I mean I really, really wish people did that. I don't want to fulminate since it's against the guidelines but presenting a piece of text that you haven't written entirely yourself and claiming its authorship as entirely your own is the definition of plagiarism. I think that's what bothers me the most. If you use AI and it contributes to the content of your text at all, why not just let us know? It's the fair thing to do. Don't make it look like you wrote something, or wrote it entirely on your own, when you haven't.

I think that would suffice to cool down the debate quite a bit, because then we wouldn't be constantly trying to double-think each other all the time. We'd be free to concentrate on the merits and demerits of a piece of writing for its own worth.

Not saying I, for one, wouldn't still be prejudiced, but if AI writing really gets better than human writing there will come a time that even hard-headed curmudgeons like me will have to admit it. Or just go and fume alone in the corner.

This is certainly not the case now and since almost nobody ever says "this was written with/by AI" we end up in the kind of double-guessing spiral we're in here.

When there is clearly a huge demand for great stories and writing like Terry Pratchett's then why is it so hard to make a living out of it? And what happens now we made it even harder?

LLMs harnesses try to make them useful to suggest things, but this is the most destructive thing you can do to a writer. You can work around it by just feeding Claude a writing critique skill.

And Terry Pratchett would have loved it too. Even if it were clumsy.

But thanks for being kind in taking criticism.

It’s funny how anytime an article gets called out for being AI slop on HN, the author’s reaction is something like that: “oh yeah sorry I used AI but just for proofreading I swear, I should’ve done just a tiny bit less”.

No one seems to get the message that relying on AI at all is what makes writing shit. Good writers have confidence in what they produce. The fact that you’re willing to incorporate any AI suggestion at all means you’ve already lost the battle.

The people I know have no confidence whatsoever in their writing, rewriting and rephrasing the same paragraph over and over until they either run out of time or give up. They also circulate their drafts among colleagues and ask for their opinions too.

It's not the confidence what makes good writing, but rather putting in the work.

Tbh my first couple research papers were brutally savaged by reviewers until I spoke to a lady at my university's Academic English department. In fact I was sent there by an internal reviewer who refused to pass my early-stage report otherwise. The lady at the Academic English dept pointed out one thing I was doing and it immediately clicked and I've only got good words about my writing style since.

Know what that One Simple Hack was? I spent my youth writing Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror as a hobby. So naturally when it came to writing papers, I thought, hey, I know how to write. It's like literature.

Shockingly, it is not. Like, at all! In literary writing it's basically sacrilege to write the same thing in the same words twice. In technical writing that is what you must do. Unless you want to confuse everyone about what you mean. So I was trying to make my technical writing "not boring" by not repeating the same expressions and instead finding new, creative ways to refer to the same concepts in different places, and that just made reviewers really angry because they never knew what I meant. I stopped doing that -and also generally tightened up my use of terminology- and that was it. Now every paper gets at least one reviewer that says "this is a well-written paper".

Then they brutally maul me anyway on all the rest, of course but, eh, what can you do :D

P.S. Dunno, maybe "that's a well-written paper" is what everyone says when they're looking for something nice to say before they let rip. I sometimes do it too. People do that all the time, don't they? I had calcific tenonditis and I went to a doctor and he told me "you are really brave, others in your condition would be screaming their heads off" (from the pain). And I remembered that my father had the same thing when I was a kid and he'd gone to a doctor and come back bragging that the doctor told him he was so brave, others would be screaming their heads off. I wish people didn't do that, I'm fine being just like everyone else, honest. Just don't make me doubt my mediocrity, you know?

This is a little like saying no one will ever paint anymore because cameras exist.

It might be harder to make a living off art now (which...debatable), but at no point, ever, was it easy.

-- Yogi Berra

Writing is hard now, not because AI exists, but because there are so many writers out there and everyone's competing for attention, not just with other writers, nor with books from the past, but with all forms of media. Loads of people today, who might otherwise be reading novels for entertainment, are too busy scrolling their phones or watching TikToks or playing video games.

We don't have another Terry Pratchett because all the would-be Terry Pratchetts are toiling in obscurity, and possibly giving up on writing as a result.

These writing jobs in print media have mostly disappeared in the UK. It's certainly harder to make a living as a writer today than it was in the 70's and 80's.

The Clovenhoof Series by Heide Goody and Iain Grant gets to Good Omens.

