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Comment by harshreality | Hacker News Reader

Current popular AI (LLMs, music generation, image generation) doesn't have a concept of facts, structure and sequence; they don't have an emotional concept of something on the edge of novelty, but not so novel that it's jarring and chaotic. However, that says nothing about the future.

Her essay is attention-seeking nonsense. She can't predict the future of art-generating AIs. Nobody can. This way she can write a "mea culpa" and admit to being wrong to get some additional attention for herself and her works once AI renders human production of new works largely pointless—because nobody will be able to verify it's human-generated rather than machine-generated, and human-generated works will cost more.

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You’re re-stating points from the article, what mea culpa would she need to make?

FTA:

> But judging from the attempt recently made with one of these entities—“Write a Margaret Atwood science-fiction short story about a dystopian future”—anything more complex and convincing is as yet beyond it. The result, quite frankly, was pedestrian in the extreme, and if I actually wrote like that, I would defenestrate myself immediately. The program, so far, does not understand figurative language, let alone irony and allusion, and its flat-footed prose was the opposite of effective storytelling. But who knows what the machines might yet achieve? you may say. I’ll wait and see. Maybe they’ll at least turn out a mediocre murder mystery or two.

That, as a writer of science fiction, she can't imagine AIs will ever turn out anything more than a "mediocre" work of fiction.

The game AI naysayers like to play is that anything not made by a human is inherently mediocre, because value is largely subjective, and they implicitly define away the possibility of a great AI creator because knowing it was made by AI ruins it for them.

The same narrative existed for go, even the fall and winter before the Alphago–Lee Sedol match. The AI beat Fan Hui, but was still mediocre and would never challenge top professionals for the foreseeable future. There would be inherent limits an AI would run up against because it lacked some quality necessary to be a top-level competitor (or artist).

She doesn't say that is all it will turn out, it seems you are adding that in to discredit her; she says wait and see and it may at least be able to turn that out.

So her essay is content-free. "This may happen, or it may not." Great. Thanks for your input, Margaret.

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