Usually it starts with an apparently thoughtful and expert-sounding comment on the original post, a comment clearly AI-generated if you know some of the current tells. The author responds with enthusiasm—after all, hardly anybody comments on old school blogs these days. A long back and forth ensues. The bot practices the usual emotional mirroring and flattery. At the end of what seemed to the host a great conversation, the bot suddenly pivots to something like: “By the way, you should come [check out my scammy online business and tell all your friends]!”Will AI writing replace human writing? That depends on both how well the AIs will be able to write and also what the writing is for.
The thread ends there. In that sudden curtailment, I can read the realization of the blog/newsletter owner that they haven’t been talking to a person. They’ve been publicly, but unwittingly, conversing with a machine, whose interest in their work means nothing. They’ve tasted the rotting sweetness of a ‘heaven ban.’
It makes my skin crawl. I want to explain to them what just happened. But I know that if it happened to me, I’d hope nobody had seen.
corsaren: One challenge with defending AI from neo-Luddites is that the public-facing usage is so heavily skewed towards antisocial uses. And sure, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, but these are agents. There’s a real sense in which the bots *are* the ones doing the killing^.
Yishan: This is a big problem. Inside tech, we are all using frontier models with mindblowing capabilities. But everyone outside is just experiencing comment spam and slop produced by grifters using least-expensive models that output reams of garbage.
FischerKing: Writers need readers who like their style. The college professors forcing students to write in-class essays to avoid AI cheating are doing the right thing - but it could be a losing battle. If fewer and fewer people want to read a distinct human style - then AI writing wins. [...]I am with Vaughan, with the obvious warning that I am a writer and could be biased.
Then think of really unnecessary works of modernism like Finnegan’s Wake. A few people pretend to like this. The overwhelming majority has zero interest. The better AI gets, the more a ‘distinct human style’ could come to look like unnecessary nonsense - waste of time.
Henry Vaughan: There are different modes of writing and reading and it’s not all about communicating information.
Literary writing and reading is more like conversation. Its closest analogue is friendship and the thing being enjoyed is the uniqueness of a personality.
I think that for many purposes people really do care about style, especially about variety of style, and about the parasocial relationship to the author, and about the costly signal that you are devoting your own mind and effort to communication. Not in every situation, but in many situations. [...]
The question then is, how does AI writing adjust? Will AI learn to write differently? Will it gain a wider variety of style?
I see two likely ways the answer could be yes.
1. The AIs might become superintelligent, and gain the ability to adjust style along with everything else, in which case I expect AI writing to win out because AI everything wins out, but also we have bigger problems and I don’t care.
2. The AIs might not be superintelligent, but be trained to produce a wider variety of styles, or a different style, in response to this. I’m not sure whether I like this.
by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAV/X | Read more:
Image: David Perell/X