You could totally argue that if people can't tell the difference, it's irrational for them to care which one they get, and I don't totally disagree with that either, but it's not like personal tastes have ever really been a rational thing either. Our ability to enjoy something is the result of a bunch of signals in our brains, and it's not that crazy that adding another signal (or removing one) can change that result in a way that makes it more or less desirable to seek out. Some people might literally like a piece of writing more if they have reason to believe it's from a human than they would if they read the same exact thing but had reason to believe it's from an AI, and while I would find a study showing that as fascinating, I wouldn't see that as an argument that people like the wrong things, because "right" or "wrong" don't really seem like they apply to that sort of thing. If someone told me that knowing there's a human on the other end and that having some sort of indirect, one-way emotional connection to them is an important part of what makes them enjoy it, who am I to tell them that's wrong?

AI is never going to stop people from creating new things. Will it make it harder or different to make a living? Sure, but ai isn't the first thing to do that, nor will it be the last.

But making a living off of your art is incredibly, incredibly difficult, and always has been. If AI doubled, or halved, your chances of winning the lottery, it still wouldn't really change your odds of winning.

I concede that I don't have data to base this on but there's plenty of anecdata. AI companies brazenly steal artists' work and reproduce it, and automate its production, without those artists' permission. How is this going to make things not worse for artists? I think you're saying it doesn't matter because it's a drop in the ocean. Well, how did we get to the ocean? How did artists' work get devalued? Maybe it's all the technological advances that everyone brings up in those conversations, to justify the use of yet another one to do the work that until recently only human artists could do: photography, typography, CAD, computer graphics etc etc. Maybe the more we automate the more we take away from the value of artists' work, and that's why we're where we are now, where if you're an artist, you better find a day job?

I used to write a lot as a teenager. Hours and hours spent writing and overwriting, and correcting, and re-writing, drafts upon drafts. In Greek, mind, because that's my native language. I once passed some drafts to a big-name literary critic who was controversial for having said once that Kazantzakis had no talent; and he told me "write! Because you have talent!". He told me I got talent and he called Kazantzakis talent-less. What.

But of course I didn't become a professional writer. I didn't even try. I mean I kind of almost half-tried but it was obvious I could never write what I wanted (sci-fi and horror mainly with a smattering of fantasy) and still make a living. Not least because it was all written in Greek and those genres don't have a huge following in Greece. Or didn't back when I was a teenager, it's probably a bit better now. But still not enough to make a living out of. I could tell. Bad idea. Find a day job.

And then I got a job ...writing. Code. Ahem.

But I mean I'm bitching about the fact that we keep making all this new tech and none of it seems to make the life of artists any easier, and why not? Don't we all want to enjoy good art? Who's going to make it? Even if we replace human artists now, who's going to train the AI of the future to make new art, once the recombinations of the art they're already trained on stops being interesting? We enjoy novelty, right?

We have to draw the line somewhere with art, of course, and that usually comes down to a combination of what consumers value, and broader perceived cultural merit. Nobody really cares about the well-being of artists who specialize in making pretty paper airplanes, or drawing pictures using only the MSPaint pencil brush.

I think the audience, not the tools, deserve the most scrutiny here. Look around at this very thread, and all the people defending what the LLM wrote. Their feelings can't be argued with. But they make me feel sad and alienated, because I see a vast difference, so vast and so obvious, and they see none at all.

In the future, perhaps people will enjoy LLM work -- genuinely enjoy it -- as much as I've enjoyed Vonnegut or more. It may be the inevitable result of a broader cultural shift away from reading and writing. I guess with time, maybe we'll find out how valuable it actually is to have a strong command of one's language... I imagine, at least, people today are much better at other things to compensate.

Gosh! Thanks!

>> In the future, perhaps people will enjoy LLM work -- genuinely enjoy it -- as much as I've enjoyed Vonnegut or more. It may be the inevitable result of a broader cultural shift away from reading and writing. I guess with time, maybe we'll find out how valuable it actually is to have a strong command of one's language... I imagine, at least, people today are much better at other things to compensate.

I guess there's been a cultural shift away from literacy and towards technological prowess and science, at least in the anglophone world in the last couple decades? It seems so to me but I think it might be because I, myself, turned to tech and science, and away from literature, in that time.

What I remember from my school years is that most kids treated reading and writing as a chore. If I think about it, besides myself, there were just one or maybe two other kids I knew who read books other than what the school recommended, and for our own pleasure. I was the only kid I knew who wrote *.

Which is weird because, at a certain level, everyone can write, right? Like, at a certain level, everyone can sing, and if they really put themselves into it, most people can sing pretty decently after all. I would think it's the same with writing. There's plenty of people who write stuff, in the press, in books, online, for movies or theater etc. I always thought that was the main weakness of choosing a career as a writer: you do not have a moat. And like you suggest, taste is subjective so sometimes all you have to do to make a living as a writer is to capture the zeitgeist or get lucky.

