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1domtoday at 12:45 PM5 repliesview on HN

> AI writing makes me vomit.

I think this was fairly obvious and fair 1 - 2 years ago. Now though, I have to wonder if people who think this with such conviction are falling for the toupee fallacy.

You said it yourself: someone you consider a well known (and presumably accomplished?) author thinks AI is pretty good at writing.


Replies

strkentoday at 1:23 PM

I haven't tried using an AI to write prose, but I use Claude to write code daily and it spits out the worst comments I've ever seen, along with some surprisingly good ones.

Would we not expect AI fiction to be the same? A stream of poor and excellent taste, not particularly original or surprising, samey in hard-to-define ways, but capable of being hammered into a good story by an editor.

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delis-thumbs-7etoday at 1:24 PM

> Now though, I have to wonder if people who think this with such conviction are falling for the toupee fallacy.

If this is the case it should be quite easy for you to provide examples of excellent AI-fiction.

As for the “well-known author”, Occam’s razor says he (like most “well-known accomplished authors”) doesn’t know what the hell he is talking about.

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kevin_thibedeautoday at 3:13 PM

Good at constructing paragraphs, yeah. Generating coherent plotting and character development is still a human skill.

stanactoday at 1:16 PM

> I think this was fairly obvious and fair 1 - 2 years ago.

And that's mostly for us, developers who use it all the time and maybe for other office employees. Not sure if random person would recognize LLM-isms.

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fzeroracertoday at 1:18 PM

There's been multiple 'unslop' contests [1] with a focus on AI 'writing' and I agree with the OP that AI writing makes me want to vomit. It's all hollow, bland writing that has zero zest to it.

[1] https://www.hyperstitionai.com/unslop-results