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.
>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)
Diamonds are expensive because that's how much money people pay for them.
People buy diamonds because [they have no taste and] they can afford to, or want to present themselves as being able to afford to.
I'm sure some of them have various dark thoughts about it, too.
People derive their value from their economic status because that is a tool available to them and the world they grew up in forced them to do so. Being able to derive your value from other aspects of life is a luxury and a privelege that is, ironically, unaffordable for the majority.
It's not the economic output itself, but what it represents. I can value myself as a human being all I want, and I should, but without that economic output, it's a much harder life. Money gets you food and a roof over your head. More money gets you better food and a better roof that doesn't leak and a more secure one as well. (also gets you more problems)
Gets you a car that runs, one that runs reliably instead of breaking down. A parking space for it, even in the center of a big city.
It represents security, happiness, vacations, things/stuff. We can judge however we want about those categories but judging people isn't going to change that do actually want them. So maybe you can get all that without economic output, it just seems like it would be easier to accomplish/achieve with than without.
> 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.
> 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.
what. how?
UBI allows bad jobs to end. It allows workers to look for other work without threat to their economic conditions. Nothing about that is a cast system or limits upward mobility. it in fact, increase that mobility.
> people who care about the craft usually care about it telling genuine human stories and celebrating the author as much as the result
No, the human was never a core factor. People who enjoy a van Gogh - or any other work - primarily do so because it has particular qualities they appreciate (no, being human-made isn't an intrinsically appreciable quality; secondarily because many humans instinctively like to possess unique - or "shiny" - things), and the author tends to be a very good means to access other works with such qualities. That "celebrating the author" is just a side-effect, and there's nothing to stop a non-human entity from "telling genuine human stories" (whatever that means).
> why should the machines be compelled to interact with you?
The ultimate purpose of machines is to serve humans, and that's a bit hard to do without interaction. Just as the ultimate purpose of humans - and other living things - is to survive.
> People who enjoy a van Gogh - or any other work - primarily do so because it has particular qualities they appreciate (no, being human-made isn't an intrinsically appreciable quality; secondarily because many humans instinctively like to possess unique - or "shiny" - things)
Speak for yourself. You could show me the exact same artistic image, same exact pixels, but if I know it was made by a human, it will instantly be worth more to me and capture more of my interest. Conversely, having the knowledge that the pixels were created by a machine would make me instantly lose interest in the image.
I think "being human-made" very much is an intrinsically appreciable quality, but you have to include the production of the art as part of the art itself for that to be the case. And I and many other people explicitly do include the production of the art as part of the art itself. Not everyone shares this perspective, but many do.
> No, the human was never a core factor. People who enjoy a van Gogh - or any other work - primarily do so because it has particular qualities they appreciate
I don't follow. How about the 20k year old cave paintings in Lascaux? Are you saying "What you appreciate about it isn't the craft, or the story and history behind it; you care about only some of it's qualities?"
It's an extremely valuable part of history, for historians, archeologists, etc. The people who created those works too can be considered a "work", something to be studied the same as that which they did/made are studied.
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.
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.
Because there are a million literary awards and some of them are awarded by people who are bad at recognizing quality.
Additionally, many of these cases were only partially created using AI or aren't proven to have actually used AI or used AI in a creative and non-conventional way and that's what they won for.
It's a chart that shows the number of things going up over time. The total number of things increasing over time is going to play a hugely significant role in that, regardless of how broken the selection criteria are.
A contest of skill is not necessarily like spinning a roulette.
If I were to play Lebron James in basketball 1v1, it would not matter how many times we ran the experiment. We could play a trillion times, and I would win 0 of them.
If you sampled 10 Hollywood directors and asked whether The Godfather or The Room is a better movie, the Room would win the poll 0 out of a trillion times.
The reasonable naive expectation for contests like these is that, below a certain bar of quality, the chance of win is 0. So if you see wins go up as volume of submissions goes up, it shows that either ai writing is above that bar, or that faulty judging is a widespread problem beyond a few anomalous organizations.
You have better than zero in a trillion odds against Lebron James. What if his phone rings?
"10 Hollywood directors" is hilariously unconstrained -- I'd put money on at least one having never seen The Godfather.
> The reasonable naive expectation for contests like these is that, below a certain bar of quality, the chance of win is 0.
I agree that the layperson's understanding of what 'literary award' means is close to this idea, but the "contests like these" is the problem here. "contests like these" include one that allows and seems extremely keen on "AI" generated text, for example.
