Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Why? I'm genuinely curious, not just being argumentative. I ask because at this point in my life, I barely give authors a second thought when reading their works. I'm not really interested in them, or their intentions, only in their works (and whether or not they were interesting enough for me to try more of them).
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It's not as much about the author themselves; I also don't care that very much about the life of authors and their whereabouts, etc. It's more about the simple fact that they are human, and therefore share with us the experience of what it feels, and likely wonder about what it means, to be alive, here.
It's hard to explain, and probably a combination of several factors. Part of it might be cultural; I come from the French-speaking world, where authors have a very high social status. Members of the "Académie Française" are basically revered as beings of higher intelligence and purpose than the plebs below. There is this omnipresent idea that there is something to be learned from reading the works of authors, that books are a gateway to something bigger than us. Of course this is not something people state that plainly, and certainly not all French authors seek (or deserve) such praise, but the whole idea of "reading just for fun", and a worldview where authors are essentially entertainers, remains more prevalent in the English-speaking world.
Then there's the question of purpose. Somehow I feel if there was no purpose in writing something, there is no purpose in reading it. Of course we can say that an AI writing a novel has a "purpose", e.g. to make the reader laugh; however the way it achieves this is by pulling the correct levers and pressing the right buttons to release the right dose of dopamine - a kind of mechanical and clinical act performed to reach the goal with the highest possible performance. Somehow I am less interested in reading a work which was written with this purpose as a driver. I think humans have the possibility to infuse their works with a higher purpose, and achieve the end objective in far more interesting ways.
Then finally the whole thing carries a risk of creating our own personal echo chambers; books written by AI specifically for someone (as per the thread title) would basically cater to this person's desires and feed them what they want to read. However what we want is not always what we need; I believe it is necessary to be periodically confronted to ideas that challenge our world view, so we get an opportunity to discover new things, explore and evolve. I trust human writers for this.
Now, all of this is likely to be moot in maybe 10 years from now, when artificial intelligence vastly outperforms our own. At that point, AI will arguably be able to deliver all of the above. Until then, I'll stick to people
