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