Take J. K. Rowling as an example. I've absolutely read all of the Harry Potter series, but the writing is atrocious, the plot is trite and the world-building is unoriginal and shallow. Yet she's ... what, the best selling author ever or something like that? Like I say way above, people really want to read good stories. Or even not that good stories.

Will that change? I really don't think so. But will authors be replaced with chatbots? Will we all end up asking our favourite chatbot to generate a story like we want it? That makes me sad, too, and I feel like something will be lost that we don't want lost. But ... who knows. I also think we've lost something the way everyone is constantly on their phones now, but that's how the world works. Things change. Sometimes it's hard to see that they really change for the better.

__________________

* Although other kids were possibly at it but where too shy to share. I was... not a shy kid.

that stopped after twitter

and went asymptotically downhill from there

approaching, but never quite literally getting to the point of eating a dog shit sandwich

(despite the same nauseous feeling and bad taste in your mouth)

It's only partly a joke.

So, you might also be repped writ large in their their training data...

  (;^_^)

also, your last-line worldview... i mean i get it, but...

just basically sounds like the twitter origin story (T_T)

That, plus it's also full to the brim with LinkedIn-esque AI slop. There are still some decent writers there, for sure, but Substack is going downhill fast as more grifters join the platform in the hopes of making a quick, easy buck.

And if it isn't, we should find out very soon. If AI has got so good as OpenAI's post implies, then we should soon see a veritable blooming in the production of mathematical results, by lay people no less. No mathematicians needed! OpenAI say that their secret LLM solved the planar unit distance problem "autonomously" and the companion remarks say it one-shotted it; and while the companion remarks make it clear that there was a lot of refinement and improvement work done by humans, everyone seems to agree that the AI did the job by itself.

If that's true, if we're really at that level of autonomous mathematical reasoning ability, then we should see hundreds, even thousands, of open problems suddenly solved in a matter of years if not months. We'll just have to wait and see.

https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contribution...

I think it is important to temper expectations in light of the fact that these announcements are coming from a startup company with shady values looking to imminently IPO, and thus represent the most biased and misleading take of the situation possible.

>> If that's true, if we're really at that level of autonomous mathematical reasoning ability, then we should see hundreds, even thousands, of open problems suddenly solved in a matter of years if not months.

Stressing "hundreds, even thousands".

Google released a paper about solving 9 more Erdos problems for an average of $100 each:

https://arxiv.org/html/2605.22763v1

In a year I think we'll probably have seen hundreds of open problems solved, even if there is some a low hanging fruit exhausiton bottleneck.

But Bathory is Black, so a bit by-the-by. Venom (whom I count as an early thrash band; they have nothing to do with Black Metal except for that one song title), seem to have been more influenced by Motörhead, Motörhead, Motörhead, and Judas Priest. I believe Venom were a major influence for all European Thrash bands.

Speaking of Motörhead, they were also a major influence to at least Sodom and possibly other early Thrash bands too. So I personally think Motörhead are a more likely Thrash influence than hardcore.

Then again Metallica do have their Garage Days Revisited album which is probably a good catalogue of their influences. Maybe. Tbh I don't hear Sabbath in Metallica. And I've listened to oodles of both religiously as a teenager.

Back to European Thrash, Kreator and Destruction that I also listened to as a teenager, don't sound very hardcore-influenced at all. They are just harder, dirtier, Speed Metal bands with more violent lyrics.

Come to think of it, maybe there is an American vs. European Thrash divide. American bands more influenced by hardcore, and/like Metallica; European bands more influenced by Speed Metal. And Motörhead.

Honestly. A lot of European Thrash sounds to me like Motörhead. For example:

https://youtu.be/-qmbiw38o2I?si=z35EZG1X07p4uUe5

But, well, that's a bit on the nose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8C3Tez3iAY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOa5p0FVhko

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XphUURIAx5g

and for my "cheat" example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pAD870Lx-o

I suppose its my bias speaking but at the end of the day there has to be something that distinguishes thrash metal from speed metal or heavy metal of course. Its in our "guts" so to speak but it needs teasing out exactly what the difference is. In the branch of thrash or partition perhaps that I gave the distinction is clear: hardcore of some sort or scene as the influence. For German thrash, I can see clearly there is a difference, as Sodom and Kreator in their early era feels like black/death metal structurally so it isn't just sped up Motorhead. While a lot of Metallica sounds like thrash, there is an element of rock music to Metallica's sound. Your example with that Sodom song is a good one. In my view a band that considered itself thrash when doing the "odd one out" song for an album, would never write something like For whom the bell tolls, they'd do a Discharge cover instead or a east coast hc style short song. Perhaps its my finding rock music grating that biases me to leaning toward some of Metallica's work not being thrash. For German, we can see it by asking what is the difference between Rage or Angel Dust and Kreator/Destruction (here of course even Rage and Angel Dust are already absent of any rock feeling even though they are supposed to be the older so called "speed metal" style). In both my examples and much of German thrash I think for me, if I look back and see, I think its that whatever path they took the rock aspects have completely gone from them by that time.

