Wow, I could not disagree with this more. What’s valuable about a novel is the social relationships it fosters, both in relation to the author, and also all the others that have read it. I read a book to better understand what other people are thinking, how they see the world — both directly from the author, and indirectly, in discovering what other readers may have found valuable.

I can maybe understand finding value in a machine-written novel if others also read it and enjoyed it, but having an LLM spit out a novel and reading it in isolation, that would be a complete waste of time to me.

novel is a bunch of words

or even a bunch of characters, bunch of pixels and so on.

To me this is the wrong level of abstraction that is not sufficient to encode the meaning of literature.

Reading a book is a way to peek into author's mind. There is nothing to peek into when the book is generated by llm.

> A novel is a bunch of words

> What's valuable in a novel (or a poem) is in the words.

Even if the words are a lie? Misleading? False?

I'm not even talking about LLMs. What if it's propaganda designed to influence your thinking, possibly against your own interests; are those still valuable words that you'd cherish reading?

My point is that the source matters, intent matters, and authenticity matters. To me, anyway.

LLMs are inherently backward looking; their training corpus consists of existing works and their ability to extrapolate is ultimately constrained by that corpus. However powerful their proponents claim them to be, they aren't powerful enough to predict the evolution of human society and culture as a whole.

Changes to that corpus that reflect the real world are going to come from incorporating future works created by humans. (LLM generated training data can reinforce fidelity to the current corpus but don't alter it.) The future still belongs to human creativity.

Generally speaking - I agree with you. Source bias is a real logical fallacy, and failing to evaluate the content itself, regardless of the source, is a problematic view of the world.

In the same way that I don't need the lumber in my house "hand sawed" for it to achieve my goal of creating a habitable space.

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But more broadly, I do think there's space to at least question the use and role of AI.

Because while content can (and should) be addressed directly, there's a valid meta-conversation about the intent of producing content, and the results producing that content might have.

What goal does producing this content achieve?

What is the role of this content in society?

Is this content, on this scale, an appropriate thing to be making?

These are MUCH harder questions - often because we've shifted from concrete (content) to abstract (value judgements).

To go back to my housing analogy: We're no longer evaluating the benefits of hand-sawed vs power sawed timber. We're discussing whether our housing is built in the right spots, if we're building enough of it, and are we allocating it in the right ways.

I think there is both value that comes from the work being authored by a human, and value which does not?

Completely untrue. Stephen King has a loyal following. These same people aren't going to pick up a generic scary book written by a machine. This goes for music as well.

You do care though. You may not think you care but you absolutely do. If somebody tells you that in the Hood canal west of Seattle, there is a population of endangered tree octopuses, who are unique among octopuses in that they climb up to land and lay their eggs under fallen tree trunks in old growth forests, and that they are now endangered because road construction is cutting their access to the old growth forests, so they cannot lay more eggs.

You would care about that story, until you found out that this story is a lie, an old April’s fools joke that escaped confinement. The words are the same, but your reactions to the exact words have changed with new information about the source.

When we read personal stories it affects our emotions as we empathize with the author, or otherwise share the feelings that the author is trying to convey. When we find out there is no such author, our empathy and our notion of shared feelings vanishes with the new information even though the words stay the same.

I care because it’s not personal, it’s not informed by lived experience, etc. It has no meaning. AI “novels” are just facsimiles of other people’s writings assembled in a way that appears new, but ultimately it’s just an approximation of a person writing a book. Their’s no author intent or context of any kind to consider. It removes core pillars of experiencing literature.

I don’t want a mathematical approximation of writing informed by feelings, knowledge, experiences, etc. anymore than I would want to see an “AI band” perform just because the music is supposedly great. There’s no personality, there’s nothing personal period.