If they allow "AI" submissions, it's not a literary award. You can "the future is now, old man" me if you'd like, but the point is that the term 'literary award' in that case does not mean what it means to most people at this point in time.
The Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award appears to be very biased in favour of "AI" "generated" "works". This is the source of 5 out of 13 items in the 'Allowed' category. e.g. from one of the notes:
> The disclosed AI use was apparently limited to inventing the name of a fictional disease. The organizers still counted it among the year’s AI-assisted winners.
::
I haven't scoured through all of the listings, but I've found several that are included for pretty weak reasons. e.g. in "suspected or disputed":
> A screenshot of a 100% Pangram result spread online. No author response, organizer investigation, admission, or revocation has surfaced.
_A_ screenshot? Of Pangram? A perfect score? And nobody officially responded to it? Wild. By the way, the piece being referred to has a scattering of em dashes throughout, including one in the opening sentence. Make of that what you will. Or don't -- it's a perfectly normal way to punctuate English prose.
I think maybe people should be able to understand that the Pangram thing is 100% a joke by now -- yes, I checked, 100%.
It was damned from the off by the simple fact that it's a service for people who sensed "AI" and want that confirmed.
Of course one could also consider the lack of evidence demonstrating its efficacy, or the theoretical and practical difficulty of building software to perform the task [the advertised one, not the task of giving the customer what they want], etc.
::
To be clear, the article here isn't really the target of my ire, as it's largely just a collection of notes. Actually there is one thing I wanted to criticise -- you can't include entries getting shortlisted as examples of "literary awards granted".
I wouldn't interpret the chart as indicative of the gains in the quality of AI writing; it's more that it's a fairly new phenomenon and there is a dramatic increase in people who try to smuggle AI stories into contests (be it for personal gratification or to "show" human writers), and an increase in the scrutiny that submissions receive.
Fundamentally, I know that HN has plenty of people who will react with "ha-ha, human authors should pack their bags", just like what we keep telling mathematicians, because we see the discipline as just another market that can be conquered by automation or another benchmark to track. But literature, similarly to most other forms of higher-brow entertainment, isn't just about reducing unit-cost or hacking engagement metrics. For the same reason why a genuine van Gogh painting is worth a lot more than a nearly-perfect replica, people who care about the craft usually care about it telling genuine human stories and celebrating the author as much as the result.
Now, the mass consumer may not care; if you have an infinite Harry Potter sequel machine, many will partake. But then, I guess the question is, if you build the sequel machine, are you leaving the world better off or not? Do you want to be interacting exclusively with machines down the line? And if there's no inherent value to humanity, why should the machines be compelled to interact with you?
«And if there's no inherent value to humanity, why should the machines be compelled to interact with you?»
Reading this part made me wish it was more compelling than I think it really is, because I think someone could argue that the value of human consumption isn't predicated on the value of human creation.
I used to find things like machine-run pizza places and coffee shops really cool (even though I've never been to one). I even wrote a small coffee automation program once, but recently, with the promise of automation getting more real by the day, I find myself genuinely worried for the fate of human-run pizza places! They're doing fine now, but what if the machine-run ones become 10x or 100x cheaper? Would anyone still occasionally pay for the expensive human-run ones?
While it's debatable how that will turn out, the value of human creation feels a lot more significant when it comes to art and literature, but I'm starting to realize that for many others there's no fundamental difference between consuming art and eating pizza.
The post is about ai literature winning awards. Since an award is supposed to be a measure of quality, not unit-cost, a trend of ai winning awards is either indicative of the quality of the writing or of a systemic flaw in how these awards are judged (which seems plausible too).
A van gogh painting is more valuable than a replica because 1. it is scarce and 2. owning one conveys prestige. A perfect replica of a van gogh painting conveys the same artistic expression as the original.
Same for blood diamonds. I think scarce objects with exaggerated monetary value have some extra function for very wealthy people, for accounting or laundering purposes. That's why NFTs were a thing.
You're missing my point. A very good fake of van Gogh can sell at an auction for a lot of money, but if the new owner finds out, they're not gonna be happy. The same applies here: AI entries would not have won most of these contests if it was known that it's AI (discounting the handful of contests that were actually meant for AI literature and are weird to include on the list).
My point is that the value of most human art derives from something more than the arrangement of pixels / bits, and if we disregard this, we end up in a pretty shitty world.
> a trend of ai winning awards is either indicative of the quality of the writing or of a systemic flaw in how these awards are judged (which seems plausible too).