But I do see what you mean in many places, e.g. the structural similarity of Sodom and Kreator with early Black. Including Bathory again! It isn't just sped up Motorhead, and the Sodom track is indeed a bit out of the ordinary, but they're still a big influence I think.

I don't know if I agree Metallica have a rock element. Hmm. Can you point to a track more specifically where you hear that? I can't think of any. Unless it's in the Black Album or later?

>> I suppose its my bias speaking but at the end of the day there has to be something that distinguishes thrash metal from speed metal or heavy metal of course. Its in our "guts" so to speak but it needs teasing out exactly what the difference is.

Well, yes, and then, maybe it's a bit of an affectation. It's only something you do once you've listened to a bit more metal than the ordinary person (which is not much: AC/DC, Metallica, maybe Slayer, end of). I of course had endless debates with my friends as a teenager and I may or may not have written angry letters to the editors of the only Greek language Metal magazine when I was growing up (and I think the only one still?) to protest the clandestine placing of a band in the absolutely wrong category in this or that article of theirs.

Maybe kids these days will get over that sort of thing. Maybe not. It's all good.

>> and for my "cheat" example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pAD870Lx-o

Yeah without even listening to that I can tell it's cheating XD

One thing I just realized is that compared to early thrash metal, some speed metal bands had already gotten far more militant, stripped down and free of any remaining rock feelings. Think of Exciter, Rage, early Helloween or Agent Steel.

Again speaking to my bias of course but for me thrash starts getting truly exciting when it started growing toward death metal, its the most "fun" form of metal to me in a way nothing else gets, its in some ways the most spiritually "hardcore punk" like form of metal in the sense of instead of just including this or that hardcore guitar phrase or drum beat in a song, their approach of writing and playing was very pure, heart worn on sleeves and egging each other on fun. The complexity level was increasing rapidly but I feel due to this hardcore sensibility it doesn't just start sounding like prog rock as this hardcore like minimalist thinking keeps the melodies elegant and flowing, its probably one of more legato leaning genres of metal.

But yes, genres are not mathematical structures, trying to find a really hard scientific dividing line would keep leading to moving in circles forever. I have my preferences of course, death thrash and OSDM mainly.

Hm. OK, maybe. I haven't ever thought of it that way tbh. It does kind of Deep Purple though, in its general rythm so maybe.

I think I agree with your point about Thrash moving away from Rock, very much, despite my feeling that Motorhead was a major influence. I don't know if there's a contradiction there. On the other hand, one of my favourite bands is Entombed (though I can't say I like everything they ever recorded) and I like them exactly because they have this kind of boogie groove in their death-thrash. Then again I think that is one reason some people just don't like them.

I'd say some Thrash bands definitely veered too close to prog. Annihilator? Over Kill? Megadeath... Some Death bands too. I remember reading reviews about this or that Death record and the journo would write about the sudden changes of tempo and the complex riffs and so on and I'd always be like, I don't care about that. I like my Metal simple tbh. Give me one riff that will blow me away and I don't care how technically accomplished you are.

Now, I remember a friend of mine who distinguished Metal from non-Metal based on whether a song had a guitar solo, or not. If it did, it was Metal. If not, it was something else, probably that sus hardcore stuff that our common friends liked. I guess that goes to your point about the similarities and therefore at least cross-pollination, if not outright influence, between thrash and hardcore.

>> But yes, genres are not mathematical structures, trying to find a really hard scientific dividing line would keep leading to moving in circles forever. I have my preferences of course, death thrash and OSDM mainly.

Yeah, mostly classic Metal, Doom, Black, Thrash, and a bit of NWOTHM here. OSDM is cool too, I need to dig more into it.

Death, I'm kind of 50/50. I like some Death bands a lot, like I played the first two Death albums to er death. It's a bit hit and miss for me though. I like Grind bands more consistently, Cannibal Corpse and Last Days of Humanity.

When I was a kid, adults told me Metal was a passing fad, it would go away in a few years, and I'd grow out of it.

Any moment now...!

Have you ever asked what he thinks of black metal?

