Recently, I noticed the cadence of articles I peruse on ZeroHedge has a very strong AI feel. It's probably the most mainstream media source I refer to. It could be more awareness by me or an actual change in content generation, or both.
The question nobody in this entire industry has thought to ask is the only one that ever mattered: is it any good?
A $1.45 billion market has been built on a single axis — human or not human — as if answering that question settles everything. It doesn't settle anything. It sidesteps the only judgment that literature has ever actually required of itself. There is a century of human-generated slop. There will be a century of AI-generated slop. The slop was never the problem of origin. It was always a problem of quality.
What these tools certify — what the keystroke loggers and the blink-rate cameras and the perplexity scores are actually measuring — is not value. Not craft. Not whether the thing earns its ending or surprises its reader or says something that needed saying in a way that makes it irreplaceable. They measure process. They measure mess. They have built an entire credentialing infrastructure that rewards incompetence and penalizes revision, and called it authenticity.
I tested ZeroGPT this week. A story I engineered specifically to mimic human messiness scored 13.9% AI. A piece I wrote myself, carefully, with attention, scored 75.3%. The detector preferred the performance of humanness to the actual thing. Which is, in miniature, exactly what this entire market is doing.
The Artisan journal entry with uncorrected typos got the gold badge. The Pulitzer feature got flagged. Nobody asked which one was worth reading. That question didn't enter the room. And until it does, none of this means anything at all.
This is just absurd. The concept isn't entirely without value, as some people really do appreciate pure artisanal work, but for most use cases, it's totally irrelevant.
The value of the work is in the end result, not the production process. The labor theory of value was disproven decades ago.
I love how we invented AI, then after we need to make a product to certify that things are real. AI is coming. Drawing and painting art will go in the way of handcrafted toys, horses and buggies, hand built homes (that going to loose), hand crafted writing, and hand crafted music. I guess watching Yellowstone will have new meaning to everyone, that cowboy way of life will ride off into the sunset. And 40y from now, few will apperciate it, and fewer will care about it. And that is just the nasty truth. But honestly hand-crafted paintings and drawings and writing, had a good long run, and I will always search for that ninch market of watching a guy on the street paint or draw and apperciating it, no certification needed just my eyes watching talent.
This is a great written prose by someone clever. Made me laugh. The difference between listening to Michael Jackson raw and Bad Bunny. Either way, I believe this will be the language of the last Cowboys. And fewer of us will search it out over the years. Keep it real. Understand what is coming. Love it, Dave!
Looks like another money grab by those trying to prey on authors and their insecurities over this AI Red Scare. The people selling the picks and shovels to the hordes of aspiring writers are the ones assured of making a profit in this cutthroat industry.
This subject of this article is the plot of Blade Runner.
April 1. Nevertheless, proving human provenance will become big business.
Recently, I noticed the cadence of articles I peruse on ZeroHedge has a very strong AI feel. It's probably the most mainstream media source I refer to. It could be more awareness by me or an actual change in content generation, or both.
The question nobody in this entire industry has thought to ask is the only one that ever mattered: is it any good?
A $1.45 billion market has been built on a single axis — human or not human — as if answering that question settles everything. It doesn't settle anything. It sidesteps the only judgment that literature has ever actually required of itself. There is a century of human-generated slop. There will be a century of AI-generated slop. The slop was never the problem of origin. It was always a problem of quality.
What these tools certify — what the keystroke loggers and the blink-rate cameras and the perplexity scores are actually measuring — is not value. Not craft. Not whether the thing earns its ending or surprises its reader or says something that needed saying in a way that makes it irreplaceable. They measure process. They measure mess. They have built an entire credentialing infrastructure that rewards incompetence and penalizes revision, and called it authenticity.
I tested ZeroGPT this week. A story I engineered specifically to mimic human messiness scored 13.9% AI. A piece I wrote myself, carefully, with attention, scored 75.3%. The detector preferred the performance of humanness to the actual thing. Which is, in miniature, exactly what this entire market is doing.
The Artisan journal entry with uncorrected typos got the gold badge. The Pulitzer feature got flagged. Nobody asked which one was worth reading. That question didn't enter the room. And until it does, none of this means anything at all.
This is just absurd. The concept isn't entirely without value, as some people really do appreciate pure artisanal work, but for most use cases, it's totally irrelevant.
The value of the work is in the end result, not the production process. The labor theory of value was disproven decades ago.
I love how we invented AI, then after we need to make a product to certify that things are real. AI is coming. Drawing and painting art will go in the way of handcrafted toys, horses and buggies, hand built homes (that going to loose), hand crafted writing, and hand crafted music. I guess watching Yellowstone will have new meaning to everyone, that cowboy way of life will ride off into the sunset. And 40y from now, few will apperciate it, and fewer will care about it. And that is just the nasty truth. But honestly hand-crafted paintings and drawings and writing, had a good long run, and I will always search for that ninch market of watching a guy on the street paint or draw and apperciating it, no certification needed just my eyes watching talent.
Organic range free artisanal writing, bro. We got locally sourced paragraphs. Grass fed authors. Ethically sourced nouns.
This is a great written prose by someone clever. Made me laugh. The difference between listening to Michael Jackson raw and Bad Bunny. Either way, I believe this will be the language of the last Cowboys. And fewer of us will search it out over the years. Keep it real. Understand what is coming. Love it, Dave!
Artisan would be more terrifying if I could not reasonably hope it's irrelevant to the use and monetization of AI tools.
The SJWs will love it, as will our would-be aristo masters
Looks like another money grab by those trying to prey on authors and their insecurities over this AI Red Scare. The people selling the picks and shovels to the hordes of aspiring writers are the ones assured of making a profit in this cutthroat industry.
That's exactly what this looks like.