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«And if there's no inherent value to humanity, why should the machines be compelled to interact with you?»

Reading this part made me wish it was more compelling than I think it really is, because I think someone could argue that the value of human consumption isn't predicated on the value of human creation.

I used to find things like machine-run pizza places and coffee shops really cool (even though I've never been to one). I even wrote a small coffee automation program once, but recently, with the promise of automation getting more real by the day, I find myself genuinely worried for the fate of human-run pizza places! They're doing fine now, but what if the machine-run ones become 10x or 100x cheaper? Would anyone still occasionally pay for the expensive human-run ones?

While it's debatable how that will turn out, the value of human creation feels a lot more significant when it comes to art and literature, but I'm starting to realize that for many others there's no fundamental difference between consuming art and eating pizza.

The fine dining scene is doing well despite cheaper alternatives being available (ubiquitous?). So I wouldn't worry about the possibility of experiencing amazing hand crafted pizza disappearing, even if convenient cheap machine made frozen pizzas should become what most people choose experience regularly. And I believe the same goes for other art forms, people enjoy producing and consuming them, and the experience of top notch human productions will be available and no worse regardless of what the masses choose to spend their time and energy on.

Where we might get fucked over is if Bauhaus displaces architecture where some resources are allocated to form instead of all going to function because buyers are cheap. It would be impossible for individuals with taste but little resources to set out with to meaningfully affect the public landscape. But that ship has sailed almost a century ago.

You brought up fine dining and frozen pizza but what about a situation where the automated one is both cheaper and better tasting? We're still functioning on the assumption that that will never happen.

The fine dining was a reference to high art in general, the frozen was directly addressing the worry that pizza places with human made pizza would disappear given cheaper better alternatives. I think the picture still holds. I've been to places that serve human made pizza where I think I would prefer some of the better frozen ones food-wise, but still went and enjoyed the experience (mostly for the social component?).

Similarly, a lot of the fine dining is about showing off an artistic creation that surprises and/or delights, not necessarily the food-artefact beating out others in price nor quality. (Ok, there's the whole show around it as well, but even the places light on the craftsmanship that goes into the ceremony are hard to imagine succumbing to cheaper and better/equivalent alternatives assembled/delivered home, which arguably exist.) I foresee the other arts now competing with LLMs having a similar fate to the fine dining scene. Not capturing the masses, but still doing fine.

Or perhaps ultra small scale brewing of beer would be a better picture now that I've slept on it. It follows the same pattern of most consumption being mass produced good cheap product, but somehow artists putting awesome hand made creations into the world is happening both commercially and by people doing it purely for their love of the craft, despite the prices being higher and the technical quality not rarely lower.

>Fundamentally, I know that HN has plenty of people who will react with "ha-ha, human authors should pack their bags", just like what we keep telling mathematicians, because we see the discipline as just another market that can be conquered by automation or another benchmark to track.

I think it's a bit more nuanced than that, at least some of us are going: "ha-ha, people derive their value from their outputs instead of understanding existence is itself valuable"

Why does everyone value themselves based on their economic output? Why do blood diamonds compete at all with lab grown - one often involves sacrifices to the minors, and the other is cheaper and by all metrics better? (hint: because the narrative of "effort" is what drives that particular example... the blood makes the diamonds shinier in some people's minds... that's not a good look, morally)

> Why does everyone value themselves based on their economic output?

I mean this is really the issue with the idea of AI taking jobs, isn't it? If our entire economic system wasn't predicated on this, nobody would be really that miffed about AI use in art because there wouldn't be much of a market for it, because the concept of art as being a marketable widget wouldn't exist in the first place, and the notion of human expression being replaced with a machine would be absurd. But we have tied up art with economic exchange for centuries. It has been a market commodity for almost as long as recorded human history. So the graphic designer who pours their creative spirit into what is, essentially, an economic exchange (rather than going and painting landscapes or something) feels an acute threat because it threatens their existence.

To overcome this and to live a future where it feels more like ML/LLMs live in concert with humanity then you'd have to picture a future where human value is divorced from one's capacity to provide economic value. When exactly does anyone foresee that happening? The entire system would crumble. UBI is clearly not the answer because all it does is entrench a subtle cast system and limit upward mobility and does nothing to address this root cause.

