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Comment by JadoJodo | Hacker News Reader

One of the comments on the article stated, "What a pleasurable read.". I have no idea if this article was generated using the method described, but this gave me pause in the era of ChatGPT/AI.

Can something be pleasurable to read/view/listen to/etc., knowing the author of the work doesn't, for lack of a better term, have a soul? I don't know.

Perhaps this drifts too far into philosophy, but I myself find it adds something... more, knowing that a human being put their thoughts/feeling/heart into a piece of work. This is certainly, in part, informed by my theistic beliefs, but I recognize that others (like Sam Harris) wouldn't delineate at all between human thought processes and something like ChatGPT.

That being said, I would have to imagine some portion of people also feel something "other" about human connection that brings works of art/literature/music/film/etc. an undeniable beauty BECAUSE of their human-origin.

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To me, what matters most about the media I consume is my personal emotional response to it. Whether a sentence is generated by an AI or a human, it has an equivalent impact on my feelings.

For me, at least, the important part of media I consume is how I feel about it. If an AI writes a sentence and a human later writes the same sentence, they have the same effect on me.

To me, what matters most about the media I consume is how it makes me feel. Whether a sentence is written by an AI or a human, it has the same impact on my emotions.

I wrote one of these. The other two are ChatGPT's rewording of the same idea, and a second rewording with "try to sound as human as possible". They are in an arbitrary order. Does one of them make you feel different than the other?

I for one am completely uninterested in AI-generated "art" (including writing, music, etc) because of the lack of a human who is communicating something. I'm concerned it will be increasingly difficult to tell what is worth my while.

Yes.

I keep going back to Stephen King's definition of writing as telepathy. The machine does not think.

That doesn't make it bad, it just makes it meaningless. I was able to use it to identify an obscure 90s B movie and that's pretty cool.

But in terms of actual meaning, you might as well be talking to a tree.

There's a long and storied history of humans who talk to trees and project deep meaning on their answers, so we're probably doomed to fall for the delusion anyway.

> Can something be pleasurable to read/view/listen to/etc., knowing the author of the work doesn't, for lack of a better term, have a soul? I don't know.

I find pleasure in looking at gorgeous natural landscapes: mountain ranges, forests, waterfalls, creeks, glaciers, the sky at night. I also enjoy eating fresh blackberries.

I enjoy them even though they don't have a soul or a human creator.

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