I wouldn't interpret the chart as indicative of the gains in the quality of AI writing; it's more that it's a fairly new phenomenon and there is a dramatic increase in people who try to smuggle AI stories into contests (be it for personal gratification or to "show" human writers), and an increase in the scrutiny that submissions receive.
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. But literature, similarly to most other forms of higher-brow entertainment, isn't just about reducing unit-cost or hacking engagement metrics. For the same reason why a genuine van Gogh painting is worth a lot more than a nearly-perfect replica, people who care about the craft usually care about it telling genuine human stories and celebrating the author as much as the result.
Now, the mass consumer may not care; if you have an infinite Harry Potter sequel machine, many will partake. But then, I guess the question is, if you build the sequel machine, are you leaving the world better off or not? Do you want to be interacting exclusively with machines down the line? And if there's no inherent value to humanity, why should the machines be compelled to interact with you?
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 subsequent AI works multiply.
The first spatter canvas was a new conceptual move and valued more for that than for the paint and canvas; subsequent derivative works didn’t ring nearly as valuable. The first “ChatGPT, reword this like a pirate shanty” was worth a laugh, now it’s worth an eyeroll.
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.
>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)
If anyone wants to commission an AI novella, holler out to me. (For free -- this is a hobby)
I've been trying to build an automated book publisher for about a year now. While the books aren't yet "human good", the slop factor is getting fairly low. Part of that is because I've stuck to formats easier for AI to avoid the uncanney vally in: recipe books, historical re-tellings, etc.
Unpopular take: AI slop is actually just slop. (Most) people ultimately don't or won't care if writing or other media is partially or wholly authored by AI. Same with art. I feel as much righteous indignation as the typical person as I write that, I think. "I want humans making art that makes me feel these profound feelings!" I say to myself. But if I don't know who the creator is, all I have to go on is the art.
A sort of related concept is that I may dislike, actively hate, or be completely indifferent to some of the authors and artists whose work I love. I love their work, but I may not love them. I may choose to spend time with people whose art I dislike. So it is with AI. I dislike the idea of AI, so I claim to dislike the art.
As amazing as AI writing is, we are still in the uncanny valley, and that is why we hate it.
Imagine the holodecks in Star Trek, which for my argument I'll consider to be significantly more advanced AI, and significantly closer to crawling out of the uncanny valley... the people using them ultimately hit the same wall of "oh but this falls short of real human experience."
> The disclosed AI use was apparently limited to inventing the name of a fictional disease. The organizers still counted it among the year’s AI-assisted winners.
This one was interesting to see, because cases like this make the difference between luddite exclusion (anything that transitively comes from 'AI' is spiritually-tainted bits) and accurate disclosure (LLM output is distinguished from human product). Either policy is a valid choice, but lumping the two together as equally 'AI-assisted' tends to confuse rather than help.
This is similar to the 'no gray areas' problem with compiling a list such as https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/ai-free-foss-alternatives repo and needing a complex system of tags to avoid mixing projects that have measured/conservative stances short of full exclusion, with projects that have gone full slop-cannon.
We really need more terms for AI-assisted writing. There's degrees to everything and writing is one of those things where there's LOADS of gray areas. Did you use AI for research? What about generating random names for characters/places? Did you use it to check your grammar (why do people even care about this? They do!)?
Anything touched by AI is starting to become "the fruit of the poisonous tree" for a lot of people and it's getting ridiculous. I've chatted with people who will refuse to read a story because they think the cover art was generated by AI (even though they don't really know; they're just guessing). "It's AI slop."
One of the listed stories was almost disqualified for that very same reason (AI cover art). Another was controversial because the author used AI to generate a random name for a disease.
If we had better terms for the levels of AI involvement, maybe people would get a little less worked up about it?
Fiction requires charting a path through the infinitely large space of what is possible. I think AI can be very helpful assistant when plotting, figuring out how you lead characters naturally, as the storyteller, to where you want to get them through manipulation of circumstance.
One is limited as a writer because of the hard problem of bringing to attention possibilities you haven't considered yet (ie writer's block). AI can be very helpful as a search tool for the "possibility space" even if its judgment and voice are mediocre.
>If we had better terms for the levels of AI involvement, maybe people would get a little less worked up about it?
I think this suggestions lacks an appreciation for why people get worked up about it.
