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Comment by galkk | Hacker News Reader

That criticism reminds me articles/videos where professional musicians critise some famous hit songs. Musicians sometimes can comment that guitar is ahead of drums or vocal doesn't hit notes quite well. The things that I as not musician doesn't hear at all. And this is also common topic in their reviews, that one should write music for audience, not for other musicians.

I'm not native speaker and many weirdnesses of the text may go past me, but I can say that for me the commented texts (especially the 2nd one, about post apocalyptic Canada) are completely passable and much better that what I will be able ever to write.

Yes, it may be not a threat (yet) to professional, especially established author. But they will be good helpers for people like me, who can get suggestions, improvements and illustrations just for the price of my 4090 and time to tinker with models.

No gpt was used for writing this though.

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I find your reaction intriguing since I had nearly the opposite reaction. Especially when it comes to the second piece I had little to critique about it technically (maybe a little from a structural standpoint but not as much grammatically), but I found it incredibly dull due to its complete lack of any real point. With your musical analogy, it felt to me like a piece where all of the instruments were played perfectly, but failed to make a song I actually would care to listen to again.

> But they will be good helpers for people like me, who can get suggestions, improvements and illustrations just for the price of my 4090 and time to tinker with models.

This I agree with; for someone who may not be as gifted a writer, but still has something interesting to say, generative models could help with that. I just hope that people don’t lean on these models for generating ideas because if that story was any indication, that’ll just lead to a proliferation of boring, soulless works.

Agree. This reminds me of a kid's school assignment, which sounds impressive, but really misses the point. A kid with no real writing talent or experience given this same prompt would also cargo cult some uncohesive drivel like this.

That lines up pretty well with how much ChatGPT responses ape the stereotypical school essay style of being 1/5th introduction, 3/5ths content, and 1/5ths conclusion that reiterates the content.

Even if there weren’t stylistic and logical problems with the story, I don’t think I’d be terribly interested in reading it.

Fundamentally, literature is about communication with other people, living in another person’s mental world or understanding their unique perspective.

It’s not really clear to me what human value an LLM generated story has. It’s a statistically probable sequence of tokens generated from the distribution of internet-based language. It had no unique perspective, and conveys nothing about actual human experience. What do I learn from that? How is my life enriched?

There's a segment of generative AI proponents who, on a fundamental level, genuinely do not understand art. All art is communication, and without humanity it is meaningless.

LLMs are really cool for creative brainstorming and stuff like that, as a tool for inspiration, but I am baffled by the idea that anyone is interested in entire AI-generated works.

What do I learn from that?

That you are nothing special. The computer is just doing what you do, putting one word after the last one. Picking each word more or less carefully, based on its own training and the audience's expectations.

It's doing it badly, for the moment. But would we mock a talking dog who stutters?

How is my life enriched?

Being able to see what's coming is helpful, more often than not.

You’re describing human communication as “nothing special”, just a string of patterns that have no significance beyond their low entropy.

Frankly that’s solipsistic, bordering on pure nihilism. When I read another person’s writing or talk to them, it enriches my life because it gives me a slice of their experience. When I read LLM output, it just definitionally can’t do that, no matter how plausible and semantically meaningful the words are. What is the purpose of literature for you? Just consuming a pleasing string of words?

That’s not to say they have no value, just that I can’t learn anything about another person’s experience of life through an LLM, because they aren’t people

The LLM isn't creating new information, only packaging existing information.

When it creates a poem, song, essay, painting, or program that has never existed before, it is doing what we do. Whether or not we define that as "creating new information" is not an especially interesting question at the end of the day.

No, because what matters here is if information complexity (aka entropy) is being increased.

Humans increase it, LLMs decrease it.

This matters because eventually in the future information complexity will be humankind's only valuable resource.

(So humans create value, LLMs destroy it.)

(Shrug) If you want to increase entropy, just call rand().

You might take a bit of time to learn what you're talking about before posting, or at least before forming permanent opinions on the subject. It's fascinating stuff, trust me... and I'm not that much farther along than you are, trust me on that as well.

> Yes, it may be not a threat (yet) to professional, especially established author. But they will be good helpers for people like me, who can get suggestions, improvements and illustrations just for the price of my 4090 and time to tinker with models.

I think that's more or less what Atwood was saying: that it's not yet good enough to replace talented professionals. I doubt she'd argue that it can do the other things you mentioned.

She seems to feel the gap is really large right now. Even if it is as bad as she indicates, I wonder how long it will be before the gap is closed given the progress we've seen recently.

The feeling among writers generally (and among companies that thought, for a time, they could fire most of their writers and editors…) is that LLMs need another couple huge upheavals in how they operate, to compete with and replace skilled humans rather than being a 1.1x multiplier for a skilled human. Their current trajectory isn’t making them all that worried, now that they’ve had some time to see what LLM text generators can actually do (which isn’t much).

Musicians write for other musicians. Coders use the best data structure to solve a problem not for the users but for another coder to appreciate. You weigh praise on the merits of the judge to do the judgement. People in the end listen to the music musicians listen to, even if this is with a lag. I am not a musician but I appreciate a musician’s depth of understanding for something I superficially let stroke my ears.

> Coders use the best data structure to solve a problem not for the users but for another coder to appreciate.

If only. That would make life so much better and easier.

Huh? How does forgetting who you work for lead to better software?

Wrong thread?

Coders use the best data structure to solve a problem not for the users but for another coder to appreciate.

I find that sentiment mildly offensive. I write a lot of code myself, but for every program I write, I use a hundred programs written by other people. If those programmers want to impress me, they will keep my needs as a user in mind, not their own egos.

I don't know how much code you usually read but from my experience seeing coders using the best data structure to solve a problem for other coders to appreciate is very rare, and it isn't rare because they're doing it for the users, it's rare because they are not doing it at all. The bar seems to be 'produces the expected output' not 'best'.

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