alt Hacker News> Today's AI can basically compete with the low quality stuff that makes up most of social media, it can't really compete with higher quality stuff
But compete in what sense? It already wins on volume alone, because LLM writing is much cheaper than human writing. If you search for an explanation of a concept in science, engineering, philosophy, or art, the first result is an AI summary, probably followed by five AI-generated pages that crowded out the source material.
If you get your news on HN, a significant proportion of stories that make it to the top are LLM-generated. If you open a newspaper... a lot of them are using LLMs too. LLM-generated books are ubiquitous on Amazon. So what kind of competition / victory are we talking about? The satisfaction of writing better for an audience of none?
Replies
>The satisfaction of writing better for an audience of none?
The satisfaction of writing for an engine. The last of what could still be recognized as a real human being writing. There’s no competition with AI, but also no resignation and no fear of being limited compared to the vast knowledge of an LLM. Even in a context of an "audience of none", somewhere there will be a scraper tool interested in my writing. And if it gets hallucinated... wow!
This is the part nobody wants to say out loud: most writing was already bad before LLMs. AI didn't kill good writing, it just made bad writing free. The people who were reading AI-generated slop on Amazon are the same people who were reading ghostwritten garbage before. Good writers still have audiences, they're just not competing in the SEO content farm game anymore. And honestly they never should have been.
Tens of millions of people, if not hundreds now thanks to the popularity of the television adaptation, have been waiting 15 years now for Winds of Winter to get published. If AI is such a good writer and can replace anything, write Winds of Winter for George. I don't really give a shit what's ubiquitous on Amazon. Nobody will remember any of it in a century the way we remember War and Peace. People will remember the Song of Ice and Fire books.
I think it's fine. As said above, most reading isn't done because people are looking for thought-provoking, deeply emotional multi-decade experiences with nearly parasocial relationships to major characters. They're just looking to avoid the existential dread of being alone with their thoughts for more than a few minutes. There's room for both twinkies and filet mignon in the world and filet mignon alone can't feed the entire world anyway. By the same token, if we expected all journalists to write like H.L. Menken, a lot of people wouldn't get any news, but the world still deserves to have at least a few H.L. Menkens and I don't think they'll have an audience of "none" even if their audience is smaller than Stephanie Meyer or whoever is popular today.
If it were me, I don't know man, does nobody on Hacker News still care about actually being good at anything as opposed to just making sales and having reach? Personally, I'd rather be Anthony Joshua than Jake Paul, even though Jake Paul is richer. Shit, I think Jake Paul himself would rather be Anthony Joshua
> if you get your news on HN, significant portion that make it to the top are LLM-generated.
You mean this anecdotally I assume.
This makes me think of the split between people who read the article and people who _only_ read the comments. I'm in the second group. I'd say we were preemptive in seeking the ideas and discussion, less so achieving "the point" of the article.
FWIW, AI infiltrates everything, i get that, but there's a difference between engagement with people around ideas and engagement with the content. it's blurry i know, but helps to be clear on what we're talking about.
edit: in this way, reading something a particular human wrote is both content engagement and engagement with people around an idea. lovely. engaging with content only, is something else. something less satisfying.