I definitely think this is plausible, and I think we need to start extending the idea of code "smells" to regular languages as well. I have TAed for literature and have reviewed many a manuscript and except for really really finely honed projects with lots of editing in post, written text almost always has many of these obvious smells (cliches, fallacies, illogical juxtapositions, poor cause and effect). AI-generated prose is no exception. Character names, phrases, descriptions of sensory experiences that are off or not quite right, improper negation (LLMs still struggles with the idea of 'scope'), sentence structure being very predictable and one-dimensional (even when using the latest models and mimicking famous authors and poets and even with very careful prompting), so on and so forth, you get the idea.
> A perfect replica of a van gogh painting conveys the same artistic expression as the original.
I think OP's example was a poor one. A perfect replica of a van gogh painting indeed does convey the same artistic expression as the original. However, I think the better comparison is an understudy's mimickry of A Starry Night which seems inspired by it and yet adds nothing to the original and is somewhat deficient in some ways, and misunderstands the artistic intent of the original. That would certainly not convey the same expression as the original, and would be met with widespread criticism.
My optimistic take on literature, compared to code, is that what writers produce is what is exactly consumed. The medium stays the same. The implementation choices of writers, like syntax, matter deeply to how the text resonates with a reader.
Code, on the other hand, is not consumed by end users in the same way. It compiles and turns into applications, which are then used. So users of applications are less scrupulous about what the code looks like, what language was used, and so on.
>Fundamentally, I know that HN has plenty of people who will react with "ha-ha, human authors should pack their bags", just like what we keep telling mathematicians, because we see the discipline as just another market that can be conquered by automation or another benchmark to track.
I think it's a bit more nuanced than that, at least some of us are going: "ha-ha, people derive their value from their outputs instead of understanding existence is itself valuable"
Why does everyone value themselves based on their economic output? Why do blood diamonds compete at all with lab grown - one often involves sacrifices to the minors, and the other is cheaper and by all metrics better? (hint: because the narrative of "effort" is what drives that particular example... the blood makes the diamonds shinier in some people's minds... that's not a good look, morally)
> Why does everyone value themselves based on their economic output?
I mean this is really the issue with the idea of AI taking jobs, isn't it? If our entire economic system wasn't predicated on this, nobody would be really that miffed about AI use in art because there wouldn't be much of a market for it, because the concept of art as being a marketable widget wouldn't exist in the first place, and the notion of human expression being replaced with a machine would be absurd. But we have tied up art with economic exchange for centuries. It has been a market commodity for almost as long as recorded human history. So the graphic designer who pours their creative spirit into what is, essentially, an economic exchange (rather than going and painting landscapes or something) feels an acute threat because it threatens their existence.
To overcome this and to live a future where it feels more like ML/LLMs live in concert with humanity then you'd have to picture a future where human value is divorced from one's capacity to provide economic value. When exactly does anyone foresee that happening? The entire system would crumble. UBI is clearly not the answer because all it does is entrench a subtle cast system and limit upward mobility and does nothing to address this root cause.
I don't know what the future is, but I know that as long as the current economic system persists (in all its permutations, whether that's socialism, capitalism, communism, whatever outmoded 19th and 20th century ideas we have to structure society -- all alienate the individual and relationships to some degree or another) then AI will always be met with disdain even in areas where it can improve people's well-being (and FWIW I think the arts and even mathematics are NOT part of this subset of use cases).
Maybe the solution is walled cities and shutting off the internet entirely; returning to our neighborhood pubs, sports, expressions of the human spirit placed up at farmers' markets. Seems like we already seem to be trending in that direction; and if last night's apocalypse was any indication maybe the internet's days are numbered anyways.
What interests me about art isn't just the result, it's the process, and the connection that process creates.
It's more than the "aura of the artist" which Walter Benjamin talks about in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction (highly recommend for anyone interested in past discussions on his topic), it's the fact that the writer is directly processing their world as experienced into an artifact which will allow me to understand their experience and enrich my own.
The loop is:
World -> Human -> Written Word -> Reader
compared to: Corpus -> Engagement Optimized Output -> Reader. This is something David Foster Wallace talks about in an essay E Unibus Plurum - the concern that artists producing art from media consumption rather than direct experience creates a house of a mirrors. Even if the optimization is for literary quality, it's still not coming from the world. Serious art is a kind of news, not just entertainment.
Beyond that, creating art isn't just a technical process, it's an open act of self-shaping and self-discovery that is meaningful to and reflective of a community. I worry about losing the deeply insightful members of society that artistic practises create. Of course if you're a media producer interested in profit that's perfect - they want caged pigs to consume their slop, not thoughtful connected individuals.
For that matter, these first major examples of AI literature—like the first passable Stable Diffusion images, and the first halfway-hummable Suno jingle—have the advantage of cultural novelty. I feel like the shine is likely to come off quickly as derivative AI works multiply.