Anybody willing to actually apply some nuance to all of this aren't these people. If you're willing to write off an entire book because you suspect AI may have been involved in its creation, then you're likely just grandstanding. That's not even to say it isn't a valid "strategy" for "dealing" with AI, but the approach is to just hardline the issue to a degree that there's explicitly no room for nuance. This strategy suggests there's a way for people to suppress AI basically back to the point of nonexistence, and it will take an absolute position that any AI is bad.
The people who are willing to apply some nuance will eventually have to learn that being a consumer almost requires you to ignore how the sausage is being made. If you get more value from something than it costs, then it is ultimately a worthwhile product to consume. It doesn't matter if it was made by a team of passionate humans who have never even touched a computer or if it was spit out by an AI seconds before you consumed it (or anything in-between, of course). This is the way it worked before AI, when most people didn't care to acknowledge that they were just consuming some engineered slop that lacked any semblance of a human connection, and this is the way it will work "after" AI.
At this point, the only reason this is still a factor is because there are still tells which remind consumers of this greater context which is uncomfortable (thanks, in part, to the first group of people). But at some point, it simply won't be a significant factor and people will assume their products were created with at least some AI input the same way people are generally fine with assuming their products are being manufactured with slave labor, cause global warming, make them dumb, etc.
In PRs at work (software engineering) we distinguish between drafting, editing, review, and straight generation.
In creative writing I think it's less about the tool(s) and more about the investment. Reading takes time and attention. If an author offloads the actual composition (the deliberate thought, structure, and prose) to an LLM then they've reduced their effort to as close to zero as they can while still asking for the reader's full attention.
There is nothing unreasonable about identifying this as a bullshit proposition.
Suppose you are an author and you have some plot hole you're trying to work through. You say to llm, I'm thinking maybe we can have this event X happen to explain why some character needs Y. Can you research X more and tell me if this a plausible way to handle this in the story? And the llm says, that almost works but you didn't consider this, so it needs addendum Z. Then who composed the structure?
To be honest I doubt it. As far as I am concerned at least, it's a bit like the distinction between a shit sandwich and a sandwich that uses shit as a condiment.
In the terms of the fruit of the poisonous tree, the tree is not AI or what it touches, it is an author who chooses to use AI in the process of writing. The fruit of that tree is simply not one I care to eat.
Thanks for explaining your opinion with profane metaphors and nothing else. How can you tell if an author used AI to research a topic or not. Why is this bad?
There's no "good" or "bad" about it. Everyone is just wading through mountains of slop (man-made or ai made) and need a way to filter what's actually worth investing time and attention to. Effort, or percieved effort at least, is a good enough measure for most people. If 99% of ai generated "art" is low-effort garbage, why would people give the benefit of the doubt to the other 1%? What would they gain from it?
Feels disingenuous to list prizes for contests like UCSB Mind & Machine Intelligence Writing Contest or the Electronic Literature Organization, where the whole point is to have machine-assisted stories.
That’s like saying “my toddler won a national art competition” and then finding out the contest only allowed entrants by toddlers. Or like when someone bragged about their vibe-coded game making $25K, and it turns out they just won the $25k prize in a game vibe-coding competition.
I agree such inclusions are misleading and probably shouldn't be included. But the page has plenty of instances that aren't like this, so this objection seems to also mostly obscure.
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. But literature, similarly to most other forms of higher-brow entertainment, isn't just about reducing unit-cost or hacking engagement metrics. For the same reason why a genuine van Gogh painting is worth a lot more than a nearly-perfect replica, people who care about the craft usually care about it telling genuine human stories and celebrating the author as much as the result.
Now, the mass consumer may not care; if you have an infinite Harry Potter sequel machine, many will partake. But then, I guess the question is, if you build the sequel machine, are you leaving the world better off or not? Do you want to be interacting exclusively with machines down the line? And if there's no inherent value to humanity, why should the machines be compelled to interact with you?
The first spatter canvas was a new conceptual move and valued more for that than for the paint and canvas; subsequent derivative works didn’t ring nearly as valuable. The first “ChatGPT, reword this like a pirate shanty” was worth a laugh, now it’s worth an eyeroll.
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.