By prog I meant just classic prog. Complexity in metal is a bit orthogonal to being prog, I think simply "normal" death metal like Morbid Angel is far more "prog" that prog due to death metal's own native sensibilities which in part as I said tie in to the hardcore lineage. I haven't yet given it proper thought, but it's my theory that the hardcore beat and the different way punk/hardcore uses power chords from general rock music is what enabled thrash and ultimately death metal. I love Sadus and Atheist, and you will see people call them "technical" death metal not "prog" death metal, it may hint that subconsciously or consciously people are aware that death metal achieves "prog" goals without actually necessarily using classic prog techniques.

From what prog I have heard, I think its amazing, and an admirable development for the time. It's a big part of why metal is metal, early metal sensibility in my view is very strongly derived from prog. The prog bands were already using less "swingy" beats and more guitar centric writing. It's just that hardcore had to finally put the final piece of the puzzle that enabled these tendencies to achieve their full fruition. Direct prog had a tendency to sometimes wander too much. Hardcore firstly checked this by being hyper minimalist, and secondly that undeveloped theory of mine regarding hardcore having innovated a very different way of playing guitar and the drumming technique letting guitars room to breathe achieving a much more naturalistic and flowing method of creating hallways of riffs.

>When I was a kid, adults told me Metal was a passing fad, it would go away in a few years, and I'd grow out of it.

Partly imo this again ties in to the influence of hardcore culture on metal. Punk groups I think were doing xeroxed art and fliers and garage recorded and dubbed tapes quite early. A punk musician named Paul Halmshaw was irritated at the lack of infra for punk and hardcore music due to mainstream infra not deeming it worth it, so he fielded his own infra. Most people know of Peaceville as a famous metal record label today.

edit: >Cannibal Corpse

I am not aware they had any grindcore/deathgrind albums. I haven't listened to their entire discography so I could be wrong.

Wolverine Blues and even more To Ride, Shoot Straight and Speak The Truth. They've gone back a bit since then I find.

>> By prog I meant just classic prog.

Oh, right. I actually haven't heard a lot of the. Blue Öyster Cult and Rush etc? I of course acknowledge the immense influence of those bands on Metal, but that's the part of Metal I don't like that much. I think the influence was the focus on guitar technique and general musical quality which is something that's not really there in crusty punk and hardcore bands, I guess it's even anathema to some. You could even argue that a lot of Metal bands play the same music as hardcore bands but take the craft of music-making more seriously. This of course goes against my argument that thrash/death/black aren't descendants of hardcore/punk.

>> I am not aware they had any grindcore/deathgrind albums. I haven't listened to their entire discography so I could be wrong.

Oh, I see. Wikipedia calls them straight Death Metal. For me and my friends they were always either splatter/gore or grind. Different definitions I guess.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHHHePJtK40

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpL5htneI-c

NWOBHM tried to streamline it of course and they succeeded to an extent but as I theorized before, it took hardcore to actually invent the tools to finally achieve that goal completely and result in chromatic labyrinths. Ie its not hardcore alone, nor prog alone, both had to be part of metal's dna to result in death metal in my view personally.

I really don't think he copied Manowar though. People point to Hammerheart, but I think they forget Blood Fire Death, which is the true first Viking Metal album and sounds nothing like Manowar. Hammerheart also sounds nothing like Manowar to my ears although one reason for that could be that I haven't listening to a lot Manowar post-Hail to England. Maybe it sounds more like epic-Bathory after that?

The Viking theme of cousre is neither Quorthon's nor Manowar's invention.

I mean of course it didn't exactly work like that in practice because directors had to have the corners and they wanted their teams close to them, so that, e.g. our team of 15 mainframe engineers could file in to a 5 x 5 meter cubicle and one-by-one give a report on what they had done the previous day a.k.a. The Scrum. We had a certified Scrum Master.

The one time I tried to sit in a different team's space I got yelled at by their director and had to go back. I had moved in his team's space out of protest because the only space left for me to be near my team was right in front of the gents and it smelled a bit funny. I was supposed to be sitting next to my (official) Mentor but I was studying part-time for a MSc and so was not there in the mornings and another engineer would always take my place next to the Mentor, who was the most experienced Cobol programmer in the team. He always looked at me with a wry smile whenever I came in to the office and found him sitting at ... well, it wasn't really my place so I couldn't really say anything. But then the only place for me to sit was in front of the loos. So I tried to go and sit somewhere else, farther away, in protest. And then I got yelled at.

But in principle we had hot-desking and we could sit anywhere throughout the building while communicating remotely with our colleagues.

We were very agile.

Our certified Scrum Master moved on before I did.

The opportunity to maintain software running on a spacecraft is not rare? I don't think so. And those two particular spacecrafts? I'd take that job in a flash.