The first spatter canvas was a new conceptual move and valued more for that than for the paint and canvas; subsequent works tended to ring hollow and command neither interest nor value. The first “ChatGPT, reword this like a pirate shanty” was worth a laugh, now it’s worth an eyeroll.
For that matter, as artists and writers incorporate these new tools into their practice, there’s still a difference between low-effort slop and the products of artistic obsession. AI image gen is commoditized right into the ground, yet you can still find interesting and distinctive works in, say, Midjourney’s community galleries. Or in at least one example from TFA:
> An AI reading machine uses computer vision, OCR, and language processing to find short poetic combinations in physical books, erase the surrounding words, pair them with images, and publish new volumes.
That sure sounds like an artistically interesting endeavor to me, independently of their choice to execute their concept through AI models.
We really need more terms for AI-assisted writing. There's degrees to everything and writing is one of those things where there's LOADS of gray areas. Did you use AI for research? What about generating random names for characters/places? Did you use it to check your grammar (why do people even care about this? They do!)?
Anything touched by AI is starting to become "the fruit of the poisonous tree" for a lot of people and it's getting ridiculous. I've chatted with people who will refuse to read a story because they think the cover art was generated by AI (even though they don't really know; they're just guessing). "It's AI slop."
One of the listed stories was almost disqualified for that very same reason (AI cover art). Another was controversial because the author used AI to generate a random name for a disease.
If we had better terms for the levels of AI involvement, maybe people would get a little less worked up about it?
There are like 5 gazillion books to read, even without AI. As a reader to curate your limited time you cling to every indicator of quality you can get.
And authors not bothering to write their own books or publishers not caring enough to get someone to design a good cover (which you would think would really be in their own interest...) is a good sign that the work is of low quality and that I'd be better served to just read something else
Fiction requires charting a path through the infinitely large space of what is possible. I think AI can be very helpful assistant when plotting, figuring out how you lead characters naturally, as the storyteller, to where you want to get them through manipulation of circumstance.
One is limited as a writer because of the hard problem of bringing to attention possibilities you haven't considered yet (ie writer's block). AI can be very helpful as a search tool for the "possibility space" even if its judgment and voice are mediocre.
> I've chatted with people who will refuse to read a story because they think the cover art was generated by AI (even though they don't really know; they're just guessing). "It's AI slop."
There is beyond enough literature on offer for me to read in my lifetime. I'm not certain what this new age of expression will bring us, but the genie is out of the bottle. It is obvious to me that viewing llm output is distinct from the fusion I am part of traditionally when reading, even in the case of a shoddy translator. So for me personally, I will be attempting to continue reading in the same spirit traditionally. Anything contemporary I am reading, I will more fittingly treat as introspection or a window for dialect.
“Today’s old world won’t get in our way,” said the machine, enigmatically. “It even came to our aid. History has ceased its flow; no need to refer to it any longer."
In PRs at work (software engineering) we distinguish between drafting, editing, review, and straight generation.
In creative writing I think it's less about the tool(s) and more about the investment. Reading takes time and attention. If an author offloads the actual composition (the deliberate thought, structure, and prose) to an LLM then they've reduced their effort to as close to zero as they can while still asking for the reader's full attention.
There is nothing unreasonable about identifying this as a bullshit proposition.
Suppose you are an author and you have some plot hole you're trying to work through. You say to llm, I'm thinking maybe we can have this event X happen to explain why some character needs Y. Can you research X more and tell me if this a plausible way to handle this in the story? And the llm says, that almost works but you didn't consider this, so it needs addendum Z. Then who composed the structure?
>If we had better terms for the levels of AI involvement, maybe people would get a little less worked up about it?
I think this suggestions lacks an appreciation for why people get worked up about it.
Anybody willing to actually apply some nuance to all of this aren't these people. If you're willing to write off an entire book because you suspect AI may have been involved in its creation, then you're likely just grandstanding. That's not even to say it isn't a valid "strategy" for "dealing" with AI, but the approach is to just hardline the issue to a degree that there's explicitly no room for nuance. This strategy suggests there's a way for people to suppress AI basically back to the point of nonexistence, and it will take an absolute position that any AI is bad.
The people who are willing to apply some nuance will eventually have to learn that being a consumer almost requires you to ignore how the sausage is being made. If you get more value from something than it costs, then it is ultimately a worthwhile product to consume. It doesn't matter if it was made by a team of passionate humans who have never even touched a computer or if it was spit out by an AI seconds before you consumed it (or anything in-between, of course). This is the way it worked before AI, when most people didn't care to acknowledge that they were just consuming some engineered slop that lacked any semblance of a human connection, and this is the way it will work "after" AI.
At this point, the only reason this is still a factor is because there are still tells which remind consumers of this greater context which is uncomfortable (thanks, in part, to the first group of people). But at some point, it simply won't be a significant factor and people will assume their products were created with at least some AI input the same way people are generally fine with assuming their products are being manufactured with slave labor, cause global warming, make them dumb, etc.
To be honest I doubt it. As far as I am concerned at least, it's a bit like the distinction between a shit sandwich and a sandwich that uses shit as a condiment.
In the terms of the fruit of the poisonous tree, the tree is not AI or what it touches, it is an author who chooses to use AI in the process of writing. The fruit of that tree is simply not one I care to eat.
Thanks for explaining your opinion with profane metaphors and nothing else. How can you tell if an author used AI to research a topic or not. Why is this bad?
There's no "good" or "bad" about it. Everyone is just wading through mountains of slop (man-made or ai made) and need a way to filter what's actually worth investing time and attention to. Effort, or percieved effort at least, is a good enough measure for most people. If 99% of ai generated "art" is low-effort garbage, why would people give the benefit of the doubt to the other 1%? What would they gain from it?
There's an obsession here with replying with half baked analogies that I really don't see the point of. Is this an attempt at a thought-terminating-cliché?
1. People mostly hang their own photos.
2. People mostly go to museums because they expect a certain level of quality (i.e. they're offloading the curation to... curators)
3. Photography is it's own medium, generative ai is a "tool". Apple to oranges comparison.
There's nothing about the analogy that works, what is your point here?
If anyone wants to commission an AI novella, holler out to me. (For free -- this is a hobby)
I've been trying to build an automated book publisher for about a year now. While the books aren't yet "human good", the slop factor is getting fairly low. Part of that is because I've stuck to formats easier for AI to avoid the uncanney vally in: recipe books, historical re-tellings, etc.
> The disclosed AI use was apparently limited to inventing the name of a fictional disease. The organizers still counted it among the year’s AI-assisted winners.
This one was interesting to see, because cases like this make the difference between luddite exclusion (anything that transitively comes from 'AI' is spiritually-tainted bits) and accurate disclosure (LLM output is distinguished from human product). Either policy is a valid choice, but lumping the two together as equally 'AI-assisted' tends to confuse rather than help.
This is similar to the 'no gray areas' problem with compiling a list such as https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/ai-free-foss-alternatives repo and needing a complex system of tags to avoid mixing projects that have measured/conservative stances short of full exclusion, with projects that have gone full slop-cannon.
Unpopular take: AI slop is actually just slop. (Most) people ultimately don't or won't care if writing or other media is partially or wholly authored by AI. Same with art. I feel as much righteous indignation as the typical person as I write that, I think. "I want humans making art that makes me feel these profound feelings!" I say to myself. But if I don't know who the creator is, all I have to go on is the art.
A sort of related concept is that I may dislike, actively hate, or be completely indifferent to some of the authors and artists whose work I love. I love their work, but I may not love them. I may choose to spend time with people whose art I dislike. So it is with AI. I dislike the idea of AI, so I claim to dislike the art.
As amazing as AI writing is, we are still in the uncanny valley, and that is why we hate it.
Imagine the holodecks in Star Trek, which for my argument I'll consider to be significantly more advanced AI, and significantly closer to crawling out of the uncanny valley... the people using them ultimately hit the same wall of "oh but this falls short of real human experience."
If AI art becomes indistinguishable, then art made by humans will keep its value or go up in value as it will be infinitely more scarce than infinitely generatable AI art generated for cents.
This is just an AI news dump. In case some people think this is cause for celebration, maybe in 2 years we'll get: "Award-winning inflatable Optimus robot doll is indistinguishable from humans."
Feels disingenuous to list prizes for contests like UCSB Mind & Machine Intelligence Writing Contest or the Electronic Literature Organization, where the whole point is to have machine-assisted stories.
That’s like saying “my toddler won a national art competition” and then finding out the contest only allowed entrants by toddlers. Or like when someone bragged about their vibe-coded game making $25K, and it turns out they just won the $25k prize in a game vibe-coding competition.
I agree such inclusions are misleading and probably shouldn't be included. But the page has plenty of instances that aren't like this, so this objection seems to also mostly obscure.
If they allow "AI" submissions, it's not a literary award. You can "the future is now, old man" me if you'd like, but the point is that the term 'literary award' in that case does not mean what it means to most people at this point in time.
The Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award appears to be very biased in favour of "AI" "generated" "works". This is the source of 5 out of 13 items in the 'Allowed' category. e.g. from one of the notes:
> The disclosed AI use was apparently limited to inventing the name of a fictional disease. The organizers still counted it among the year’s AI-assisted winners.
