Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

But, at least with creative works rather than technical, whether or not a work was machine-generated is very important to me. If I can't tell, it makes me less interested in new creative works in general.

I already mostly ignore new recorded music because of this problem.

An AI detector (if it were reliable) would at least help with that issue.

But this is only about machine-generated works that are trying to pass as human works. If machine-generated works don't do that -- if they become their own kind of genre -- that's an entirely different thing.

View on HN

> this is only about machine-generated works that are trying to pass as human works.

But by "machine-generated" don't you mean "text that came out of an AI model"? My argument in the post is that such output tells us very little about how much human input went into the original work. It's all lumped together as AI slop.

Not just text, but also images, music, video, etc.

You are correct that "AI detectors" (if they were accurate) give a very crude indication and omit nuance. That sucks. But, from my point of view with creative works, such a thing would be better than nothing.

At least if there were such a detector, then there would be a way that I could be comfortable with at least some new works. That would be an improvement over the current state of things, where my default position has to be to ignore new works altogether.

I don't know enough about models that produce images, music, video to know how much human thinking and creativity can shape their output. But with text, the kind of output you get from a simple throwaway prompt like 'write me an essay on X' is vastly different from input you've taken a long time to think through and shape. Yet they'll mostly both be treated the same by people who rely on AI detectors.

My biggest issue with AI text is just that it's annoying to read, so I get put off before I can figure out if the content is actually worth reading. I would love a detector that detects the style of writing I find annoying and warns me, or offers to rewrite it so I can give it a chance at least.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com