What is your understanding of the luddite movement? I ask because I don't believe many are aware that luddites were not anti-technology. It was a labor movement which was targeted at exploitation by factory owners. Their issue was with factories forcing the use of machines to produce inferior products so owners could use cheaper, low skill labor.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/luddites-definition-wrong-la...

Stories are particularly troubling because we have the concept of "suspending disbelief" and readers tend to take a leap of faith with longwinded narratives because we assume the author is going somewhere with the story and has written purposefully.

When AI can write convincingly enough, it is basically a honeypot for human readers. It looks well-written enough. The concept is interesting and we think it is going somewhere. The point is that AI cannot write anything good by itself, because writing is a form of communication. AI can't communicate, only generate output based on a prompt. At best, it produces an exploded version of a prompt, which is the only seed of interest that carries the whole thing.

Somebody had that nugget of an idea which is relevant for today's readers. They told the AI to write it up, with some tone or setting details, then probably edited it a bunch. If we enjoy any part of it, we are enjoying the bits of humanity peeking through the process, not the default text the AI wrote.

You can get some good guesses from the comment itself.

> I assumed the writer was a journalist or author with a non-technical background trying to explore a more "utopian" vision of where trends could go.

If you assume you're reading something from a person with intention and a perspective, who you could connect with or influence in some way, then that affects the experience of reading. It's not just the words on the page.

the story is bad in itself and doesn't add anything to the reader

but if you knew it came from a human it would be interesting as a window to learning what the writer was thinking

since there is no writer such window doesn't exist either

People had a revulsion to eating refrigerated foods. The developed world got over it. We're comfortably on the path to becoming Eloi who will trust everything the magic box does for us.

i don't find the luddite comparison accurate. they were against looms and anti-ai people or ai skeptical people are against the wholesale strip mining of intellectual property as it exists... both public domain and non-public domain. it's used to enrich the capital class at the expense of the workers. sure it's similar but it certainly didn't have the copyright and wholesale theft of all of the human ideas behind it. it just feels quite different.

As a couple sibling comments said, I took it for an insight into the way an optimistic writer might see AI software development becoming a new form of "end-user programming" or "citizen developer" tooling. I'm personally too deep in the weeds to ever see it becoming empowering in that way (if nothing else, this will be an incredibly centralizing technology and whoever wins the "arms race" [assuming we we're not in a bubble destined to pop soon] will absolutely have the possible Toms and Megans of such a future by the short hairs). But I love end-user programming, or whatever we're calling it now! (I was partial to "shadow IT" - made it sound really cool.) So I enjoyed the idea that somebody saw AI as a "bicycle for the mind" in that sense, even if I feared they'd end up disappointed.

But there was nobody there, and I'm only disappointed in myself for not noticing.

>What is it about it that makes the story less interesting to you?

Read my comment below for a perspective.

> When AI-slop stops being, well, slop, and just is everything that humans do, but much better, and much more efficient—will we have the same repulsion to it that many of us do now?

For me, the answer to this riddle is very easy: I want to engage with other human minds. A robot (or AI) doesn't have a human mind, so I'm not interested in its "artistic" output.

It was never about how good it was. Of course AI slop adds insult to injury by being also bad. Currently. But it'll get better. My position was never that AI art (shorts, pictures, music, text) is to be frowned up because it's bad. I don't like it because it's not the expression of a human mind.

It's a bit like how an AI boy/girlfriend is not the real deal, no matter how realistic -- and I'm sure they'll get uncannily realistic in the future. They aren't the real deal because there's no real human behind the facade of companionship.