::
I haven't scoured through all of the listings, but I've found several that are included for pretty weak reasons. e.g. in "suspected or disputed":
> A screenshot of a 100% Pangram result spread online. No author response, organizer investigation, admission, or revocation has surfaced.
_A_ screenshot? Of Pangram? A perfect score? And nobody officially responded to it? Wild. By the way, the piece being referred to has a scattering of em dashes throughout, including one in the opening sentence. Make of that what you will. Or don't -- it's a perfectly normal way to punctuate English prose.
I think maybe people should be able to understand that the Pangram thing is 100% a joke by now -- yes, I checked, 100%. It was damned from the off by the simple fact that it's a service for people who sensed "AI" and want that confirmed. Of course one could also consider the lack of evidence demonstrating its efficacy, or the theoretical and practical difficulty of building software to perform the task [the advertised one, not the task of giving the customer what they want], etc.
::
To be clear, the article here isn't really the target of my ire, as it's largely just a collection of notes. Actually there is one thing I wanted to criticise -- you can't include entries getting shortlisted as examples of "literary awards granted".
I wouldn't interpret the chart as indicative of the gains in the quality of AI writing; it's more that it's a fairly new phenomenon and there is a dramatic increase in people who try to smuggle AI stories into contests (be it for personal gratification or to "show" human writers), and an increase in the scrutiny that submissions receive.
Fundamentally, I know that HN has plenty of people who will react with "ha-ha, human authors should pack their bags", just like what we keep telling mathematicians, because we see the discipline as just another market that can be conquered by automation or another benchmark to track. But literature, similarly to most other forms of higher-brow entertainment, isn't just about reducing unit-cost or hacking engagement metrics. For the same reason why a genuine van Gogh painting is worth a lot more than a nearly-perfect replica, people who care about the craft usually care about it telling genuine human stories and celebrating the author as much as the result.
Now, the mass consumer may not care; if you have an infinite Harry Potter sequel machine, many will partake. But then, I guess the question is, if you build the sequel machine, are you leaving the world better off or not? Do you want to be interacting exclusively with machines down the line? And if there's no inherent value to humanity, why should the machines be compelled to interact with you?
«And if there's no inherent value to humanity, why should the machines be compelled to interact with you?»
Reading this part made me wish it was more compelling than I think it really is, because I think someone could argue that the value of human consumption isn't predicated on the value of human creation.
I used to find things like machine-run pizza places and coffee shops really cool (even though I've never been to one). I even wrote a small coffee automation program once, but recently, with the promise of automation getting more real by the day, I find myself genuinely worried for the fate of human-run pizza places! They're doing fine now, but what if the machine-run ones become 10x or 100x cheaper? Would anyone still occasionally pay for the expensive human-run ones?
While it's debatable how that will turn out, the value of human creation feels a lot more significant when it comes to art and literature, but I'm starting to realize that for many others there's no fundamental difference between consuming art and eating pizza.
The post is about ai literature winning awards. Since an award is supposed to be a measure of quality, not unit-cost, a trend of ai winning awards is either indicative of the quality of the writing or of a systemic flaw in how these awards are judged (which seems plausible too).
A van gogh painting is more valuable than a replica because 1. it is scarce and 2. owning one conveys prestige. A perfect replica of a van gogh painting conveys the same artistic expression as the original.
Same for blood diamonds. I think scarce objects with exaggerated monetary value have some extra function for very wealthy people, for accounting or laundering purposes. That's why NFTs were a thing.
You're missing my point. A very good fake of van Gogh can sell at an auction for a lot of money, but if the new owner finds out, they're not gonna be happy. The same applies here: AI entries would not have won most of these contests if it was known that it's AI (discounting the handful of contests that were actually meant for AI literature and are weird to include on the list).
My point is that the value of most human art derives from something more than the arrangement of pixels / bits, and if we disregard this, we end up in a pretty shitty world.
You aren't accounting for volume.
How does volume explain why something low-quality would be called the best quality?
If volume can hack wins at awards, that's a fault in the award system, which is precisely the second hypothesis.
> a trend of ai winning awards is either indicative of the quality of the writing or of a systemic flaw in how these awards are judged (which seems plausible too).
I definitely think this is plausible, and I think we need to start extending the idea of code "smells" to regular languages as well. I have TAed for literature and have reviewed many a manuscript and except for really really finely honed projects with lots of editing in post, written text almost always has many of these obvious smells (cliches, fallacies, illogical juxtapositions, poor cause and effect). AI-generated prose is no exception. Character names, phrases, descriptions of sensory experiences that are off or not quite right, improper negation (LLMs still struggles with the idea of 'scope'), sentence structure being very predictable and one-dimensional (even when using the latest models and mimicking famous authors and poets and even with very careful prompting), so on and so forth, you get the idea.
