Can A.I. produce writing that we want to read?
newyorker.comProbably 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.
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.
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.
Not true at all. I hate reading my own produced AI writing.
The issue with any AI writing is that it all sounds the same.
Once that stops being true, maybe it will be acceptable. But until then, you are left with repetitive crap. That you must wade through. Not good.
My own AI generated writing makes me very uncomfortable now. That I once considered that soulless blob passable makes me question myself.
I’ve said it before, but the best analogy I've heard is that sharing your prompts is like telling your friend about that dream you had last night in terms of comparable level of interest.
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.
To be fair, a lot of the "people" talking to the engagement baiting AI are AI commenters themselves.
But you don't need to "head over to Reddit", this is happening on HN too, with both content and comments.
I wouldn't say that most Reddit or Hacker News comments rise to the level of something that I "want to read", though.
> To be fair, a lot of the "people" talking to the engagement baiting AI are AI commenters themselves.
This is true, but there’s a huge amount of real engagement as well.
> But you don't need to "head over to Reddit", this is happening on HN too, with both content and comments.
True, but it seems to get a lot less traction here.
> 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.
I don't think you have to head over to anywhere else to see this.
I’ve seen it a bit here as well of course, but generally speaking Hacker News does a much better job of avoiding that. I think it might just be because it’s more sensitive to flagging.
my estimate is maybe 20% of engaged reddit content is fully LLM authored ("100% AI")
openclaw is wildly popular in some regions of the world. jay caspian kang should write about why. it could involve some much needed introspection.
same here. id say a quarter of the posts people are reacting to on hn are ai generated
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.
Do you? Even if its a technical blog post and you learn incorrect things from it?
Person: I prefer food cooked at home, even if the chef isn't a professional.
You: Do you? even if the chef is covered in bleeding pustules and cooking with rotten food?
No? That's clearly not what they were saying.
It clearly was what they were saying:
> even if it’s filled with mistakes
The mistakes in the original comment are (presumably) grammar and syntax not factual errors.
Could be, i understood it differently
This is an odd paradox that I've thought about: If AI can produce the technical blog post, then can it also just produce the technical knowledge for me on demand when I need it?
That's can be just as well the case with AI.
Well, whether it’s a good piece or not is a different story, but I guess for me it makes me think at least time was spent on it, rather than most AI slop I see nowadays, but who knows, I can be wrong.
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.
The localization thread is underrated.
I however loath ai code comments, wikis, or anything where information density is prime. I never can understand why people like it. Each there own i guess
Yea don’t get me wrong the words on the wikis are mostly useless. The value is in the structuring and reference graphs and links.
it was always kind of a huge chore to read someone else's code. with LLMs, it is now possible for very smart people, who don't have a "special interest" in meaningless arcana, to admit it and still get paid.
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.
Gemini is a pretty amazing writer. It’s the only llm I’ve ever used that can be consistently funny - like actually writing good, nuanced jokes.
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.
Most positive AI thing shared on HN in a while, and here’s why.
Even after handing the agent a validator and iterating the validation, even after the validator get really good at telling the model what to do and what not to do, there’s still an emptiness.
This gives the author strong ground to rightly assert that both now and after new models render 2026 model writing’s emptiness old news, there’ll remain reasons to write, to communicate, to share understanding.
It’s nice to read something not proclaiming doom and not lamenting career death.
No matter how smart our tools become, the human condition still has plenty ahead.
Yeah, it can. I used AI and just won a national IBPA Benjamin Franklin award for it. I have a new series that's getting good reviews from readers as well as the industry, PW BookLife and Kirkus. I didn't use AI to generate a story, I used it to interrogate the self through sci-fi and memoir.
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.
This comment is really insightful. It is the thing that genuinely flips this. It’s not just the structure, but the robotic voice in my head that autoplays. I had incorrectly assumed everyone felt that was normal. Now let me [completely 180 on my opinion].
Just missing some em-dashes.
That’s also one of its greatest strengths. It’s excellent for taking sloppily written human text and giving it a little polish in voice and consistency. If you use a light touch you can keep it from taking away too much humanity from the original.
But the result is as nice to read as a face filled with filler and botox is to look at.
You get that effect when LLMs write whole sentences or paragraphs. Editing human prose for minor consistency improvements doesn’t do that unless you let it run wild and replace >20% of your text.
Slop is a misapplication issue. Just because today’s models can pump out a lot of text doesn’t mean they’re good for it. And just because letting them run wild produces slop, doesn’t mean they don’t work well for appropriately scoped applications.
My boss always asked me to write in a more neutral style in documents. He doesn't do that anymore.
Amusing related quote:
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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?
Or even have Claude actually go through the whole process of thinking about story structure, iterating on it, reviewing, editing, researching etc.
I feel like people expect Claude to just 1 shot a good story from their 2 sentence prompt.
But even a human needs to sit down and apply a structured or semi structured process over a non trivial amount of time/turns/iterations.
If you asked most people to write a short story out of nowhere with no context and 1hr. Most of them are gonna write some generic stuff.
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!
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.
It's only a matter of time. It's not there yet, but it'll get there.
This is a great thread! I’m currently working on a project that edits AI, slop. And it is slop, however, underneath the puzzling similes and over used metaphors is a story. I’ve discovered that most times the story is worth unearthing if it is you story. And that’s the key. You cannot simply tell Claude or any other AI to write me a great mystery or romance novel. But if you use your imagination, outline, and prompt well you’ll have a solid working draft. It’ll be shit, but at least it something worth working with.
The other thing I’ve discovered is the people using AI to write and do not edit are the people who don’t do one thing…Read. So they don’t know the a paragraph becomes cringe after a bizarre metaphor. What is does isn’t wrong, but that doesn’t make it right. I agree with Mr. Kang, but I believe the future of the publishing industry will include human edited AI stories. We just haven’t gotten there yet.
his criticism is the same as illustrators pointing out that generative art had the wrong number of fingers in 2024.
Sure. The better question can it produce writing that we should want to read?
Alone? No.