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un-diletantetoday at 2:01 PM5 repliesview on HN

I feel like writing has traditionally had two purposes, to communicate some internal feeling or idea of the writer, and to entertain. For the reader, even if their primary purpose was to be entertained, they would have no choice but to also engage with the internality of the writer. This latter point is what is changing.

I fully admit that we have been surpassed by the machine in the ability to entertain. And the biggest problem with that is that entertainment is the primary factor that drives the popularity and consequently the financial success of a book. If a writer's primary purpose is to entertain, then they should be very worried. But if their primary purpose is to convey something from within themselves, the LLM cannot replicate this. They may however lose that portion of their audience to whom the communication of profundity is merely collateral to being entertained.

I'm not a professional writer, but when I do write, I do so with the intention of expressing something that I feel, which before being thought out and written exists as something not linguistic. The language is a means for the expression of this deeper experience whose communication is the end. But an LLM on it's own is not able to convey internal experiences that it does not have. If it seems that way, it is only achieved by manipulating and rearranging the experiences of the authors that make up it's training data.


Replies

ChrisLTDtoday at 2:05 PM

> I fully admit that we have been surpassed by the machine in the ability to entertain.

Why though? Daily here on HN, posts are pilloried for being AI generated and full of AI tropes.

AI generated content might be drowning out human generated content, but I wouldn’t say that it’s surpassed human content in a qualitative way.

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douglee650today at 2:15 PM

The high-level structures of writing are prose, poetry, and drama.

Cross cutting them is the purpose, these are not mutex: exposition, narrative, description, conviction.

There's also straight rambling nonsense.

cyanregimenttoday at 2:36 PM

Conveying experience != having experience

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harimau777today at 2:11 PM

The problem as I see it is that you cannot communicate your internal feeling if no one reads you book. Therefore, even for people whose motivation is personal expression, there is a very real risk of being flooded out of the market by AI slop.