> A perfect replica of a van gogh painting conveys the same artistic expression as the original.
I think OP's example was a poor one. A perfect replica of a van gogh painting indeed does convey the same artistic expression as the original. However, I think the better comparison is an understudy's mimickry of A Starry Night which seems inspired by it and yet adds nothing to the original and is somewhat deficient in some ways, and misunderstands the artistic intent of the original. That would certainly not convey the same expression as the original, and would be met with widespread criticism.
My optimistic take on literature, compared to code, is that what writers produce is what is exactly consumed. The medium stays the same. The implementation choices of writers, like syntax, matter deeply to how the text resonates with a reader.
Code, on the other hand, is not consumed by end users in the same way. It compiles and turns into applications, which are then used. So users of applications are less scrupulous about what the code looks like, what language was used, and so on.
>Fundamentally, I know that HN has plenty of people who will react with "ha-ha, human authors should pack their bags", just like what we keep telling mathematicians, because we see the discipline as just another market that can be conquered by automation or another benchmark to track.
I think it's a bit more nuanced than that, at least some of us are going: "ha-ha, people derive their value from their outputs instead of understanding existence is itself valuable"
Why does everyone value themselves based on their economic output? Why do blood diamonds compete at all with lab grown - one often involves sacrifices to the minors, and the other is cheaper and by all metrics better? (hint: because the narrative of "effort" is what drives that particular example... the blood makes the diamonds shinier in some people's minds... that's not a good look, morally)
> Why does everyone value themselves based on their economic output?
I mean this is really the issue with the idea of AI taking jobs, isn't it? If our entire economic system wasn't predicated on this, nobody would be really that miffed about AI use in art because there wouldn't be much of a market for it, because the concept of art as being a marketable widget wouldn't exist in the first place, and the notion of human expression being replaced with a machine would be absurd. But we have tied up art with economic exchange for centuries. It has been a market commodity for almost as long as recorded human history. So the graphic designer who pours their creative spirit into what is, essentially, an economic exchange (rather than going and painting landscapes or something) feels an acute threat because it threatens their existence.
To overcome this and to live a future where it feels more like ML/LLMs live in concert with humanity then you'd have to picture a future where human value is divorced from one's capacity to provide economic value. When exactly does anyone foresee that happening? The entire system would crumble. UBI is clearly not the answer because all it does is entrench a subtle cast system and limit upward mobility and does nothing to address this root cause.
I don't know what the future is, but I know that as long as the current economic system persists (in all its permutations, whether that's socialism, capitalism, communism, whatever outmoded 19th and 20th century ideas we have to structure society -- all alienate the individual and relationships to some degree or another) then AI will always be met with disdain even in areas where it can improve people's well-being (and FWIW I think the arts and even mathematics are NOT part of this subset of use cases).
Maybe the solution is walled cities and shutting off the internet entirely; returning to our neighborhood pubs, sports, expressions of the human spirit placed up at farmers' markets. Seems like we already seem to be trending in that direction; and if last night's apocalypse was any indication maybe the internet's days are numbered anyways.
What interests me about art isn't just the result, it's the process, and the connection that process creates.
It's more than the "aura of the artist" which Walter Benjamin talks about in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction (highly recommend for anyone interested in past discussions on his topic), it's the fact that the writer is directly processing their world as experienced into an artifact which will allow me to understand their experience and enrich my own.
The loop is:
World -> Human -> Written Word -> Reader
compared to: Corpus -> Engagement Optimized Output -> Reader. This is something David Foster Wallace talks about in an essay E Unibus Plurum - the concern that artists producing art from media consumption rather than direct experience creates a house of a mirrors. Even if the optimization is for literary quality, it's still not coming from the world. Serious art is a kind of news, not just entertainment.
Beyond that, creating art isn't just a technical process, it's an open act of self-shaping and self-discovery that is meaningful to and reflective of a community. I worry about losing the deeply insightful members of society that artistic practises create. Of course if you're a media producer interested in profit that's perfect - they want caged pigs to consume their slop, not thoughtful connected individuals.
For that matter, these first major examples of AI literature—like the first passable Stable Diffusion images, and the first halfway-hummable Suno jingle—have the advantage of cultural novelty. I feel like the shine is likely to come off quickly as derivative AI works multiply.
The first spatter canvas was a new conceptual move and valued more for that than for the paint and canvas; subsequent works tended to ring hollow and command neither interest nor value. The first “ChatGPT, reword this like a pirate shanty” was worth a laugh, now it’s worth an eyeroll.