There isn't a stark contrast between 'contest of skill' and 'game of chance'. You can eliminate the skill part and get closer to pure random chance, but you can't eliminate the random chance from the contest of skill.
> You have better than zero in a trillion odds against Lebron James. What if his phone rings?
You can easily devise in this thought experiment rules that prevent loopholes, like saying no phones allowed and medical emergencies do not result in a win for the opponent.
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).
"Scarcity" is a really bad theory of this, and the NFT bros have already tested how that works out.
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.
If someone buys a fake of a van Gogh and find out it's fake, they just lost millions of dollars of wealth. This metaphor seems inappropriate to apply to the typical ways people enjoy art.
> most human art derives from something more than the arrangement of pixels / bits
Many people think art should stand on its own, independent from the artist or the circumstances of its creation. Meaning or quality in art may be conveyed purely in bits even if it is the not individual bits that are meaningful.
> if we disregard this, we end up in a pretty shitty world
This is an inappropriate degree of moralizing. But I think it if we accept policing quiet enjoyment, that ends 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.
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.
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.
Not that different, just formulated in a tamer way.
> I'm not. What am I doing wrong? Should I be on TikTok more? LinkedIn?
You're not? You don't have to wade through mountains of grifters and "hot-takes" in your social media of choice? Or through a hundred garbage sites gaming SEO every time you need to search for something online? Or through the never ending catalogue of low effort drama in streaming sites?
If so I'm sure you realize yours is not the average experience on the internet.
> need a way to filter what's actually worth investing time and attention to
nothing on social media is worth investing time and attention to. including hacker news, yet here i am so i guess my experience is not that different from the average experience, it's just not because of ai
> social media of choice
tiktok, x, linkedin, etc. have been garbage as long as they have existed. if ai slop made tiktok worse i would welcome that as a good thing for society.
> search for something online
just search on claude. the water is warm here on the dark side
> low effort drama in streaming sites
these are front and center because people like them. they have filters for acclaimed movies that aren't front and center because people don't want to watch There Will Be Blood on a random Tuesday after work. this seems like a reach
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?
> Is this an attempt at a thought-terminating-cliché?
No it’s a counter example. Calling a point half baked is closer to a thought terminating cliche.
> 1. People mostly hang their own photos.
So then that’s an answer to the question: they would give 1% of ai art the benefit of the doubt despite 99% being trash if they made it themselves.
Also I don’t accept the premise unless we are talking about family photos. Otherwise I’ve never been in a house where they’ve hanged their own photography on the wall despite being in many houses with photography on the wall.
> People mostly go to museums because they expect a certain level of quality (i.e. they're offloading the curation to... curators)
Says nothing about whether or not ai could be curated. Moreover people go to museums to see many things, including to be surprised, informed, disgusted, or to just see things they’ve never seen before.
Also curators curate on other factors than quality, or we might say “quality” doesn’t always mean the art satisfies conventional or critical tastes. No reason ai art can’t fall into that category.
> Photography is it's own medium, generative ai is a "tool".
I don’t see why ai can’t be a medium, can you explain why the output of a camera is a medium but the output of ai is a tool?
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?
> 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."
>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.
> We really need more terms for AI-assisted writing.
I actually think we need less discernment. All AI work is slop, but an enormous amount of human-written work is also slop. I think we need to come to an understanding that we're filling our lives with repetitive, derivative garbage that mostly shouldn't exist. AI is adding to the problem, not causing the problem.
We started deleting all of the good stuff on the internet and replacing it with crap long before LLMs were viable. Too many books are published every year. The biggest sellers are sort of ideal, overengineered, perfect slop that will just get over the bar of acceptability for the widest audience (and be enthusiastically praised by people in the industry whose ideal is perfect, bestselling slop), everybody else sells zilch, if they can find a publisher. Consolidation (media deregulation and the end of antitrust) has forced everybody to shoot for that widest audience, or cease to exist entirely. People are trained to slop. Slop is a sign of maturity and understanding adult responsibilities. Slop art, slop opinions, slop design, slop world.
We don't appreciate the good things (or can't even find them), let them be crowded out by slop, and we lose some of them forever every day. AI is an industrial level advance in this process, but it's still human hands letting it loose. Their motives are mortgages, healthcare, not being fired at will, avoiding social rejection, feeding your kids that maybe you'll one day be able to afford to have. You feed that into the market in return for the least amount of security the surveys and equations say that they can possibly give you, and the equity of pigs, born pigs, just rises like a hockey stick. Making slop for the pigs.
