[altmanaltman]

At some point, and I think the article hints at it, the real difference will be substance. No matter how it changes its writing style, a lot of problems with it are more about the fact that it usually says nothing. Even if it wrote like your favorite author, if there is no substance, there is no reward as a reader (maybe even as a writer).

Overall, i think its kind of useless to think of ai writing as bad because of ai writing quirks but rather because they imply low effort and a lack of interest even by the writer. That cannot be fixed no matter how they change their syntax and style.

For example, I recently spent 2 weeks researching Bruce Lee to write an article on his image and how society compressed it into this warrior monk guy. I could put the idea as a prompt and put in my exact writing style but its output will just be a reiteration of already common knowledge instead of the actual efforts I made researching all of it + having my own idea of the topic. I use AI a lot even as a non-technical person mostly but I find it lacking when it comes to being able to form subjective opinions and unique creative ideas. Ironically, after having done so much research, I don't really have any problem typing away the article and I would rather do it by hand than use an LLM. But I also love doing all of it and if you just want to create "content", low effort is not a hinderence as long as it hits some external unrelated marketing metric.

[quantummagic]

> For example, I recently spent 2 weeks researching Bruce Lee ... [AI] output will just be a reiteration of already common knowledge instead of the actual efforts I made researching all of it.

Presumably you researched Bruce Lee by reading and consuming other media related to him, most of which is likely known by the AI models. They just don't have access to any novel idea that you generated, inspired by your research.

Regardless of their current inabilities, which you're correct about, there's no logical reason that in the long term they can't be similarly inspired by considering the same information and making new connections / conjectures just as you did.

We're making the same mistake that the people who dismissed the early airplane made. "That's a neat trick, but it's too limited and not robust enough to be very useful". Not considering how the technology would evolve from the Wright Brother's prototypes.

[altmanaltman]

> Presumably you researched Bruce Lee by reading and consuming other media related to him, most of which is likely known by the AI models. They just don't have access to any novel idea that you generated, inspired by your research.

Yes, assuming they trained on all written works and all his movies, yes. But again, I found several times where AI is just plain wrong about actual facts and it'll reconsider if you provide actual proof that it's wrong. So just because things are in its training cannot be reliable proof that it actually is retrieving them accurately.

As I said, in theory, we don't have to wait for the trick to be useful. I could very easily dump all my research materials and sources as context, provide it a writing guide to generate text exactly as I want, and it'll do it. In fact, it might generate an article exactly equal to what I wrote, but I don't see how it gets to this point independently, especially given the hallucination problem above.

I'm also not claiming it's not useful; it's useful for brainstorming, checking for awkward phrasing, outlining your thoughts, etc. But it is not really good at creative writing. Can it get better in the future? Sure, I'll wait.

[spwa4]

1) the hallucination problem is known, and thus in the middle of the crosshairs of half the AI researchers in existence

2) you're assuming you know all Bruce Lee facts, which is the only way you'll distinguish true from false, and the only way you'll be able to correctly identify hallucinations. This is obviously not the case. AI models will get to this point. You won't.

The point will come, and for any reasonable person has long since passed, that any AI knows so many Bruce Lee facts they know 10x more of them than any individual does. And they can just keep writing articles leaving out different subsets of those facts and you will never know

3) everyone actually involved in writing these articles, including writers, publishers, advertisers, ... all have their incentives pointing the same way: towards deceiving you about this, and even towards not caring about it when they get caught.

[otekengineering]

Does this AI-written blog not have substance?

https://anamnesis.blog/

[riskable]

The "problem" is that people—the ones that actually care whether or not something was written by AI—don't just want to spot text that was generated by AI (like in your examples). They also want to spot text that was re-written by AI.

Before I explain the great big difference (which you probably already understand, just bear with me), know that the folks who are most up in arms about it are authors. They see their art as sacred. An ancient tradition of storytelling that deserves respect not for its output, but for the act and talent of producing it. To these folks, the very concept of using AI to generate or modify text in any way is against their religion.

Now for a real world example that would violate their principals that wouldn't bother normal people at all: A beginner or someone who's just terrible at storytelling has a story in their head and they do their best to write it down. It might look like this:

MC: "You call that a knife?"

...and so on and so forth, with poorly written descriptions of scenes, run-on sentences, etc. Then they feed that script into AI and go back and forth until they have text that they like.

To traditional authors, this is straight up EVIL. It's against everything they believe in! That person didn't write the story! They just came up with a poorly-written outline and the AI converted it into something more digestible.

Normal people will read such a story and—if it was created with the latest AI models—will never know the difference. It probably won't be a fantastic story or super well written but it will be passable. Even if they find out the process that went into it they won't care. And that pisses off these authors the most.

There's degrees to this, too: If you wrote an OK story, AI can be used to make it better. You can feed it multiple paragraphs and have it analyze the flow and offer simple suggestions for ways you could re-word sentences to improve them. Basically acting as a personal editor.

Is that "written by AI"? I would say, "no" but traditionalist authors would disagree. To them, any use of AI to write your story violates the very nature of storytelling.

...and it pisses them off to no end that you can't just run texts generated in this way though a program to tell whether AI was used in its creation.

[altmanaltman]

> MC: "You call that a knife?"

First of all, I found this pretty funny.

And yes, you may use AI to update your work in a "collaborative" style. And yes, if "they never know the difference", then sure. But as I mentioned in my comment, the issue is that I think you're seeing this from a pretty specific lens - authors as a group that hate AI and anything to do with it, but audiences can't tell the difference, etc. Those are pretty strong assumptions.

If, hypothetically, the audience cannot tell a text is generated by AI and is indistinguishable from human-written content, how does it matter what traditionalist authors agree on? Why will you have to answer "is that written by AI" if your readers can never tell it is? If they ask that question, that means they can tell, which would imply there is something in your content that does not sit right with them; given this, I feel it's really a large leap to assume the average reader can't tell the difference.

I do agree with you on the substance part. And I have my nuanced take on the use of AI in writing, but I don't encourage it for the actual putting words on paper part. I am not part of any traditionalist author group that hates AI in general etc, just to be clear.