Can A.I. produce writing that we want to read?

yawpitch

Sure. The better question can it produce writing that we should want to read?

nomadpenguin

For me, the biggest AI writing tell (other than the blatantly obvious ones) is an unnatural consistency in style, whatever style that may be. It's most apparent in longer pieces, and I'm not sure I can really pin down exactly what it is. But human writers seem to lack the ability to keep a 100% consistent voice and lapse into different registers at different times. LLMs don't have this natural rhythm, which makes for an exhausting reading experience.

saadn92

I personally don’t enjoy it. I want to read another human’s thoughts even if it’s filled with mistakes, because at least it’s not fake.

dimator

i want to read AI words about as much as i want to look at midjourney "art" they both suffer from the same lack of dimension and intent.

gamerDude

To me, the opportunity may be in reading for entertainment. Maybe to expand on a side story or flesh out part of a world I want to read about. For opinion pieces, I'd rather the human work through an opinion and read about that personal journey!

skyberrys

The best example of AI writing I've seen so far was caused by my six year old narrating a prompt ( to me to type in ) to Gemini in story mode. The results were so unexpected and wild I couldn't stop reading it. Strangely I have yet to get such a compelling result with my own prompts. I think for myself it is tainted with the expectation of what I really wanted and would have written had I taken the time to write the words of the story instead of the prompt. This is a situation where the work to write the prompt is equivalent to the work to just write the story.

keiferski

Two thoughts: 1. The default LLM behavior (at least what I’ve used as a consumer with ChatGPT Claude etc.) is to be excessively verbose, presumably because costs are tied to usage and therefore the assumption is that more text = better. I’ve spent over a decade working as a copywriter, and IME the most important part of writing is the edit - what to cut out. So I think it’s probably possible that an AI could write stuff we’d want to read, the default behavior of the AIs most people are using works against it. 2. A lot of the writing that actually gets read today is either a description of a lived experience and/or involves slang. Neither of those things are interesting if done by an AI - I don’t care about the imagined experience of an LLM.

jquery

It's only a matter of time. It's not there yet, but it'll get there.

aabdi

yes? I find ai generated deep code wikis very valuable. They provide clear walk path to read the code. Reading code raw is always painful, trying to trace the right start points, especially with lots of legacy code. https://deepwiki.com/ArroyoSystems/arroyo . One really valuable thing i'm seeing in open source though is everything is being localized. Most before it was just not available. In a way, that's really good because it helps to bring the chinese and english speaking communities.

shalmanese

The paradox is that we love reading our own AI generated writing and hate reading anyone else's AI generated writing. On a recent weeklong trip to the Philippines, I generated over a 500 page novel's worth of content from AI around various aspects of Filipino history, culture, social dynamics etc. and actually went over it at least 3 times to fully absorb the material. But if someone handed me even a 3000 word essay on the Philippines clearly written by AI, I would not be able to get to the end of it.

doctorpangloss

his criticism is the same as illustrators pointing out that generative art had the wrong number of fingers in 2024.

matt_teresi

I wonder if there is a separation of story/structure and drafting. As a movie sometime has separate story and screenplay credits, could a human architect a structure that is then drafted in an acceptable way by Claude. Has anyone found good examples of Claude drafted articles?

JimDabell

Who is “we”? Head over to Reddit and you will see that plenty of people do not notice even the most obvious AI-generated engagement bait and happily spend their time talking to it. Even the people that post about how awful AI is will chat about that very subject to a spam bot without realising. The average person is not good at spotting AI-generated content. They accept it and want to read it just as long as they don’t realise it’s not real.

arjie

Probably not to the quality of the New Yorker fiction section yet but this has already occurred here on HN. People frequently read and comment on things that are LLM based. And Reddit’s usual outrage and repetitive subreddits are almost entirely Dear Abbys written by LLM. I think there’s lots of stuff where the LLM is translating information that is poorly represented into readable English where it’s fine. Though that does require someone with taste but not ability and usually someone who has taste and cares about their taste would have eventually cultivated their ability.

raushan__

When I was using free version of AI for my everyday task that were to machinable writing but now I am using paid version AI for my tasks these are very feels that humans have written.