I'm sure you can do good things when assisted with AI, or you can trick AI into doing things that are great by themselves. But you've always been able to collage things out of slop, or pick a piece of slop and recontextualize it into something that implies a particular conversation with the context. But denying it's slop is just denial.
Nothing on this list looks appealing outside of the "AI Was Allowed From The Start" section; it all looks like annoying literary pandering. If you need AI to come up with names and change your grammar, you're not a writer who in concerned about writing imo, but about creating product.
I heard once that Peter Straub, a horror writer from the 80s, started his career in that way. He looked at all the bestsellers, found commonalities, such as the types of main characters, the types of conflicts, the genres that were selling (horror was big), the lengths of books, the lengths of chapters, the types of sentences, adjectives, plot arcs and scene descriptions, etc., and engineered a career. That's artistic and inspiring for me, but the art isn't on the paper, it's in the process. A.E. Van Vogt did the same thing in the 50s iirc, and he inspired Philip K. Dick who could slop nonstop without sleeping for days in a Methadrine haze by mixing his own divine inspirations and paranoid hallucinations with Van Vogt's cynical commercial nearly-incompetent dreamlike incoherence. If you use AI to express things that you calculate might be lucrative to feel, you're part of a long slop tradition, maybe you should be proud.
Or maybe you should just render unto the slop machines what now belongs to the slop machines, and work on something else. The slop market is full.
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".
> 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.
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.
An interesting paper from the GPT 3.5 era is "AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably" by Brian Porter & Edouard Machery (2024).
Reinforcement-learning on human preferences does work, to an extent. You get LLM output that is (shallowly) highly appealing to humans. That's certainly not in doubt.
The problem is that writing has purposes aside from making hordes of (indiscriminating, low-taste) humans smile. And these purposes are actively corroded by RL'ing on human preferences.
Generally, AI generated fiction has problems similar to the award-winnning stories listed here - they are full of incoherent, "poetic" metaphors, vague gestures to narrative depth that is never delivered on, and relentless pandering to the cheap seats. They're very much "playing the hits" - saying unchallenging, nice things that no reader would ever disagree on. We discover that racism is wrong, that family is what matters, that you have to remember who you are.
They all feature simple (almost generic) motifs, such as trees that represent life. (The repetitiveness of these motifs becomes apparent when you start reading a bunch of stories. In "The Serpent in the Grove" by Jamir Nazir we get "‘People does change,’ he says. ‘But grove does remember.’". In Back and Forth by Kavyta Kay we get "Nani smiled, sad and certain. 'Trees remember everything, beti. They live long.")
It also might be a window into how literary contests are judged.
The recent crop of prize winners have striking similarities. Largely African-American or Indian authors. Stories involving "big" humanistic issues like the legacy of colonialism/slavery, the importance of remembering one's roots, gender-based violence, and so on, with the implication that the writer is drawing on their lived experience somewhat.
I strongly suspect that the prizes are not solely being awarded based on literary merit. Judges of these contests fundamentally want to feel like their work matters: that they're uplifting worthy voices. You can deliberately write in a way that flatters this notion (or get ChatGPT to write for you.)
> Largely African-American or Indian authors. Stories involving "big" humanistic issues like the legacy of colonialism/slavery, the importance of remembering one's roots, gender-based violence, and so on, with the implication that the writer is drawing on their lived experience somewhat.
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.
Which instances do you think aren't misleading? Other than the explicitly electronic ones, it seems like nearly all of the awards are either from the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award or have some caveat like only being suspected of using AI or only using it for part of the work.
Someone producing the 10,000th illustrated edition of Frankenstein or winning an award with a book with an AI-generated cover or winning an award with an anthology with one AI generated segment or one award jury having bad taste is not very strong evidence of quality to me.
Yeah, or the one where only the cover was generated or the anthology where one page was AI-generated or the many cases where the only evidence of AI use was a Pangram score or the one that's just an illustrated edition of Frankenstein.
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.
I think there is another overlapping factor at play too: good writing is novel in some way. AI can produce so. much. volume. so even if some of the patterns it uses have been markers of "good" writing, those same patterns become almost unbearable when you have millions of people pumping out content using them.
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.
>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)
Diamonds are expensive because that's how much money people pay for them. People buy diamonds because [they have no taste and] they can afford to, or want to present themselves as being able to afford to. I'm sure some of them have various dark thoughts about it, too.
