When there is clearly a huge demand for great stories and writing like Terry Pratchett's then why is it so hard to make a living out of it? And what happens now we made it even harder?
LLMs harnesses try to make them useful to suggest things, but this is the most destructive thing you can do to a writer. You can work around it by just feeding Claude a writing critique skill.
And Terry Pratchett would have loved it too. Even if it were clumsy.
But thanks for being kind in taking criticism.
It’s funny how anytime an article gets called out for being AI slop on HN, the author’s reaction is something like that: “oh yeah sorry I used AI but just for proofreading I swear, I should’ve done just a tiny bit less”.
No one seems to get the message that relying on AI at all is what makes writing shit. Good writers have confidence in what they produce. The fact that you’re willing to incorporate any AI suggestion at all means you’ve already lost the battle.
The people I know have no confidence whatsoever in their writing, rewriting and rephrasing the same paragraph over and over until they either run out of time or give up. They also circulate their drafts among colleagues and ask for their opinions too.
It's not the confidence what makes good writing, but rather putting in the work.
Tbh my first couple research papers were brutally savaged by reviewers until I spoke to a lady at my university's Academic English department. In fact I was sent there by an internal reviewer who refused to pass my early-stage report otherwise. The lady at the Academic English dept pointed out one thing I was doing and it immediately clicked and I've only got good words about my writing style since.
Know what that One Simple Hack was? I spent my youth writing Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror as a hobby. So naturally when it came to writing papers, I thought, hey, I know how to write. It's like literature.
Shockingly, it is not. Like, at all! In literary writing it's basically sacrilege to write the same thing in the same words twice. In technical writing that is what you must do. Unless you want to confuse everyone about what you mean. So I was trying to make my technical writing "not boring" by not repeating the same expressions and instead finding new, creative ways to refer to the same concepts in different places, and that just made reviewers really angry because they never knew what I meant. I stopped doing that -and also generally tightened up my use of terminology- and that was it. Now every paper gets at least one reviewer that says "this is a well-written paper".
Then they brutally maul me anyway on all the rest, of course but, eh, what can you do :D
P.S. Dunno, maybe "that's a well-written paper" is what everyone says when they're looking for something nice to say before they let rip. I sometimes do it too. People do that all the time, don't they? I had calcific tenonditis and I went to a doctor and he told me "you are really brave, others in your condition would be screaming their heads off" (from the pain). And I remembered that my father had the same thing when I was a kid and he'd gone to a doctor and come back bragging that the doctor told him he was so brave, others would be screaming their heads off. I wish people didn't do that, I'm fine being just like everyone else, honest. Just don't make me doubt my mediocrity, you know?
This is a little like saying no one will ever paint anymore because cameras exist.
It might be harder to make a living off art now (which...debatable), but at no point, ever, was it easy.
-- Yogi Berra
Writing is hard now, not because AI exists, but because there are so many writers out there and everyone's competing for attention, not just with other writers, nor with books from the past, but with all forms of media. Loads of people today, who might otherwise be reading novels for entertainment, are too busy scrolling their phones or watching TikToks or playing video games.
We don't have another Terry Pratchett because all the would-be Terry Pratchetts are toiling in obscurity, and possibly giving up on writing as a result.
These writing jobs in print media have mostly disappeared in the UK. It's certainly harder to make a living as a writer today than it was in the 70's and 80's.
The Clovenhoof Series by Heide Goody and Iain Grant gets to Good Omens.
You could totally argue that if people can't tell the difference, it's irrational for them to care which one they get, and I don't totally disagree with that either, but it's not like personal tastes have ever really been a rational thing either. Our ability to enjoy something is the result of a bunch of signals in our brains, and it's not that crazy that adding another signal (or removing one) can change that result in a way that makes it more or less desirable to seek out. Some people might literally like a piece of writing more if they have reason to believe it's from a human than they would if they read the same exact thing but had reason to believe it's from an AI, and while I would find a study showing that as fascinating, I wouldn't see that as an argument that people like the wrong things, because "right" or "wrong" don't really seem like they apply to that sort of thing. If someone told me that knowing there's a human on the other end and that having some sort of indirect, one-way emotional connection to them is an important part of what makes them enjoy it, who am I to tell them that's wrong?
AI is never going to stop people from creating new things. Will it make it harder or different to make a living? Sure, but ai isn't the first thing to do that, nor will it be the last.
But making a living off of your art is incredibly, incredibly difficult, and always has been. If AI doubled, or halved, your chances of winning the lottery, it still wouldn't really change your odds of winning.
I concede that I don't have data to base this on but there's plenty of anecdata. AI companies brazenly steal artists' work and reproduce it, and automate its production, without those artists' permission. How is this going to make things not worse for artists? I think you're saying it doesn't matter because it's a drop in the ocean. Well, how did we get to the ocean? How did artists' work get devalued? Maybe it's all the technological advances that everyone brings up in those conversations, to justify the use of yet another one to do the work that until recently only human artists could do: photography, typography, CAD, computer graphics etc etc. Maybe the more we automate the more we take away from the value of artists' work, and that's why we're where we are now, where if you're an artist, you better find a day job?
I used to write a lot as a teenager. Hours and hours spent writing and overwriting, and correcting, and re-writing, drafts upon drafts. In Greek, mind, because that's my native language. I once passed some drafts to a big-name literary critic who was controversial for having said once that Kazantzakis had no talent; and he told me "write! Because you have talent!". He told me I got talent and he called Kazantzakis talent-less. What.
But of course I didn't become a professional writer. I didn't even try. I mean I kind of almost half-tried but it was obvious I could never write what I wanted (sci-fi and horror mainly with a smattering of fantasy) and still make a living. Not least because it was all written in Greek and those genres don't have a huge following in Greece. Or didn't back when I was a teenager, it's probably a bit better now. But still not enough to make a living out of. I could tell. Bad idea. Find a day job.
And then I got a job ...writing. Code. Ahem.
But I mean I'm bitching about the fact that we keep making all this new tech and none of it seems to make the life of artists any easier, and why not? Don't we all want to enjoy good art? Who's going to make it? Even if we replace human artists now, who's going to train the AI of the future to make new art, once the recombinations of the art they're already trained on stops being interesting? We enjoy novelty, right?
We have to draw the line somewhere with art, of course, and that usually comes down to a combination of what consumers value, and broader perceived cultural merit. Nobody really cares about the well-being of artists who specialize in making pretty paper airplanes, or drawing pictures using only the MSPaint pencil brush.
I think the audience, not the tools, deserve the most scrutiny here. Look around at this very thread, and all the people defending what the LLM wrote. Their feelings can't be argued with. But they make me feel sad and alienated, because I see a vast difference, so vast and so obvious, and they see none at all.
In the future, perhaps people will enjoy LLM work -- genuinely enjoy it -- as much as I've enjoyed Vonnegut or more. It may be the inevitable result of a broader cultural shift away from reading and writing. I guess with time, maybe we'll find out how valuable it actually is to have a strong command of one's language... I imagine, at least, people today are much better at other things to compensate.
that stopped after twitter
and went asymptotically downhill from there
approaching, but never quite literally getting to the point of eating a dog shit sandwich
(despite the same nauseous feeling and bad taste in your mouth)
It's only partly a joke.
So, you might also be repped writ large in their their training data...
(;^_^)also, your last-line worldview... i mean i get it, but...
just basically sounds like the twitter origin story (T_T)
That, plus it's also full to the brim with LinkedIn-esque AI slop. There are still some decent writers there, for sure, but Substack is going downhill fast as more grifters join the platform in the hopes of making a quick, easy buck.