The Writers Came at Night

I am not sure what the general point of this is; for a good chunk of their conversation it seems to show why AI will fail in the arts, it is incapable of understanding their frustration with the AI as demonstrated by the conversation, it misses the humanity of it and only states it and states it as a weird sort of concession. But at the end it seems to undercut that by making it all out as futile and the writers pretentious and/or the AI cruel, which leaves the whole rather thin. The final prompt to the AI had a great chance for a bit of recursive metafictional fun, but does not seem to be used; could be a hint to a subtle bit of indirect metafiction but I don't think it was.

I understand the hand-wringing in the humanities, but even if LLMs can output wonderful stories they can't really ever get past pulp fiction levels.

Question: why do people write and buy new books? There are millenia of amazing works, but people prefer to read new things. Some gems persist, but even my kids read entirely different YA novels then I did as a kid.

Art is communication. A big part of why we like new art is because it reflects the culture and mores of the now. LLMs can only give you the most like next token prediction - it is antithetical to what we want when we interact with art.

Not to say it can't spit out reasonable plots for shows or be a valuable aid to writers, but I think it will continue to serve best as an aid to humans, even more so than in coding. Maybe artists will turn into LLM wranglers like software engineers are starting to, but a human-in-the-loop is going to remain valuable.

Telling stories is as old as humanity, no machine will ever make storytelling obsolete. It will change it for sure but change is as constant as the waxing and waning of the moon.

This was a really entertaining read, do any of you have similar contemporary stories to share?

I think the story makes a good point, but I'm not sure it's even the primary point the story was trying to make.

> “Writing a book is supposed to be hard,” he said.

> “Is it, though?” said the AI. The novelist wasn’t sure, but he thought he detected a touch of exasperation in the machine’s voice.

> “Perseverance is half the art,” he said. He hadn’t had much natural talent and had always known it, but he had staying power.

It's this right here. I don't think any LLM-based AI is going to be able to replace raw human creativity any time soon, but I do think it can dramatically reduce the effort it takes to express your creativity. And in that exchange, people whose success in life has been built on top of work ethic and perseverance rather than unique insight or intelligence are going to get left behind. If you accept that, you must also accept its contrapositive: people who have been left behind despite unique insights and intelligence because of a lack of work ethic will be propelled forward.

I think a lot of the Luddite-esque response to AI is actually a response to this realization happening at a subconscious level. From the gifted classes in middle school until I was done with schooling, I can always remember two types of students: those that didn't work very hard but succeeded on their talents and those that were otherwise unexceptional beyond their organizational skills and work ethic. Both groups thought they were superior to the other group, of course, and the latter group has gone on to have more external success in their lives (at least among my student peers I maintain contact with decades later). To wit, the smart lazy people are high-ranking individual contributors, but the milquetoast hard workers are all management who the smart lazy people that report to them bitch about. The inversion of that power dynamic in creative and STEM professions... it's not even worth describing the implications, they're so obvious.

Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that AI can eventually serve to level the playing field for everything. It outputs novels, paintings, screenplays - whatever you ask it for - of such high quality that they can't be discerned from the best human-created works. In this world, the only way an individual human matters in the equation is if they can encode some unique insight or perspective into how they orchestrate their AI; how does my prompt for an epic space opera vary meaningfully from yours? In other words, everything is reduced to an individual's unique perspective of things (and how they encode it into their communication to the AI) because the AI has normalized everything else away (access to vocabulary, access to media, time to create, everything). In that world, the only people who can hope to distinguish themselves are those with the type of specific intelligence and insight that is rarely seen; if you ask a teacher, they will recant the handful of students over their career that clear that bar. Most of us aren't across that bar, less than 1% of people can be by definition, so of course everyone emotionally rejects that reality. No one wants their significance erased.

We can hand wring about whether that reality ever can exist, whether it exists now, whatever, but the truth is that's how AI is being sold and I think that's the reality people are reacting to.