alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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> 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.
This requires the machine to understand a whole bunch of things. You're talking about AGI, at that point there will be blood in the streets and screenplays will be the least of our problems.
Very well said.
> 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
It's an insightful point, but I think there's more going on. It seems that quite a lot of the people consuming media and art do actually care how much it's the product of a human mind vs generated by a machine. They want connection with the artist. Maybe it's a bit like organic produce. If you give me a juicy white peach, I probably can't tell whether it's an organic one, lovingly raised and harvested by a farmer with a generations-in-the-family orchard, or one that's been fertilized, pesticide-sprayed, and genetically-engineered by a billion dollar corporation. But there's a very good chance I care about the difference. I'm increasingly getting the impression that a big swathe of consumers prefer human-made art. Probably bigger than the percentage that insist on organic produce. There will be a market for human-created works because that's something that consumers want. Yes, some authors will cheat. Some will get away with it. It'll start to look a lot like how we think of plagiarism.
Maybe the strength of that preference varies in different parts of the industry. Maybe consumers of porn or erotica or formulaic romance or guilty pleasure pop songs don't care as much about it being human-produced. Probably no one cares about the human authenticity of the author of a technical manual. But I suspect the voters at the Oscars and Grammys and Pulitzers will always care. The closer we are to calling something "art", the more it seems we care about the authenticity and intention of the person behind it.
The other thing I think is missing from the debate is the shift from mass-market works to personalized ones. Why would I buy someone else's ChatGPT-generated novel for twenty bucks when I could spend a few cents to have it generate one to my exact preferences? I'd point to the market for romance novels as one where you can already see the seeds of this. It's already common for them to be tagged by trope: "why choose", "enemies to lovers", "forced proximity", etc. Readers use those tags to find books that scratch their very specific itch. It's not a big jump from there to telling the AI to write you a book that even more closely matches your preferences. It might look even less like a traditional "book" and more like a companion or roleplay world that's created by the AI as you interact with it. You can see seeds of that out there too, in things like SillyTavern and AI companion apps.
> 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 there's still a very high chance that someone willing to refine their AI-co-generated output 8-10+ hours a day, for days on end, will have much more success than someone who puts in 1 or 2 hours a day on it and largely takes the one of the first things from one of the first prompt attempts.
The most successful people I know are in a category you leave out: the people who will put in long hours out of being super-intrinsically-motived but are ALSO naturally gifted creatively/intelligently in some domain.