[ben_w]

While they are bad at creative work*, this reasoning isn't going to show it.

If you took the best, most creative, human writer in the world, and for thought experiment reasons they had amnesia (to mimic AI blank context windows) specifically while you asked them for a story idea 100 times in a row, my expectation is that this human would also give you the same idea at least 80 times out of that 100.

* still better than the mean human, but even the top 0.1% of humans aren't all professional authors.

[emp17344]

Better than the mean human? The mean human creates far better stories while daydreaming. AI enthusiasts have such a distorted view of human capability, it’s bizarre.

[ben_w]

The mean human in the UK gets a middling score in creative writing tasks at the end of their mandatory education, and most then leave school and forget what little they ever learned outside whatever their career path happened to be.

Most humans never do a creative writing course after school, and the longest fiction most people will write is their resume description of what their previous jobs involved, or perhaps their dating profile.

Don't mistake what you see published, or what your friends are like, for the average human: the average Hacker News comment easily above the writing grade (and creativity) of e.g. many of the one-shots stories I've seen attempted on some creative writing subreddits. "Mean" is not a high bar.

[Supermancho]

The qualification "better" is doing some hefty lifting in your assumption.

What you think is better is not what I think is better. Imagination is not storytelling. You ask the "mean human" to write, it's going to be worse than an LLM in spelling and grammar, if you get anything at all.

[emp17344]

Daydreaming is absolutely storytelling. The average person is able to craft elaborate stories on a whim. Writing is used, in part, for conveying stories, but writing is a separate skill. The good news is the average person can learn to write well, but LLMs, so far, have not demonstrated the ability to craft interesting stories and it’s pretty unlikely they’ll be able to learn, as this is an unverifiable domain.