alt Hacker NewsThe post is about ai literature winning awards. Since an award is supposed to be a measure of quality, not unit-cost, a trend of ai winning awards is either indicative of the quality of the writing or of a systemic flaw in how these awards are judged (which seems plausible too).
A van gogh painting is more valuable than a replica because 1. it is scarce and 2. owning one conveys prestige. A perfect replica of a van gogh painting conveys the same artistic expression as the original.
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You're missing my point. A very good fake of van Gogh can sell at an auction for a lot of money, but if the new owner finds out, they're not gonna be happy. The same applies here: AI entries would not have won most of these contests if it was known that it's AI (discounting the handful of contests that were actually meant for AI literature and are weird to include on the list).
"Scarcity" is a really bad theory of this, and the NFT bros have already tested how that works out.
My point is that the value of most human art derives from something more than the arrangement of pixels / bits, and if we disregard this, we end up in a pretty shitty world.
> a trend of ai winning awards is either indicative of the quality of the writing or of a systemic flaw in how these awards are judged (which seems plausible too).
I definitely think this is plausible, and I think we need to start extending the idea of code "smells" to regular languages as well. I have TAed for literature and have reviewed many a manuscript and except for really really finely honed projects with lots of editing in post, written text almost always has many of these obvious smells (cliches, fallacies, illogical juxtapositions, poor cause and effect). AI-generated prose is no exception. Character names, phrases, descriptions of sensory experiences that are off or not quite right, improper negation (LLMs still struggles with the idea of 'scope'), sentence structure being very predictable and one-dimensional (even when using the latest models and mimicking famous authors and poets and even with very careful prompting), so on and so forth, you get the idea.
> A perfect replica of a van gogh painting conveys the same artistic expression as the original.
I think OP's example was a poor one. A perfect replica of a van gogh painting indeed does convey the same artistic expression as the original. However, I think the better comparison is an understudy's mimickry of A Starry Night which seems inspired by it and yet adds nothing to the original and is somewhat deficient in some ways, and misunderstands the artistic intent of the original. That would certainly not convey the same expression as the original, and would be met with widespread criticism.
Same for blood diamonds. I think scarce objects with exaggerated monetary value have some extra function for very wealthy people, for accounting or laundering purposes. That's why NFTs were a thing.