If only. That would make life so much better and easier.

I find that sentiment mildly offensive. I write a lot of code myself, but for every program I write, I use a hundred programs written by other people. If those programmers want to impress me, they will keep my needs as a user in mind, not their own egos.

I think that's more or less what Atwood was saying: that it's not yet good enough to replace talented professionals. I doubt she'd argue that it can do the other things you mentioned.

> But they will be good helpers for people like me, who can get suggestions, improvements and illustrations just for the price of my 4090 and time to tinker with models.

This I agree with; for someone who may not be as gifted a writer, but still has something interesting to say, generative models could help with that. I just hope that people don’t lean on these models for generating ideas because if that story was any indication, that’ll just lead to a proliferation of boring, soulless works.

Fundamentally, literature is about communication with other people, living in another person’s mental world or understanding their unique perspective.

It’s not really clear to me what human value an LLM generated story has. It’s a statistically probable sequence of tokens generated from the distribution of internet-based language. It had no unique perspective, and conveys nothing about actual human experience. What do I learn from that? How is my life enriched?

LLMs are really cool for creative brainstorming and stuff like that, as a tool for inspiration, but I am baffled by the idea that anyone is interested in entire AI-generated works.

That you are nothing special. The computer is just doing what you do, putting one word after the last one. Picking each word more or less carefully, based on its own training and the audience's expectations.

It's doing it badly, for the moment. But would we mock a talking dog who stutters?

How is my life enriched?

Being able to see what's coming is helpful, more often than not.

Frankly that’s solipsistic, bordering on pure nihilism. When I read another person’s writing or talk to them, it enriches my life because it gives me a slice of their experience. When I read LLM output, it just definitionally can’t do that, no matter how plausible and semantically meaningful the words are. What is the purpose of literature for you? Just consuming a pleasing string of words?

That’s not to say they have no value, just that I can’t learn anything about another person’s experience of life through an LLM, because they aren’t people

Humans increase it, LLMs decrease it.

This matters because eventually in the future information complexity will be humankind's only valuable resource.

(So humans create value, LLMs destroy it.)

You might take a bit of time to learn what you're talking about before posting, or at least before forming permanent opinions on the subject. It's fascinating stuff, trust me... and I'm not that much farther along than you are, trust me on that as well.