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ForceBrutoday at 3:26 PM3 repliesview on HN

Person: finds the article beautifully written. The comments: "but it's AI, so you aren't allowed to think that it's beautifully written!!!!"

This doesn't follow. For instance, there are some pictures that I know are AI-generated, yet they're still beautiful to me. Nothing jaw-dropping, just very nice. Being AI-generated doesn't automatically mean being not worthy, especially when it comes to art. I understand, this is kind of insulting to human artists, writers, etc: we thought only the human soul and Nature could produce "the beautiful", but apparently not.

Which is not surprising, because LLMs are specifically trained to please their audience. Of course they can produce uhhhh "content" that people will find beautiful, that's not even necessarily a "bad" thing.


Replies

simonwtoday at 3:33 PM

The best explanation I've seen for why AI art doesn't deliver like human art is this from Ted Chiang:

> Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. […] to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.

> If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-i...

rogualtoday at 3:50 PM

Are the comments really saying that? That the person isn't allowed to think it's beautiful?

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ChrisMarshallNYtoday at 3:41 PM

> but it's AI, so you aren't allowed to think that it's beautifully written

Um...I didn't actually say that.

I just said that the reason it is beautifully-written, was probably (not 100% sure) that it might be because it was LLM-written. There was definitely some human input (like not having read the Witches books, but that was strangely-written, so it may have been they read, but didn't like), but there's a better-than-even chance that the prose was written by an LLM.

I'm not really into that "you're not allowed to feel..." thing. I sincerely apologize if that's how it came across. That wasn't how I meant it to be taken.

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