I don't know what the future is, but I know that as long as the current economic system persists (in all its permutations, whether that's socialism, capitalism, communism, whatever outmoded 19th and 20th century ideas we have to structure society -- all alienate the individual and relationships to some degree or another) then AI will always be met with disdain even in areas where it can improve people's well-being (and FWIW I think the arts and even mathematics are NOT part of this subset of use cases).

Maybe the solution is walled cities and shutting off the internet entirely; returning to our neighborhood pubs, sports, expressions of the human spirit placed up at farmers' markets. Seems like we already seem to be trending in that direction; and if last night's apocalypse was any indication maybe the internet's days are numbered anyways.

> UBI is clearly not the answer because all it does is entrench a subtle cast system and limit upward mobility and does nothing to address this root cause.

what. how?

UBI allows bad jobs to end. It allows workers to look for other work without threat to their economic conditions. Nothing about that is a cast system or limits upward mobility. it in fact, increase that mobility.

It's not the economic output itself, but what it represents. I can value myself as a human being all I want, and I should, but without that economic output, it's a much harder life. Money gets you food and a roof over your head. More money gets you better food and a better roof that doesn't leak and a more secure one as well. (also gets you more problems)

Gets you a car that runs, one that runs reliably instead of breaking down. A parking space for it, even in the center of a big city.

It represents security, happiness, vacations, things/stuff. We can judge however we want about those categories but judging people isn't going to change that do actually want them. So maybe you can get all that without economic output, it just seems like it would be easier to accomplish/achieve with than without.

Diamonds are expensive because that's how much money people pay for them. People buy diamonds because [they have no taste and] they can afford to, or want to present themselves as being able to afford to. I'm sure some of them have various dark thoughts about it, too.

People derive their value from their economic status because that is a tool available to them and the world they grew up in forced them to do so. Being able to derive your value from other aspects of life is a luxury and a privelege that is, ironically, unaffordable for the majority.

My optimistic take on literature, compared to code, is that what writers produce is what is exactly consumed. The medium stays the same. The implementation choices of writers, like syntax, matter deeply to how the text resonates with a reader.

Code, on the other hand, is not consumed by end users in the same way. It compiles and turns into applications, which are then used. So users of applications are less scrupulous about what the code looks like, what language was used, and so on.

The 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.

You aren't accounting for volume.

How does volume explain why something low-quality would be called the best quality?

If volume can hack wins at awards, that's a fault in the award system, which is precisely the second hypothesis.

It's a chart that shows the number of things going up over time. The total number of things increasing over time is going to play a hugely significant role in that, regardless of how broken the selection criteria are.

A contest of skill is not necessarily like spinning a roulette.

If I were to play Lebron James in basketball 1v1, it would not matter how many times we ran the experiment. We could play a trillion times, and I would win 0 of them.

If you sampled 10 Hollywood directors and asked whether The Godfather or The Room is a better movie, the Room would win the poll 0 out of a trillion times.

The reasonable naive expectation for contests like these is that, below a certain bar of quality, the chance of win is 0. So if you see wins go up as volume of submissions goes up, it shows that either ai writing is above that bar, or that faulty judging is a widespread problem beyond a few anomalous organizations.

You can't win a competition without entering it.

You have better than zero in a trillion odds against Lebron James. What if his phone rings?

"10 Hollywood directors" is hilariously unconstrained -- I'd put money on at least one having never seen The Godfather.

> The reasonable naive expectation for contests like these is that, below a certain bar of quality, the chance of win is 0.

I agree that the layperson's understanding of what 'literary award' means is close to this idea, but the "contests like these" is the problem here. "contests like these" include one that allows and seems extremely keen on "AI" generated text, for example.

There isn't a stark contrast between 'contest of skill' and 'game of chance'. You can eliminate the skill part and get closer to pure random chance, but you can't eliminate the random chance from the contest of skill.

> You have better than zero in a trillion odds against Lebron James. What if his phone rings?

You can easily devise in this thought experiment rules that prevent loopholes, like saying no phones allowed and medical emergencies do not result in a win for the opponent.

Because there are a million literary awards and some of them are awarded by people who are bad at recognizing quality.

