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because we typically want to know the writer of a piece. we want to know where to lay credit.

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.

> want to know the writer of a piece

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?

Because you need to do some pre-filtering on where to focus your attention, and you want to make sure the author put some thought into the article without having to analyze it.

Due to LLMs making the cost of publishing “thoughts” extremely low, there’s now an over-supply of content that looks decent on the surface, but in reality the author has probably spent less time on than the reader.

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why does it bother you to give attribution? why do you think crediting the writer impacts how the piece stands?

we have pop musicians who produce massive hits under their names and the song writers are still given credit in liner notes and in the tracks details on spotify or wherever.

if it’s created by a bot, id take it even further and say which version of which model actually generated it should be declared. why would anyone be against giving proper attribution?

We like writing because the fact that we can create good writing says something about ourselves. If AI can create writing that surpasses, say, a Tolstoy or George Eliot, that will fundamentally change our self-perception. Is that a good thing or bad thing? Well, let's first cross the bridge of an LLM writing War & Peace and see how we feel.
It's not about pedigree, but context. Without context our most beloved stories are just meaningless ink on paper.
If someone couldn't be bothered to write it, I certainly can't be bothered to read it. I did not bother to read the article involved because the continual piss stain on the images, the website itself, and a few key phrases let me on to the fact that it was all generated.

When you interact with art, you do so to interact with the author and the point they want to make. Writing is something where a skilled writer will be able to make a point tersely and have it stick, knowing where to embellish and where to keep it simple. Every decision in art tells you about the artist. Generative AI may be able to fake the composition process, but the point of composition is it reveals something about the human. All of those are artistic decisions that a machine apparently now "can do", but not with any coherency.

The holder of the reigns of slop is not an artist, this is plain to see because they do not interact or engage with their work on the same level as an artist. The produced slop is not art, because it cannot be engaged with on the same level.

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I’ve said this many times before

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

I think there's a distinction.

Imagine if you had an auto cake making machine that decides on its own the best time to make cake. It adds the ingredients, stirs, turns the oven on, and leaves the finished cake on the counter for you.

People start opening bakeries consisting entirely of cakes baked by the automatic machines. The owners of these machines have no idea whether the cakes have a bit too much flour or were slightly over-stirred. In some cases, they haven't even tried the cakes.

Who gets to claim they made the cake?

By contrast, there are others who carefully tune their machines to make sure everything is perfect. They adjust the mixing settings and ingredient proportions. They experiment and iterate. They taste test throughout the process. And what they give to the public tastes every bit as good as a homemade cake.

The first group is creating slop. The second group, I think, is baking. And OP is in the second group.

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If you commission a baker to bake you a cake, did you make the cake? What if you added sprinkles on top?
If you commission a baker, another person, with wants and desires of their own, is involved.

If you use an AI, there isn't.

Either way, it's clear that the author (yes, the author) put a lot of work into this by iterating and shaping it to what he wanted, and that's a lot more than sprinkles.

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Eh.

Why would I give him the same credit I would give a writer.

Or why would I give a writer the same credit I would give someone who created the AI prompts and scaffolding to generate this?

Being unhappy about not being able to call oneself an author, ends up betraying a lack of confidence in the work or process.

In the end writer, dancer, actor, whatever - these titles come from their impact.

There will be a different name for this, and eventually there will be something made that is good enough that people will be spell bound. At which point its going to be named something else.

At which point.

can't reply to your comment below so i will comment here

> why does it bother you to give attribution? why do you think crediting the writer impacts how the piece stands?

clearly it does to you?

thing is, this is a fool's errand to try to police what people credit when there is zero capability of verification and enforcement

the current social norms still value authorship, so people will just take or omit credit as they see most advantageous, even if it's merely an ego advantage, which it typically is but a proxy for brand building

what will happen if/when the currency of attribution is completely altered? hard to predict

my prediction is that track record will be considerably more important, not less, but human merit will be increasingly seen as irrelevant

> because we typically want to know the writer of a piece. we want to know where to lay credit.

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).