Well it’s certainly imperfect, I’ll give it that.

But I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it was written by an LLM, fed a prompt like “write a short story to appeal to Lemmy about how LLMs are bad and human writers are good”. So it plays Lemmy’s greatest hits: “straight white people bad, gay black people good; LLMs bad; big tech bad; self hosting good.”, sprinkles in the “artist/human soul vs technology/corporate banality” trope, and then lays it on an uninspiring story arc. Doesn’t help that the excerpts of the supposedly “imperfect writing” sound like something that would be printed in the NYT or Atlantic culture section.

Which, I guess is all well and fine - but really the biggest thing that pulled me out of the story was the absurdity that anyone was actually so pro-ai, or that so many people are so anti-ai. Like, is this story written in the future, where LLMs are much better than they are today? Because LLM writing I’ve seen is, for the most part, quite bad. And actually has been getting worse lately. And most people dislike it. Having an actual job as a “prompt engineer” was a fever dream some tech bloggers had for about 20 minutes, and someone so brazenly championing wholesale LLM writing would be the laughingstock of any writing group in real life. Similarly, the idea that people are so sick of ai-generated content that they would join a writing group and attend an event specifically about being opposed to it, is equally absurd. People mostly use ai as (1) better google, (2) to do annoying boring things they don’t want to do, like homework or writing a cover letter, or (3) (by far most commonly) for porn. When not specifically seeking it out for these tasks, people tend to avoid it as much as is practical. People aren’t dumb, and neither are the people who make the content those people consume - so the content creators keep making non-ai content, and the people keep consuming it. Sure, if you put on a writers showcase at your gay bookstore, people will show up - but it will be because these are already the sort of people who go to writers’ showcases at gay bookstores, not because it is anti-ai.