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Especially since it was “obvious” I’m skeptical those specific awards were ever worth taking seriously.
Likewise, obviously AI-generated blog posts frequently make the Hacker News frontpage, but I feel that reflects the declining quality of its userbase: the topic is actually often good, but the entire article is basically the title and maybe one or two details AI-expanded, a human-written article would’ve been better.
I have a simple test: AI can create art that is human-level to me when I like some work that is revealed to be AI (obviously or later). So far I have seen decent AI technical writing. I actually saw good pixel art I initially suspected was partly AI, but then I saw the artist livestreams so now I’m convinced it’s 100% human.
Obvious in the sense of scoring 100% on Pangram, as well as subjectively.
But, yeah, that's exactly my point. Self-appointed experts still choose it; and HN's userbase has been in a steep decline for years and gleefully eats it up. But how is the human artist to make a living or even get recognition, between the Scylla of stupid experts and the Charybdis of stupid anons?
It's still pretty obvious to people, above room temperature IQ and who care, what is LLM-generated and what is not. That's not enough to lead to human work being preferred; and, from here, things only get worse.
This is already a problem, has been before AI, and can become much worse without AI: companies overwork and underpay artists because otherwise they can find a faster, cheaper, sloppier-but-still-adequate replacement.
To fund and help artists, I believe it’s more productive to increase welfare, grants, or easy side-jobs, while reducing necessary effort and increasing background encouragement to create art, than attack AI which may replace them.
But not all experts are stupid. If the majority who are awarding grants or otherwise funding artists select AI work, that’s a problem, but I think even if they preferred AI they’d try to select humans.
The dream is that the brilliant, underappreciated artist is recognized by an expert, who elevates them and provides an audience. I don't think that happens except by occasional good luck, and most artistic "experts" are idiots, especially the ones who are legibly high status on the expertise hierarchy.
I suspect that after the embarrassing AI slop awards this year, most literary awards will start using Pangram or something similar as a first filter. Because, you're right, they do want to select humans. But it's just a matter of time until we have LLMs that are a bit better and less clockable.
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