Additionally, many of these cases were only partially created using AI or aren't proven to have actually used AI or used AI in a creative and non-conventional way and that's what they won for.

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.

> 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.

In your understudy metaphor, you seem to be suggesting that flaws with AI art are fundamentally due to deficient craft.

In that case, if you saw or read something that you considered high quality, and later found out it was AI, would that affect your opinion of it?

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.

If someone buys a fake of a van Gogh and find out it's fake, they just lost millions of dollars of wealth. This metaphor seems inappropriate to apply to the typical ways people enjoy art.

> most human art derives from something more than the arrangement of pixels / bits

Many people think art should stand on its own, independent from the artist or the circumstances of its creation. Meaning or quality in art may be conveyed purely in bits even if it is the not individual bits that are meaningful.

> if we disregard this, we end up in a pretty shitty world

This is an inappropriate degree of moralizing. But I think it if we accept policing quiet enjoyment, that ends up in a pretty shitty world.

> people who care about the craft usually care about it telling genuine human stories and celebrating the author as much as the result

No, the human was never a core factor. People who enjoy a van Gogh - or any other work - primarily do so because it has particular qualities they appreciate (no, being human-made isn't an intrinsically appreciable quality; secondarily because many humans instinctively like to possess unique - or "shiny" - things), and the author tends to be a very good means to access other works with such qualities. That "celebrating the author" is just a side-effect, and there's nothing to stop a non-human entity from "telling genuine human stories" (whatever that means).

> why should the machines be compelled to interact with you?

The ultimate purpose of machines is to serve humans, and that's a bit hard to do without interaction. Just as the ultimate purpose of humans - and other living things - is to survive.

> People who enjoy a van Gogh - or any other work - primarily do so because it has particular qualities they appreciate (no, being human-made isn't an intrinsically appreciable quality; secondarily because many humans instinctively like to possess unique - or "shiny" - things)

Speak for yourself. You could show me the exact same artistic image, same exact pixels, but if I know it was made by a human, it will instantly be worth more to me and capture more of my interest. Conversely, having the knowledge that the pixels were created by a machine would make me instantly lose interest in the image.

I think "being human-made" very much is an intrinsically appreciable quality, but you have to include the production of the art as part of the art itself for that to be the case. And I and many other people explicitly do include the production of the art as part of the art itself. Not everyone shares this perspective, but many do.

You said it. Depending on your knowledge of the entity producing the work, you get a different experience. In a vacuum though you'd appreciate the work for it's actual qualities which you find appealing. The potential for appreciation isn't different at all; it's just overruled by stronger feelings regarding the current trend of AI-hate vs AI-love. Like given identical works from 2 humans, if you respect human A and despise human B, then it's a near 100% certainty that you'd appreciate the work attributed to human A and find every possible fault with that attributed to human B. With a fun bit of hypocritic confusion if it's the same work with the attribution going back and forth.

Also the point about humans preferring the unique and "shiny". Human-made things will always be unique (nobody can do the same the the exact same way twice without machine help), while machine-made things are usually not unique but can be made so (and even then a generative routine used to make something unique can be replayed).

I think it all comes down to scarcity, the same thing that's driving pokemon card prices through the roof. That's all there is.

As AI can generate ~any image nowadays, there is potential for an infinite amount of AI art, driving the value of AI generated images to 0, unless artificial scarcity is introduced like in the case of Pokemon cards.

Whereas with humans, there isn't an infinite amount of human art, as only a subset of humans are skilled enough to create good art pieces. Human art should therefore theoretically always be more valuable than any AI art. EDIT: Have to add, human artists always make use of artificial scarcity as well by only making 1-N copies.

I value this scarcity, that there are people insanely more skilled than me, blessed with good genes and environment that are able to create art that didn't exist before in the space of human made art. It creates healthy role models for people to be inspired by. The scarcity or skills aren't artificial, but natural.

You seem to be conflating "intrinsically appreciable" and "intrinsically deducible". We can and do appreciate artworks because of their extrinsic qualities such as its historical background, the works that preceded and succeeded it, meanings given by author etc. So the "potential for appreciation" is indeed higher for human beings with this web of interconnections. The vacuum example doesn't do much since it strips the very thing that gives the artwork its extrinsic meanings that we appreciate. When we step out of the vacuum the balance changes and the works are not equal anymore and I can hardly understand why we would insist on living in the vacuum when we clearly do not.