People derive their value from their economic status because that is a tool available to them and the world they grew up in forced them to do so. Being able to derive your value from other aspects of life is a luxury and a privelege that is, ironically, unaffordable for the majority.
It's not the economic output itself, but what it represents. I can value myself as a human being all I want, and I should, but without that economic output, it's a much harder life. Money gets you food and a roof over your head. More money gets you better food and a better roof that doesn't leak and a more secure one as well. (also gets you more problems)
Gets you a car that runs, one that runs reliably instead of breaking down. A parking space for it, even in the center of a big city.
It represents security, happiness, vacations, things/stuff. We can judge however we want about those categories but judging people isn't going to change that do actually want them. So maybe you can get all that without economic output, it just seems like it would be easier to accomplish/achieve with than without.
> 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.
> 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.
what. how?
UBI allows bad jobs to end. It allows workers to look for other work without threat to their economic conditions. Nothing about that is a cast system or limits upward mobility. it in fact, increase that mobility.
> people who care about the craft usually care about it telling genuine human stories and celebrating the author as much as the result
No, the human was never a core factor. People who enjoy a van Gogh - or any other work - primarily do so because it has particular qualities they appreciate (no, being human-made isn't an intrinsically appreciable quality; secondarily because many humans instinctively like to possess unique - or "shiny" - things), and the author tends to be a very good means to access other works with such qualities. That "celebrating the author" is just a side-effect, and there's nothing to stop a non-human entity from "telling genuine human stories" (whatever that means).
> why should the machines be compelled to interact with you?
The ultimate purpose of machines is to serve humans, and that's a bit hard to do without interaction. Just as the ultimate purpose of humans - and other living things - is to survive.
> People who enjoy a van Gogh - or any other work - primarily do so because it has particular qualities they appreciate (no, being human-made isn't an intrinsically appreciable quality; secondarily because many humans instinctively like to possess unique - or "shiny" - things)
Speak for yourself. You could show me the exact same artistic image, same exact pixels, but if I know it was made by a human, it will instantly be worth more to me and capture more of my interest. Conversely, having the knowledge that the pixels were created by a machine would make me instantly lose interest in the image.
I think "being human-made" very much is an intrinsically appreciable quality, but you have to include the production of the art as part of the art itself for that to be the case. And I and many other people explicitly do include the production of the art as part of the art itself. Not everyone shares this perspective, but many do.
That might be true for some people, but I don't think parents who keep their children's art are doing it for the quality of the art.
Nope, in that case it's about preserving memories of one they know and cherish.
> No, the human was never a core factor. People who enjoy a van Gogh - or any other work - primarily do so because it has particular qualities they appreciate
I don't follow. How about the 20k year old cave paintings in Lascaux? Are you saying "What you appreciate about it isn't the craft, or the story and history behind it; you care about only some of it's qualities?"
It's an extremely valuable part of history, for historians, archeologists, etc. The people who created those works too can be considered a "work", something to be studied the same as that which they did/made are studied.
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.
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 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.
Because there are a million literary awards and some of them are awarded by people who are bad at recognizing quality.
Additionally, many of these cases were only partially created using AI or aren't proven to have actually used AI or used AI in a creative and non-conventional way and that's what they won for.
It's a chart that shows the number of things going up over time. The total number of things increasing over time is going to play a hugely significant role in that, regardless of how broken the selection criteria are.
A contest of skill is not necessarily like spinning a roulette.
If I were to play Lebron James in basketball 1v1, it would not matter how many times we ran the experiment. We could play a trillion times, and I would win 0 of them.
If you sampled 10 Hollywood directors and asked whether The Godfather or The Room is a better movie, the Room would win the poll 0 out of a trillion times.
The reasonable naive expectation for contests like these is that, below a certain bar of quality, the chance of win is 0. So if you see wins go up as volume of submissions goes up, it shows that either ai writing is above that bar, or that faulty judging is a widespread problem beyond a few anomalous organizations.
You can't win a competition without entering it.
You have better than zero in a trillion odds against Lebron James. What if his phone rings?
"10 Hollywood directors" is hilariously unconstrained -- I'd put money on at least one having never seen The Godfather.
> The reasonable naive expectation for contests like these is that, below a certain bar of quality, the chance of win is 0.
I agree that the layperson's understanding of what 'literary award' means is close to this idea, but the "contests like these" is the problem here. "contests like these" include one that allows and seems extremely keen on "AI" generated text, for example.
There isn't a stark contrast between 'contest of skill' and 'game of chance'. You can eliminate the skill part and get closer to pure random chance, but you can't eliminate the random chance from the contest of skill.
