would care about that story, until you found out that this story is a lie, an old April’s fools joke that escaped confinement. The words are the same, but your reactions to the exact words have changed with new information about the source.

When we read personal stories it affects our emotions as we empathize with the author, or otherwise share the feelings that the author is trying to convey. When we find out there is no such author, our empathy and our notion of shared feelings vanishes with the new information even though the words stay the same.

[sodapopcan]

> You do care though. You may not think you care but you absolutely do.

This is something I have a lot of trouble explaining and generally don't try to because I've never actually studied this or anything. So I can only go from my 45 years experiencing of experiencing art along with others.

Of course if you are just putting on music to work to, this isn't going to matter much if at all, but...

Generally people do really seem to care about the person behind something they are experiencing. The simplest example I can give is one of those extremely well shot photos that very few people have taken from a sitting position of their feet dangling off a massive building. I would have a very hard time believing anyone claiming that such a photo wouldn't give them very different feelings if they knew it was a real person v not. Again, this is the simplest example I can think of but I think it goes much deeper with all sorts of art, ie, most people to some degree are attempting experiencing art through the person who created it whether they "know" it or not. This is evident when presented with something they don't like and say something like, "Who would make this?"

[slibhb]

Your example hinges on whether a bunch of words is true, not on how they came to be written.

> When we read personal stories it affects our emotions as we empathize with the author, or otherwise share the feelings that the author is trying to convey. When we find out there is no such author, our empathy and our notion of shared feelings vanishes with the new information even though the words stay the same.

This isn't true for me. If I read an incredibly moving poem and later learned that it was written by someone casting the I Ching and picking words out of a hat, it would not affect how I felt about the poem.

[dolebirchwood]

> You would care about that story

No, I wouldn't. I don't live in Seattle, and I don't care about octopi. Why project what you think a reader cares about?

[horsawlarway]

Generally speaking - I agree with you. Source bias is a real logical fallacy, and failing to evaluate the content itself, regardless of the source, is a problematic view of the world.

In the same way that I don't need the lumber in my house "hand sawed" for it to achieve my goal of creating a habitable space.

---

But more broadly, I do think there's space to at least question the use and role of AI.

Because while content can (and should) be addressed directly, there's a valid meta-conversation about the intent of producing content, and the results producing that content might have.

What goal does producing this content achieve?

What is the role of this content in society?

Is this content, on this scale, an appropriate thing to be making?

These are MUCH harder questions - often because we've shifted from concrete (content) to abstract (value judgements).

To go back to my housing analogy: We're no longer evaluating the benefits of hand-sawed vs power sawed timber. We're discussing whether our housing is built in the right spots, if we're building enough of it, and are we allocating it in the right ways.

[tines]

> Source bias is a real logical fallacy

This is irrelevant because we’re not using the source to judge the strength of an argument. Logical fallacies have only to do with the strength of a logical argument, nothing else.

To illustrate this, if I sell you some energy and you ask whether the energy comes from burning children or from a solar farm, I can’t say that it’s a logical fallacy for you to care because all energy powers your home just the same. You don’t owe any consideration to the content (energy) at all, because energy is not an argument that is subject to the source fallacy, to treat it as such is a fundamental category error.

Even to take your tack and say “We should consider the energy generated from burning children apart from its source, because we don’t want to fall prey to the source fallacy. However, the societal effects should also be taken into consideration…” shouldn’t be countenanced.

[beej71]

There's a road in California that is the last hand-built road made in the state. Nothing special about it, in particular (aside from the terrifying, exposed drop), otherwise.

But since I know the human history of the road, it _feels_ different when I'm on it than other machine-built roads.

It's the same in a hand-made house. Knowing the human labor gives the house a different vibe.

If we look at 10 paintings and one was painted by a human master artist, it becomes, to me, more impressive than the AI works, even if it isn't the award-winner.

These sentiments are incredibly subjective, of course. Some people simply feel no difference between a hand-made brick and a machine-made brick other than the latter is likely cheaper and of higher material quality.

But for those of us looking for the indescribable _soul_ of the work, we fail to find it in those produced by machine.

I just visited Lowell National Park and watched the mechanical looms in action. The cloth they produced was blandly soulless, like all the cloth we use and wear and discard. The loom itself, on the other hand, was a hand-built mechanical work of art, and felt amazingly _human_ by compassion.

This isn't something we tend to value in the US, though. The closest we get is people hanging their kids' childhood art on the walls and buying custom art at great expense to increase social standing. And a few support-your-indy-artist types.

[pixl97]

>it _feels_ different when I'm on it than other machine-built roads.

Well, because roads are hard to build and take a lot of energy, it's going to be way narrower, curvier, and hillier. The guy shoveling out rocks all day would have gladly switched the shovel for a bulldozer.