To your point that this is merely reactionary attitude on the emergence of AI, people have and do still value hand-made crafts such as carpentry over mass-produced furniture.

> No, the human was never a core factor. People who enjoy a van Gogh - or any other work - primarily do so because it has particular qualities they appreciate

I don't follow. How about the 20k year old cave paintings in Lascaux? Are you saying "What you appreciate about it isn't the craft, or the story and history behind it; you care about only some of it's qualities?"

It's an extremely valuable part of history, for historians, archeologists, etc. The people who created those works too can be considered a "work", something to be studied the same as that which they did/made are studied.

OK, and so other artists can be studied too, and aspects of their creativity can be studied, and this doesn't have to be formal but can amount to just liking the artist's creativity. But you said "being human-made isn't an intrinsically appreciable quality".

That word "intrinsic", what does it mean in this context? You're sure it means something?

Sure, anything that can be sensed/known, can be studied.

It means that one cannot experience (look at, listen to, etc) a work and honestly say "I appreciate how this was human-made". There's no quality that can be imbued into a work that makes it discernable as made-by-human, as opposed to made-by-machine, or even made-by-nature (and eventually, maybe even made-by-alien). Not like one can discern and appreciate the lines and colours in a painting, or the tones and energy of a song. The maker of a work is extrinsic to it.

But there's no quality that makes an object discernable as anything at all; it's all theories. You don't absorb facts about reality through a sense organ, you start with a theory - such as "this is hexagonal" or "this was made by a human" - and test it. I diagnose that you are suffering from inductivism.

That might be true for some people, but I don't think parents who keep their children's art are doing it for the quality of the art.

Nope, in that case it's about preserving memories of one they know and cherish.

What interests me about art isn't just the result, it's the process, and the connection that process creates.

It's more than the "aura of the artist" which Walter Benjamin talks about in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction (highly recommend for anyone interested in past discussions on his topic), it's the fact that the writer is directly processing their world as experienced into an artifact which will allow me to understand their experience and enrich my own.

The loop is:

World -> Human -> Written Word -> Reader

compared to: Corpus -> Engagement Optimized Output -> Reader. This is something David Foster Wallace talks about in an essay E Unibus Plurum - the concern that artists producing art from media consumption rather than direct experience creates a house of a mirrors. Even if the optimization is for literary quality, it's still not coming from the world. Serious art is a kind of news, not just entertainment.

Beyond that, creating art isn't just a technical process, it's an open act of self-shaping and self-discovery that is meaningful to and reflective of a community. I worry about losing the deeply insightful members of society that artistic practises create. Of course if you're a media producer interested in profit that's perfect - they want caged pigs to consume their slop, not thoughtful connected individuals.

For that matter, these first major examples of AI literature—like the first passable Stable Diffusion images, and the first halfway-hummable Suno jingle—have the advantage of cultural novelty. I feel like the shine is likely to come off quickly as derivative AI works multiply.

The first spatter canvas was a new conceptual move and valued more for that than for the paint and canvas; subsequent works tended to ring hollow and command neither interest nor value. The first “ChatGPT, reword this like a pirate shanty” was worth a laugh, now it’s worth an eyeroll.

For that matter, as artists and writers incorporate these new tools into their practice, there’s still a difference between low-effort slop and the products of artistic obsession. AI image gen is commoditized right into the ground, yet you can still find interesting and distinctive works in, say, Midjourney’s community galleries. Or in at least one example from TFA:

> An AI reading machine uses computer vision, OCR, and language processing to find short poetic combinations in physical books, erase the surrounding words, pair them with images, and publish new volumes.

That sure sounds like an artistically interesting endeavor to me, independently of their choice to execute their concept through AI models.

> Fundamentally, I know that HN has plenty of people who will react with "ha-ha, human authors should pack their bags"

And yet they still seem to object to LLM-generated blog posts and LLM-generated comments here, where literary expectations are much lower.

The quality of LLM prose may improve quite a bit, but I suspect LLMs writing fiction will asymptote towards the quality of a writer who has never interacted with other people, but only read other fiction. Even if you dismiss any value of the author being a sapient being to the process, a human author has a far larger training set...