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 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)
If anyone wants to commission an AI novella, holler out to me. (For free -- this is a hobby)
I've been trying to build an automated book publisher for about a year now. While the books aren't yet "human good", the slop factor is getting fairly low. Part of that is because I've stuck to formats easier for AI to avoid the uncanney vally in: recipe books, historical re-tellings, etc.
A sort of related concept is that I may dislike, actively hate, or be completely indifferent to some of the authors and artists whose work I love. I love their work, but I may not love them. I may choose to spend time with people whose art I dislike. So it is with AI. I dislike the idea of AI, so I claim to dislike the art.
As amazing as AI writing is, we are still in the uncanny valley, and that is why we hate it.
Imagine the holodecks in Star Trek, which for my argument I'll consider to be significantly more advanced AI, and significantly closer to crawling out of the uncanny valley... the people using them ultimately hit the same wall of "oh but this falls short of real human experience."
Or perhaps, people notice the AI art that is slop or in the uncanny valley. By definition when something crosses the uncanny valley you don't notice.
This one was interesting to see, because cases like this make the difference between luddite exclusion (anything that transitively comes from 'AI' is spiritually-tainted bits) and accurate disclosure (LLM output is distinguished from human product). Either policy is a valid choice, but lumping the two together as equally 'AI-assisted' tends to confuse rather than help.
This is similar to the 'no gray areas' problem with compiling a list such as https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/ai-free-foss-alternatives repo and needing a complex system of tags to avoid mixing projects that have measured/conservative stances short of full exclusion, with projects that have gone full slop-cannon.
Anything touched by AI is starting to become "the fruit of the poisonous tree" for a lot of people and it's getting ridiculous. I've chatted with people who will refuse to read a story because they think the cover art was generated by AI (even though they don't really know; they're just guessing). "It's AI slop."
One of the listed stories was almost disqualified for that very same reason (AI cover art). Another was controversial because the author used AI to generate a random name for a disease.
If we had better terms for the levels of AI involvement, maybe people would get a little less worked up about it?
One is limited as a writer because of the hard problem of bringing to attention possibilities you haven't considered yet (ie writer's block). AI can be very helpful as a search tool for the "possibility space" even if its judgment and voice are mediocre.
I think this suggestions lacks an appreciation for why people get worked up about it.
Anybody willing to actually apply some nuance to all of this aren't these people. If you're willing to write off an entire book because you suspect AI may have been involved in its creation, then you're likely just grandstanding. That's not even to say it isn't a valid "strategy" for "dealing" with AI, but the approach is to just hardline the issue to a degree that there's explicitly no room for nuance. This strategy suggests there's a way for people to suppress AI basically back to the point of nonexistence, and it will take an absolute position that any AI is bad.
The people who are willing to apply some nuance will eventually have to learn that being a consumer almost requires you to ignore how the sausage is being made. If you get more value from something than it costs, then it is ultimately a worthwhile product to consume. It doesn't matter if it was made by a team of passionate humans who have never even touched a computer or if it was spit out by an AI seconds before you consumed it (or anything in-between, of course). This is the way it worked before AI, when most people didn't care to acknowledge that they were just consuming some engineered slop that lacked any semblance of a human connection, and this is the way it will work "after" AI.
At this point, the only reason this is still a factor is because there are still tells which remind consumers of this greater context which is uncomfortable (thanks, in part, to the first group of people). But at some point, it simply won't be a significant factor and people will assume their products were created with at least some AI input the same way people are generally fine with assuming their products are being manufactured with slave labor, cause global warming, make them dumb, etc.
In creative writing I think it's less about the tool(s) and more about the investment. Reading takes time and attention. If an author offloads the actual composition (the deliberate thought, structure, and prose) to an LLM then they've reduced their effort to as close to zero as they can while still asking for the reader's full attention.
There is nothing unreasonable about identifying this as a bullshit proposition.
I feel like the people getting worked up about it are the ones collapsing everything into a single term they can blanket apply everywhere.
In the terms of the fruit of the poisonous tree, the tree is not AI or what it touches, it is an author who chooses to use AI in the process of writing. The fruit of that tree is simply not one I care to eat.
That’s like saying “my toddler won a national art competition” and then finding out the contest only allowed entrants by toddlers. Or like when someone bragged about their vibe-coded game making $25K, and it turns out they just won the $25k prize in a game vibe-coding competition.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890743
It’s meaningless data. Worse than meaningless, as it obscures the validity of what’s around it.