Because you need to do some pre-filtering on where to focus your attention, and you want to make sure the author put some thought into the article without having to analyze it.

Due to LLMs making the cost of publishing “thoughts” extremely low, there’s now an over-supply of content that looks decent on the surface, but in reality the author has probably spent less time on than the reader.

why does it bother you to give attribution? why do you think crediting the writer impacts how the piece stands?

we have pop musicians who produce massive hits under their names and the song writers are still given credit in liner notes and in the tracks details on spotify or wherever.

if it’s created by a bot, id take it even further and say which version of which model actually generated it should be declared. why would anyone be against giving proper attribution?

We like writing because the fact that we can create good writing says something about ourselves. If AI can create writing that surpasses, say, a Tolstoy or George Eliot, that will fundamentally change our self-perception. Is that a good thing or bad thing? Well, let's first cross the bridge of an LLM writing War & Peace and see how we feel.

It's not about pedigree, but context. Without context our most beloved stories are just meaningless ink on paper.

If someone couldn't be bothered to write it, I certainly can't be bothered to read it. I did not bother to read the article involved because the continual piss stain on the images, the website itself, and a few key phrases let me on to the fact that it was all generated.

When you interact with art, you do so to interact with the author and the point they want to make. Writing is something where a skilled writer will be able to make a point tersely and have it stick, knowing where to embellish and where to keep it simple. Every decision in art tells you about the artist. Generative AI may be able to fake the composition process, but the point of composition is it reveals something about the human. All of those are artistic decisions that a machine apparently now "can do", but not with any coherency.

The holder of the reigns of slop is not an artist, this is plain to see because they do not interact or engage with their work on the same level as an artist. The produced slop is not art, because it cannot be engaged with on the same level.

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I think there's a distinction.

Imagine if you had an auto cake making machine that decides on its own the best time to make cake. It adds the ingredients, stirs, turns the oven on, and leaves the finished cake on the counter for you.

People start opening bakeries consisting entirely of cakes baked by the automatic machines. The owners of these machines have no idea whether the cakes have a bit too much flour or were slightly over-stirred. In some cases, they haven't even tried the cakes.

Who gets to claim they made the cake?

By contrast, there are others who carefully tune their machines to make sure everything is perfect. They adjust the mixing settings and ingredient proportions. They experiment and iterate. They taste test throughout the process. And what they give to the public tastes every bit as good as a homemade cake.

The first group is creating slop. The second group, I think, is baking. And OP is in the second group.

If you commission a baker to bake you a cake, did you make the cake? What if you added sprinkles on top?

Eh.

Why would I give him the same credit I would give a writer.

Or why would I give a writer the same credit I would give someone who created the AI prompts and scaffolding to generate this?

Being unhappy about not being able to call oneself an author, ends up betraying a lack of confidence in the work or process.

In the end writer, dancer, actor, whatever - these titles come from their impact.

There will be a different name for this, and eventually there will be something made that is good enough that people will be spell bound. At which point its going to be named something else.

At which point.

In Peter Watt's Blindsight, the aliens understand language as spam, a hostile intent to waste their time, and respond by opening fire.

Reading LLM slop without warning makes me see their point of view.

I think there's useful ways to engage with LLM writing, but they are often very different than human writing.

A human writer, a good one, often has ideas that are denser than the words on the page, and close reading is rewarded by helping you unpack the many implications.

With AI writing, there's usually fewer ideas than words, and so it requires a different kind of engagement. Either the human prompter behind it didn't supply enough ideas, or they were noncommittal enough that their very indecision got baked in.

LLMs are very prone to hedging and circling around a point while not saying much of anything. Maybe it is the easiest way to respond to RLHF incentives and corporate-speak training data. Or maybe they're just intrinsically stuck on being unable to find the right next token so they just endlessly spiral around via all of the wrong ones. Either way, there's often a whole lot of cotton candy text that dissolves when you try to look at it more closely.