For that matter, as artists and writers incorporate these new tools into their practice, there’s still a difference between low-effort slop and the products of artistic obsession. AI image gen is commoditized right into the ground, yet you can still find interesting and distinctive works in, say, Midjourney’s community galleries. Or in at least one example from TFA:
> An AI reading machine uses computer vision, OCR, and language processing to find short poetic combinations in physical books, erase the surrounding words, pair them with images, and publish new volumes.
That sure sounds like an artistically interesting endeavor to me, independently of their choice to execute their concept through AI models.
We really need more terms for AI-assisted writing. There's degrees to everything and writing is one of those things where there's LOADS of gray areas. Did you use AI for research? What about generating random names for characters/places? Did you use it to check your grammar (why do people even care about this? They do!)?
Anything touched by AI is starting to become "the fruit of the poisonous tree" for a lot of people and it's getting ridiculous. I've chatted with people who will refuse to read a story because they think the cover art was generated by AI (even though they don't really know; they're just guessing). "It's AI slop."
One of the listed stories was almost disqualified for that very same reason (AI cover art). Another was controversial because the author used AI to generate a random name for a disease.
If we had better terms for the levels of AI involvement, maybe people would get a little less worked up about it?
There are like 5 gazillion books to read, even without AI. As a reader to curate your limited time you cling to every indicator of quality you can get.
And authors not bothering to write their own books or publishers not caring enough to get someone to design a good cover (which you would think would really be in their own interest...) is a good sign that the work is of low quality and that I'd be better served to just read something else
Fiction requires charting a path through the infinitely large space of what is possible. I think AI can be very helpful assistant when plotting, figuring out how you lead characters naturally, as the storyteller, to where you want to get them through manipulation of circumstance.
One is limited as a writer because of the hard problem of bringing to attention possibilities you haven't considered yet (ie writer's block). AI can be very helpful as a search tool for the "possibility space" even if its judgment and voice are mediocre.
A term is all you need?
> I've chatted with people who will refuse to read a story because they think the cover art was generated by AI (even though they don't really know; they're just guessing). "It's AI slop."
There is beyond enough literature on offer for me to read in my lifetime. I'm not certain what this new age of expression will bring us, but the genie is out of the bottle. It is obvious to me that viewing llm output is distinct from the fusion I am part of traditionally when reading, even in the case of a shoddy translator. So for me personally, I will be attempting to continue reading in the same spirit traditionally. Anything contemporary I am reading, I will more fittingly treat as introspection or a window for dialect.
“Today’s old world won’t get in our way,” said the machine, enigmatically. “It even came to our aid. History has ceased its flow; no need to refer to it any longer."
In PRs at work (software engineering) we distinguish between drafting, editing, review, and straight generation.
In creative writing I think it's less about the tool(s) and more about the investment. Reading takes time and attention. If an author offloads the actual composition (the deliberate thought, structure, and prose) to an LLM then they've reduced their effort to as close to zero as they can while still asking for the reader's full attention.
There is nothing unreasonable about identifying this as a bullshit proposition.
Suppose you are an author and you have some plot hole you're trying to work through. You say to llm, I'm thinking maybe we can have this event X happen to explain why some character needs Y. Can you research X more and tell me if this a plausible way to handle this in the story? And the llm says, that almost works but you didn't consider this, so it needs addendum Z. Then who composed the structure?
>If we had better terms for the levels of AI involvement, maybe people would get a little less worked up about it?
I think this suggestions lacks an appreciation for why people get worked up about it.
Anybody willing to actually apply some nuance to all of this aren't these people. If you're willing to write off an entire book because you suspect AI may have been involved in its creation, then you're likely just grandstanding. That's not even to say it isn't a valid "strategy" for "dealing" with AI, but the approach is to just hardline the issue to a degree that there's explicitly no room for nuance. This strategy suggests there's a way for people to suppress AI basically back to the point of nonexistence, and it will take an absolute position that any AI is bad.
The people who are willing to apply some nuance will eventually have to learn that being a consumer almost requires you to ignore how the sausage is being made. If you get more value from something than it costs, then it is ultimately a worthwhile product to consume. It doesn't matter if it was made by a team of passionate humans who have never even touched a computer or if it was spit out by an AI seconds before you consumed it (or anything in-between, of course). This is the way it worked before AI, when most people didn't care to acknowledge that they were just consuming some engineered slop that lacked any semblance of a human connection, and this is the way it will work "after" AI.
At this point, the only reason this is still a factor is because there are still tells which remind consumers of this greater context which is uncomfortable (thanks, in part, to the first group of people). But at some point, it simply won't be a significant factor and people will assume their products were created with at least some AI input the same way people are generally fine with assuming their products are being manufactured with slave labor, cause global warming, make them dumb, etc.
> If we had better terms for the levels of AI involvement, maybe people would get a little less worked up about it?
