Comment by dist-epoch
1 day ago
> If the author didn’t bother to write it, why should I bother to read it
There is an argument that luxury stuff is valuable because typically it's hand made, and in a sense, what you are buying is not the item itself, but the untold hours "wasted" creating that item for your own exclusive use. In a sense "renting a slave" - you have control over another human's time, and this is a power trip.
You have expressed it perfectly: "I don't care about the writing itself, I care about how much effort a human put into it"
If effort wasn’t put into it, then the writing cannot be good, except by accident or theft or else it is not your writing.
If you want to court me, don’t ask Cyrano de Bergerac to write poetry and pass it off as your own.
> If effort wasn’t put into it, then the writing cannot be good
This is what people used to say about photography versus painting.
> pass it off as your own.
This is misleading/fraud and a separate subject than the quality of the writing.
Well, with regard photography that is a lazy point. It is both true and not true, and also irrelevant. Artistic photography takes a lot of effort, training, and taste. But using an iPhone to take an arbitrary picture does not. I don’t value photography that takes no effort, just as you don’t. Ultimately, photography is recording data— light that traveled to the camera. AI writing is regurgitating someone else’s data.
When you use GenAI to produce work, it is to a significant extent not your own work. If you call it your own work then you are committing fraud to some degree. You are obscuring your own contribution. This is not separate from quality, since authorship is a fundamental aspect of quality.