But all of these value statements about value statements are kind of ignoring the Moloch problem in the corner of the room. What becomes the purpose of humans in a world of automation? At our current rate, it's being exterminated under the boots of corporations that swallow up all the value in the universe. The conversation of "How can things be made better for all humankind" seems to have disappeared after the greed is good conversation won.

[Forgeties79]

I care because it’s not personal, it’s not informed by lived experience, etc. It has no meaning. AI “novels” are just facsimiles of other people’s writings assembled in a way that appears new, but ultimately it’s just an approximation of a person writing a book. Their’s no author intent or context of any kind to consider. It removes core pillars of experiencing literature.

I don’t want a mathematical approximation of writing informed by feelings, knowledge, experiences, etc. anymore than I would want to see an “AI band” perform just because the music is supposedly great. There’s no personality, there’s nothing personal period.

[horsawlarway]

while I understand this argument - I think it consistently falls down when compared to the types of content that are generally purchased and consumed.

I'd argue that most folks get plenty of value from the content itself, entirely separate from the intent, context, or even existence of the author.

I don't care about the motivations of the director to enjoy an action movie. I don't care about the life history of the author to enjoy a good fiction.

I think there is (and should be) space for content where people care, but I'd suggest it's the fringes (ex - majority of music is production grade pop, not meaningful songs, majority of books sales are erotic fiction, etc).

[buttercraft]

> I don't care about the life history of the author to enjoy a good fiction.

But the fiction is a product of the author's lived experiences. If the author had lived a different life, they would have written a different book. Or none at all. Without life experience, where would stories even come from? Why would they matter at all?

[Forgeties79]

> types of content that are generally purchased and consumed.

This is the entire issue though. We’ve boiled creation down to “consumable content” like we are all in a boardroom talking market strategy. I am reading a book to enrich my life. Yes I enjoy popcorn entertainment and “low brow“ stuff, not everything needs to be Citizen Kane, but what does it say about us if we’re willing to just sit around “consuming” LLM content which is just facsimiles of actual creation by real people? What is the point when we have more “content to consume” than ever before? It’s just saturating us with impersonal stuff lazily achieved by scraping the real thing and prompting until it outputs something acceptable. Why is the person even making it? The answer unfortunately is almost always “a quick buck,” so I’m not sold.

What is the point of reading a middling fantasy book that a person didn’t even create when there are already likely countless fantasy books in existence/being written right now?

[pixl97]

>What is the point of

Anything.

While I subscribe to an absurdist viewpoint rather than the nihilists, attempting to take an objective view on what one should consume is a difficult and most likely completely incorrect task.

The entire talk of should we mass product LLM crap generally side tracks the discussion of 'how can we create a world where everyone can consume mindless crap instead of endless toil'.

[sodapopcan]

> I don't care about the motivations of the director to enjoy an action movie. I don't care about the life history of the author to enjoy a good fiction.

...and you don't need to know those things, that's insane. But you very likely are, even (not so) subconsciously, questioning some of these things.

[sorokod]

novel is a bunch of words

or even a bunch of characters, bunch of pixels and so on.

To me this is the wrong level of abstraction that is not sufficient to encode the meaning of literature.

[ThrowawayR2]

LLMs are inherently backward looking; their training corpus consists of existing works and their ability to extrapolate is ultimately constrained by that corpus. However powerful their proponents claim them to be, they aren't powerful enough to predict the evolution of human society and culture as a whole.

Changes to that corpus that reflect the real world are going to come from incorporating future works created by humans. (LLM generated training data can reinforce fidelity to the current corpus but don't alter it.) The future still belongs to human creativity.

[platevoltage]

Completely untrue. Stephen King has a loyal following. These same people aren't going to pick up a generic scary book written by a machine. This goes for music as well.

[pton_xd]

> A novel is a bunch of words

> What's valuable in a novel (or a poem) is in the words.

Even if the words are a lie? Misleading? False?

I'm not even talking about LLMs. What if it's propaganda designed to influence your thinking, possibly against your own interests; are those still valuable words that you'd cherish reading?

My point is that the source matters, intent matters, and authenticity matters. To me, anyway.

[brainwad]

Most (all?) good novels are propaganda designed to influence your thinking.

If a machine could truly provoke thoughts as well as a human author, then yeah it'd be worth reading its work, too.

[drdeca]

I think there is both value that comes from the work being authored by a human, and value which does not?

[idiotsecant]

Good news! I have so many words for sale. Humans spend so much time trying to put them together in 'meaningful' ways. I take all the hassle out of it! Dirt cheap! Billions of words! How many would you like?

[tumdum_]

Reading a book is a way to peek into author's mind. There is nothing to peek into when the book is generated by llm.