alt Hacker NewsIt spoke to me as someone who's not jazzed about LLMs but also not convinced by the "it's violating our precious copyright!" arguments against them.
I think there's something in there with the character hierarchy of screenwriter vs novelist vs poet; it seems like the screenwriter in the story writes to make a living, the novelist does it for prestige, and the poet does it largely for the love of the game. The screenwriter is on board with AI until he realizes it'll hurt him more than it'll help him--ironic since he had been excited about being able to use different actors' likenesses!--and the whole time he's looking down at the poet like "Oh, god, if all this takes off I'm going to be as poor and pathetic as that guy." (Which raises interesting questions about the poet's stake in all of this: he doesn't actually have much to lose here, considering how little money or recognition he gets in the first place, but he's helping the other two guys anyway.) The novelist is rallying against the AI, but he's also initially disappointed to find out that his work wasn't important enough to use in its training data... and then later gets a kind of twisted thrill when it does actually quote his own work back at him. I dunno. I think it's a messy story in the same way that the conversation about AI and the arts is itself messy, which I like. And I always appreciate a story that leaves me with questions to mull over instead of trying to dump a bunch of platitudes in my lap :P
What I meant by not being sure about the point was not that he was not clear in what platitudes he was trying to convey, just that I was not sure about what he was trying to say which includes what questions he was trying to raise. It provides the reader with something to think about primarily through the messiness that you noticed instead of raising questions and ideas which work off of each other; the ending simply undercuts any nuance of the AI failing to get their frustration instead building on it or changing our perspective on it.
For example, if it had ended a few sentences earlier and used that potential bit of metafiction it would be suggesting that the story we just read was or at least could be the story written by the AI for the novelist and now the AI does understand their frustration but represented itself as not understanding it. That gives us a great deal to think about and builds in a second perspective on the entire piece, the perspective of the AI. But as written that only works well with the conversation part of the story and those last few lines make it really not work at all.
Edit: I think you could make the case that the meta is utilized just as I outlined above, it kind of works with the general pretentious ass that ChatGPT is in the story, things like the mace and the general lack of preparedness of the writers kind of works with those last few lines in that context. But that raises other issues and likely has some rather ugly/messy ramifications on the whole, I think. Probably will reread it when I get home but on a quick check of a few things, strongly suspect my initial view is the the more accurate one and I am just having fun with analysis at this point.