Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
Right, but in the present case we have exactly what you're describing—a story, almost fully written by AI but with some human cherry-picking in the mix. And readers are finding it a phenomenal story and then wanting to vomit retrospectively in learning about the authorship. It just seems patently obvious to me that this is not where the sentiment is going to stay—it will hit the margin, like the people who decide to not own a cell phone, or those who would rather listen to analog audio; there will be a market for it but it will exist at the margin. Eventually, especially for young people, more and more of what they consume will be AI generated and they won't care because it's indistinguishable from human work.

Or, I digress, it will be distinguishable from human work but because it's so much better than anything that a human could have ever created. These AI tools that we have now are as dumb as they will ever be. If we ever reach AGI or superintelligence or whatever—or even if not, even if these tools just advance for 10 more years on their current trajectory—it's easy for me to imagine some scenario where the machines can generate something so perfect to your liking that you just prefer it to anything a human ever would have created, storytelling and all.

You can take the general case where AI can just generate a better movie than a team of humans ever could plausibly generate. After all, AI doesn't have any of the physical constraints of a movie studio—the budget, the logistics of traveling from location to location, the catering, the fact that the crew has to sleep, has to coordinate schedules, all that. AI, with some human involvement or not, could just keep iterating on some script on a laptop overnight until its created an optimized version which is more satisfying to humans than any other human made movie ever created. Or in a narrow case it could create the perfect movie for you, given what it knows about you and your interests. All human movies would look inferior.

For my kids, who I'm sure are going to grow up in a world where this type of art is embedded everywhere—and where the human version is almost certainly going to be worse—I don't think the desperate cries to see the last scrap of human ingenuity will mean anything. All of these people throwing rocks at Waymos and others boycotting companies for generating ads rather than shooting one with a video studio; it's so obviously helpless, desperate and obviously futile in the face of what's coming.

I mourn the future that seems plausible here but I also welcome it as inevitable. The technology is coming, and people are going to have to adapt one way or another.

You're talking about content. Only content can be "perfect" as you say.

When I'm listening to music, looking at art, seeing a play or a short film I want to feel connection to the humans behind it. AI is by definition missing that connection. That's what makes me retrospectively vomit at AI writings like these. That connection requires that the humans behind it are imperfect, the solo can have one or two sloppy notes, but at least it's genuine interaction. We have seen this same yearning for connection with all the "Don't use LLM to comment, use your true style of writing with its flaws" rules.

I'm 100% certain mainstream studios will be producing "perfect" content with AIs just like current mainstream pop stars have 10 ghost writers working on each song to create "perfect" songs. The good stuff will exist in the fringes as always and I'm ok with that as I've already been for years.

And the future may not be as settled as you think it is. Leaders try to sell you their vision of the future by saying it is settled and that things are certain, but that is because they want you to believe that, because if you and the masses believe so, it's more certain for the future to settle the way the leaders want. But you can also actively refuse that future and find a different future that's worth believing in yourself.

The riff comes first, the people come second. One of the nice things about punk and metal is how anti celebrity in a fundamental way both genres are. In histories of the genres, you will usually find such and such band made such and such invention that led to certain new structures being accessible. Of course the social background of the scenes where it emerged is important too but the history is traced first in terms of the riff. Or aka books like glazing a particular rockstars life history are rare, even though there are some "superstars" in metal and punk. The culture is very "only analog is real, digitals fake shit" but idk in some other ways they seem much closer to having not much difficulty accepting a valid musical work regardless of origin.
loading story #47436767
Are you an AI? This looks like it was at least ran through an LLM judging by the heaps of em dashes.