> You have better than zero in a trillion odds against Lebron James. What if his phone rings?
You can easily devise in this thought experiment rules that prevent loopholes, like saying no phones allowed and medical emergencies do not result in a win for the opponent.
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).
"Scarcity" is a really bad theory of this, and the NFT bros have already tested how that works out.
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.
If someone buys a fake of a van Gogh and find out it's fake, they just lost millions of dollars of wealth. This metaphor seems inappropriate to apply to the typical ways people enjoy art.
> most human art derives from something more than the arrangement of pixels / bits
Many people think art should stand on its own, independent from the artist or the circumstances of its creation. Meaning or quality in art may be conveyed purely in bits even if it is the not individual bits that are meaningful.
> if we disregard this, we end up in a pretty shitty world
This is an inappropriate degree of moralizing. But I think it if we accept policing quiet enjoyment, that ends 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.
In your understudy metaphor, you seem to be suggesting that flaws with AI art are fundamentally due to deficient craft.
In that case, if you saw or read something that you considered high quality, and later found out it was AI, would that affect your opinion of it?
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.
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?
> Thanks for explaining the another person's opinion using your own, entirely-different, opinion.
Not that different, just formulated in a tamer way.
> I'm not. What am I doing wrong? Should I be on TikTok more? LinkedIn?
You're not? You don't have to wade through mountains of grifters and "hot-takes" in your social media of choice? Or through a hundred garbage sites gaming SEO every time you need to search for something online? Or through the never ending catalogue of low effort drama in streaming sites?
If so I'm sure you realize yours is not the average experience on the internet.
> need a way to filter what's actually worth investing time and attention to
nothing on social media is worth investing time and attention to. including hacker news, yet here i am so i guess my experience is not that different from the average experience, it's just not because of ai
> social media of choice
tiktok, x, linkedin, etc. have been garbage as long as they have existed. if ai slop made tiktok worse i would welcome that as a good thing for society.
> search for something online
just search on claude. the water is warm here on the dark side
> low effort drama in streaming sites
these are front and center because people like them. they have filters for acclaimed movies that aren't front and center because people don't want to watch There Will Be Blood on a random Tuesday after work. this seems like a reach
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?
> Is this an attempt at a thought-terminating-cliché?
No it’s a counter example. Calling a point half baked is closer to a thought terminating cliche.
> 1. People mostly hang their own photos.
So then that’s an answer to the question: they would give 1% of ai art the benefit of the doubt despite 99% being trash if they made it themselves.
Also I don’t accept the premise unless we are talking about family photos. Otherwise I’ve never been in a house where they’ve hanged their own photography on the wall despite being in many houses with photography on the wall.
> People mostly go to museums because they expect a certain level of quality (i.e. they're offloading the curation to... curators)
Says nothing about whether or not ai could be curated. Moreover people go to museums to see many things, including to be surprised, informed, disgusted, or to just see things they’ve never seen before.
Also curators curate on other factors than quality, or we might say “quality” doesn’t always mean the art satisfies conventional or critical tastes. No reason ai art can’t fall into that category.
> Photography is it's own medium, generative ai is a "tool".
I don’t see why ai can’t be a medium, can you explain why the output of a camera is a medium but the output of ai is a tool?
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?
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."
>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.
> We really need more terms for AI-assisted writing.
I actually think we need less discernment. All AI work is slop, but an enormous amount of human-written work is also slop. I think we need to come to an understanding that we're filling our lives with repetitive, derivative garbage that mostly shouldn't exist. AI is adding to the problem, not causing the problem.
We started deleting all of the good stuff on the internet and replacing it with crap long before LLMs were viable. Too many books are published every year. The biggest sellers are sort of ideal, overengineered, perfect slop that will just get over the bar of acceptability for the widest audience (and be enthusiastically praised by people in the industry whose ideal is perfect, bestselling slop), everybody else sells zilch, if they can find a publisher. Consolidation (media deregulation and the end of antitrust) has forced everybody to shoot for that widest audience, or cease to exist entirely. People are trained to slop. Slop is a sign of maturity and understanding adult responsibilities. Slop art, slop opinions, slop design, slop world.
We don't appreciate the good things (or can't even find them), let them be crowded out by slop, and we lose some of them forever every day. AI is an industrial level advance in this process, but it's still human hands letting it loose. Their motives are mortgages, healthcare, not being fired at will, avoiding social rejection, feeding your kids that maybe you'll one day be able to afford to have. You feed that into the market in return for the least amount of security the surveys and equations say that they can possibly give you, and the equity of pigs, born pigs, just rises like a hockey stick. Making slop for the pigs.
