why can't the quality of the works stand on its own? Whether there's LLM generation or not should be irrelevant.
every book you buy has an author credited. articles in newspapers and magazines have photographer and author attributions.
asking an ai to write you a story does not make you an author. if you ask someone to take a photo for you, you don’t magically get to say “look at this photograph, i’m a photographer.” if you ask someone to bake you a wedding cake, and then claim you baked it, you’re a fraud.
we deserve to know the actual writer.
but you dodged the question i asked - why can't a piece stand on the contents, rather than its pedigree?
Would you care if a writer used a pen name? Does that in any way diminish their works? What about the unknown editors that contributed?
AI is just a tool
If you used a fancy auto bake cake machine instead of an oven, you still get to claim that you made the cake.
100 years ago someone would be making the claim that using an oven to make cakes “doesn’t count”
All AI did was raise the bar
It’s quite clear here that the author spent a lot of time on this so he absolutely gets credit as the author
Does the average person really do care all the time? Maybe the outlet it comes from as a whole (factuality, political lean) but more rarely the exact author. Many don’t even have the critical skills for any of it and consume whatever content is chosen for them by whatever algorithm is there. We probably should care, I just don’t think a lot of us do.
For me, needing to know that something’s written by AI serves threefold purposes:
1) acknowledging that it might be slop that someone threw together with no effort (important in regards to spam)
2) acknowledging that depending on the model the factuality might be low when it comes to anything niche (though people are wrong too, often enough)
3) mentally preparing myself for AI bullshit slop language, like “It’s not X, it’s Y.”, or just choose not to engage with it (it's the same disgust reaction as when I find a PDF and realize it's just scanned images, not proper text)
In general, unless the goal is either human interaction or a somewhat rare case of wanting to read a specific blog etc., most of the time I don’t categorically care whether something was lovingly created by a human or shoved out by a half baked version of Skynet - only that it’s good enough for whatever metrics I want to evaluate it by. I’m not ashamed of it and maybe that’s why I don’t take an issue with AI generated code either, as long as it’s good enough (sometimes better than what people write, other times quite shit when the models and harnesses are bad).
Also I feel a bit conned. I was curious what Tom Hartmann was up to and now it seems he doesn't exist and it's just some slop?
Creative writing is the intent to convey feelings, thoughts, to create atmosphere. Here's a great example of the failure to do so here, in a way that even most terrible writers would avoid.
> “It just said harvest,” she told Tom. She was sitting in one of the plastic chairs, holding a cup of the adequate coffee.
The coffee in this story is conveyed as being 'perfectly adequate'. But how do you convey adequacy? When you simply just say 'the coffee is adequate' there's nothing there. It could be conveyed by establishing that the coffee is always perfectly room temperature, or with the mere hint of bitterness and sweetness, or that it tastes like every other brand out there. In many respects this story is the exact same as the 'perfectly adequate' coffee: functional, unexciting and ultimately flavorless.