If someone told me they produced a 300-page novel by hand—I would be impressed.
If someone else told me they produced a 300-page novel with the aid of an LLM (that wrote the vast majority of the book) and the human merely organized the AI-generated content—I would consider the real author to be the LLM and the human would merely be an editor (or, at best, an artist creating a collage).
Imagine a photographer taking pictures with a fancy digital camera. Should we consider the camera as the real author and the person holding it as some clever impostor?
I’m not trolling. This was a serious question when photography was invented. For decades, art critics refused to consider photography as True Art. If we can plausibly claim that a professional photographer can sometimes be an Artist, I think that we also should accept that a novelist writing with AI assistance could be considered as such. Note that typing “write me a 300-page novel” into the prompt won’t get you good results, even with the most powerful models. The human has still to do heavy editing work… as long as not everyone can do that, the concept of “AI Artist” could be in some sense meaningful.
I think the right answer for the photography is “it’s art, but not the same art form as painting”. And it has different quality and interestingness metrics. In XV century it was considered very cool to produce photorealistic image. Some people think it’s still cool, but only if it’s not a photo.
And it’s the same for the AI-art. Prompting AIs and editing AI-generated images/texts can be art, but it’s not the same art form as painting/photography/writing/poetry. And it should have different merics too. Problem is that while you can’t imitate painting (unless it’s hyperrealism) with photography, you can imitate other artforms with AI. And this is kinda cheating.
The industry of portraiture dominated all painting. Photography destroyed the value proposition of portraiture by mostly invalidating talent and producing photographs in less time and more cheaply than an artist andthe photograph preserved the fundamental elements that were actually desired.
A substantial fraction of artists had to shift their styles or find new work and it is one of the major causes of the shift towards styles like impressionism or surrealism.
While you’re right that using AI to write your stories isn’t writing—just as portrait photography isn’t painting—it is still storytelling. Those who think of elaborate ways to dismiss that this still leaves the human in charge of directing, edits, rewriting, and ultimately inspiration the story invariably end up relitigating the old arguments of portrait artistspainters and portrait photographers. The focus of both overlap, but they’re also different. The photographer has additional concerns that the painter does not have and the same is true in reverse. This applies to literature and especially storytelling whether written by a human using a word processor, or by the long iterative process of outlining, prompting, editing, modifying, and pasting together a story.
In the end I’m certain that people will accept “AI-Assisted WritingStorytelling” and other similar artistic endeavors because they still require human input and more importantly preserve the fundamental elements that people actually desire.Another user mentioned they’d consider this something akin to making collages and that’s a fair comparison, but just look up a collage on Wikipedia and it will say:Collage is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts.
Make a new word for creating stories out of artificially generated user directed word collections into well organized and edited collages that can be wholly unique and frequently indistinguishable from human writing if you want—you’re right that it isn’t the same art as writing but if you said it wasn’t storytelling I’d have to disagree and I think history will vindicate me like it always does in these situations when artists are threatened by a new form of art assisted by technology that undercuts their value proposition. Maybe this will lead too a shift towards poetry with exotic and original structural forms and constraints (like House of Leaves) or maybe to stories that go beyond what LLM can imitate.
Imagine a photographer taking pictures with a fancy digital camera. Should we consider the camera as the real author and the person holding it as some clever impostor?
I’m not trolling. This was a serious question when photography was invented. For decades, art critics refused to consider photography as True Art. If we can plausibly claim that a professional photographer can sometimes be an Artist, I think that we also should accept that a novelist writing with AI assistance could be considered as such. Note that typing “write me a 300-page novel” into the prompt won’t get you good results, even with the most powerful models. The human has still to do heavy editing work… as long as not everyone can do that, the concept of “AI Artist” could be in some sense meaningful.
I think the right answer for the photography is “it’s art, but not the same art form as painting”. And it has different quality and interestingness metrics. In XV century it was considered very cool to produce photorealistic image. Some people think it’s still cool, but only if it’s not a photo.
And it’s the same for the AI-art. Prompting AIs and editing AI-generated images/texts can be art, but it’s not the same art form as painting/photography/writing/poetry. And it should have different merics too. Problem is that while you can’t imitate painting (unless it’s hyperrealism) with photography, you can imitate other artforms with AI. And this is kinda cheating.
The industry of portraiture dominated all painting. Photography destroyed the value proposition of portraiture by mostly invalidating talent and producing photographs in less time and more cheaply than an artist and the photograph preserved the fundamental elements that were actually desired.
A substantial fraction of artists had to shift their styles or find new work and it is one of the major causes of the shift towards styles like impressionism or surrealism.
While you’re right that using AI to write your stories isn’t writing—just as portrait photography isn’t painting—it is still storytelling. Those who think of elaborate ways to dismiss that this still leaves the human in charge of directing, edits, rewriting, and ultimately inspiration the story invariably end up relitigating the old arguments of portrait
artistspainters and portrait photographers. The focus of both overlap, but they’re also different. The photographer has additional concerns that the painter does not have and the same is true in reverse. This applies to literature and especially storytelling whether written by a human using a word processor, or by the long iterative process of outlining, prompting, editing, modifying, and pasting together a story.In the end I’m certain that people will accept “AI-Assisted
WritingStorytelling” and other similar artistic endeavors because they still require human input and more importantly preserve the fundamental elements that people actually desire. Another user mentioned they’d consider this something akin to making collages and that’s a fair comparison, but just look up a collage on Wikipedia and it will say: Collage is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts.Make a new word for creating stories out of artificially generated user directed word collections into well organized and edited collages that can be wholly unique and frequently indistinguishable from human writing if you want—you’re right that it isn’t the same art as writing but if you said it wasn’t storytelling I’d have to disagree and I think history will vindicate me like it always does in these situations when artists are threatened by a new form of art assisted by technology that undercuts their value proposition. Maybe this will lead too a shift towards poetry with exotic and original structural forms and constraints (like House of Leaves) or maybe to stories that go beyond what LLM can imitate.