I'm sure you can do good things when assisted with AI, or you can trick AI into doing things that are great by themselves. But you've always been able to collage things out of slop, or pick a piece of slop and recontextualize it into something that implies a particular conversation with the context. But denying it's slop is just denial.
Nothing on this list looks appealing outside of the "AI Was Allowed From The Start" section; it all looks like annoying literary pandering. If you need AI to come up with names and change your grammar, you're not a writer who in concerned about writing imo, but about creating product.
I heard once that Peter Straub, a horror writer from the 80s, started his career in that way. He looked at all the bestsellers, found commonalities, such as the types of main characters, the types of conflicts, the genres that were selling (horror was big), the lengths of books, the lengths of chapters, the types of sentences, adjectives, plot arcs and scene descriptions, etc., and engineered a career. That's artistic and inspiring for me, but the art isn't on the paper, it's in the process. A.E. Van Vogt did the same thing in the 50s iirc, and he inspired Philip K. Dick who could slop nonstop without sleeping for days in a Methadrine haze by mixing his own divine inspirations and paranoid hallucinations with Van Vogt's cynical commercial nearly-incompetent dreamlike incoherence. If you use AI to express things that you calculate might be lucrative to feel, you're part of a long slop tradition, maybe you should be proud.
Or maybe you should just render unto the slop machines what now belongs to the slop machines, and work on something else. The slop market is full.
> 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.
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".
> 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.
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.
An interesting paper from the GPT 3.5 era is "AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably" by Brian Porter & Edouard Machery (2024).
Reinforcement-learning on human preferences does work, to an extent. You get LLM output that is (shallowly) highly appealing to humans. That's certainly not in doubt.
The problem is that writing has purposes aside from making hordes of (indiscriminating, low-taste) humans smile. And these purposes are actively corroded by RL'ing on human preferences.
Generally, AI generated fiction has problems similar to the award-winnning stories listed here - they are full of incoherent, "poetic" metaphors, vague gestures to narrative depth that is never delivered on, and relentless pandering to the cheap seats. They're very much "playing the hits" - saying unchallenging, nice things that no reader would ever disagree on. We discover that racism is wrong, that family is what matters, that you have to remember who you are.
They all feature simple (almost generic) motifs, such as trees that represent life. (The repetitiveness of these motifs becomes apparent when you start reading a bunch of stories. In "The Serpent in the Grove" by Jamir Nazir we get "‘People does change,’ he says. ‘But grove does remember.’". In Back and Forth by Kavyta Kay we get "Nani smiled, sad and certain. 'Trees remember everything, beti. They live long.")
It also might be a window into how literary contests are judged.
The recent crop of prize winners have striking similarities. Largely African-American or Indian authors. Stories involving "big" humanistic issues like the legacy of colonialism/slavery, the importance of remembering one's roots, gender-based violence, and so on, with the implication that the writer is drawing on their lived experience somewhat.
I strongly suspect that the prizes are not solely being awarded based on literary merit. Judges of these contests fundamentally want to feel like their work matters: that they're uplifting worthy voices. You can deliberately write in a way that flatters this notion (or get ChatGPT to write for you.)
> Largely African-American or Indian authors. Stories involving "big" humanistic issues like the legacy of colonialism/slavery, the importance of remembering one's roots, gender-based violence, and so on, with the implication that the writer is drawing on their lived experience somewhat.
I can't read this without recalling American Fiction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0MbLCpYJPA
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.
Which instances do you think aren't misleading? Other than the explicitly electronic ones, it seems like nearly all of the awards are either from the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award or have some caveat like only being suspected of using AI or only using it for part of the work.
Someone producing the 10,000th illustrated edition of Frankenstein or winning an award with a book with an AI-generated cover or winning an award with an anthology with one AI generated segment or one award jury having bad taste is not very strong evidence of quality to me.
The award was for the illustration, it wasn't incidental.
Yeah, or the one where only the cover was generated or the anthology where one page was AI-generated or the many cases where the only evidence of AI use was a Pangram score or the one that's just an illustrated edition of Frankenstein.
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.
Agreed.
I think there is another overlapping factor at play too: good writing is novel in some way. AI can produce so. much. volume. so even if some of the patterns it uses have been markers of "good" writing, those same patterns become almost unbearable when you have millions of people pumping out content using them.