I feel like the people getting worked up about it are the ones collapsing everything into a single term they can blanket apply everywhere.
To be honest I doubt it. As far as I am concerned at least, it's a bit like the distinction between a shit sandwich and a sandwich that uses shit as a condiment.
In the terms of the fruit of the poisonous tree, the tree is not AI or what it touches, it is an author who chooses to use AI in the process of writing. The fruit of that tree is simply not one I care to eat.
Thanks for explaining your opinion with profane metaphors and nothing else. How can you tell if an author used AI to research a topic or not. Why is this bad?
There's no "good" or "bad" about it. Everyone is just wading through mountains of slop (man-made or ai made) and need a way to filter what's actually worth investing time and attention to. Effort, or percieved effort at least, is a good enough measure for most people. If 99% of ai generated "art" is low-effort garbage, why would people give the benefit of the doubt to the other 1%? What would they gain from it?
Thanks for explaining the another person's opinion using your own, entirely-different, opinion. "Shit sandwich" usually implies "bad".
> Everyone is just wading through mountains of slop
I'm not. What am I doing wrong? Should I be on TikTok more? LinkedIn?
99% of output from cameras is unmitigated low-effort garbage, yet people still hang 1% of photographs in art museums and on their walls.
There's an obsession here with replying with half baked analogies that I really don't see the point of. Is this an attempt at a thought-terminating-cliché? 1. People mostly hang their own photos. 2. People mostly go to museums because they expect a certain level of quality (i.e. they're offloading the curation to... curators) 3. Photography is it's own medium, generative ai is a "tool". Apple to oranges comparison.
There's nothing about the analogy that works, what is your point here?
Bit of a side question to the crowd:
If anyone wants to commission an AI novella, holler out to me. (For free -- this is a hobby)
I've been trying to build an automated book publisher for about a year now. While the books aren't yet "human good", the slop factor is getting fairly low. Part of that is because I've stuck to formats easier for AI to avoid the uncanney vally in: recipe books, historical re-tellings, etc.
> The disclosed AI use was apparently limited to inventing the name of a fictional disease. The organizers still counted it among the year’s AI-assisted winners.
This one was interesting to see, because cases like this make the difference between luddite exclusion (anything that transitively comes from 'AI' is spiritually-tainted bits) and accurate disclosure (LLM output is distinguished from human product). Either policy is a valid choice, but lumping the two together as equally 'AI-assisted' tends to confuse rather than help.
This is similar to the 'no gray areas' problem with compiling a list such as https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/ai-free-foss-alternatives repo and needing a complex system of tags to avoid mixing projects that have measured/conservative stances short of full exclusion, with projects that have gone full slop-cannon.
Unpopular take: AI slop is actually just slop. (Most) people ultimately don't or won't care if writing or other media is partially or wholly authored by AI. Same with art. I feel as much righteous indignation as the typical person as I write that, I think. "I want humans making art that makes me feel these profound feelings!" I say to myself. But if I don't know who the creator is, all I have to go on is the art.
A sort of related concept is that I may dislike, actively hate, or be completely indifferent to some of the authors and artists whose work I love. I love their work, but I may not love them. I may choose to spend time with people whose art I dislike. So it is with AI. I dislike the idea of AI, so I claim to dislike the art.
As amazing as AI writing is, we are still in the uncanny valley, and that is why we hate it.
Imagine the holodecks in Star Trek, which for my argument I'll consider to be significantly more advanced AI, and significantly closer to crawling out of the uncanny valley... the people using them ultimately hit the same wall of "oh but this falls short of real human experience."
If AI art becomes indistinguishable, then art made by humans will keep its value or go up in value as it will be infinitely more scarce than infinitely generatable AI art generated for cents.
> As amazing as AI writing is, we are still in the uncanny valley, and that is why we hate it.
Or perhaps, people notice the AI art that is slop or in the uncanny valley. By definition when something crosses the uncanny valley you don't notice.
This is just an AI news dump. In case some people think this is cause for celebration, maybe in 2 years we'll get: "Award-winning inflatable Optimus robot doll is indistinguishable from humans."
What is the point of all this?
Feels disingenuous to list prizes for contests like UCSB Mind & Machine Intelligence Writing Contest or the Electronic Literature Organization, where the whole point is to have machine-assisted stories.
That’s like saying “my toddler won a national art competition” and then finding out the contest only allowed entrants by toddlers. Or like when someone bragged about their vibe-coded game making $25K, and it turns out they just won the $25k prize in a game vibe-coding competition.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890743
It’s meaningless data. Worse than meaningless, as it obscures the validity of what’s around it.
I agree such inclusions are misleading and probably shouldn't be included. But the page has plenty of instances that aren't like this, so this objection seems to also mostly obscure.