undefined | Better HN

0 pointsmonkaiju7mo ago0 comments

I like the distinction between syntactic tools, like spellcheck, and semantic tools, like AI. The former clearly doesn't impugn the author, the latter does. They seem clearly and fundamentally different to me.

0 comments

handoflixue7mo ago

Where do you put the line? What do you do with the ambiguous categories?

Clearly a trucker does not "deliver goods" and a Taxi Driver is not in the business of ferrying passengers - the vehicle does all of that, right?

Writers these days rarely bother with the actual act of writing now that we have typing.

I've rarely heard a musician, but I've heard lots of CDs and they're really quite good - much cheaper than musicians, too.

Is my camera an artist, or is it just plagiarizing the landscape and architecture?

monkaijuOP7mo ago

I'm not sure it makes sense to assume the creative act of a person writing to other people, which is fundamentally about a consciousness communicating to others, is anything like delivering goods.

The distinction I pointed out, applied to people producing writing intended for other people to read, seems to give a really clear "line". Syntactic tools, you're still fully producing the writing, semantic tools, you're not. You can find some small amount of blurriness if you really want, like does using a thesaurus count as semantic, but it seems disingenuous to pretend that has even close to the same impact on the authorship of the piece as using AI.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse