If you enjoy some piece of media (a story, a song, an image), and then find out it was created with AI, is it reasonable to have your enjoyment impacted in retrospect? It sure is.
John Gruber wrote on his blog (that has a pretentious title, which I can identify with):
My advice is not to care whether anything was written by an AI or a human. The only thing worth evaluating is what we human readers are naturally good at determining: whether it is good or bad. If it’s good, read it. If it’s not, don’t. […] If you read something and enjoy it, and subsequently find out it was generated by an LLM, don’t feel bad. You read something good that you enjoyed.
If I read something, enjoyed it, and subsequently found it out was generated by an LLM, I absolutely would feel bad. To suggest I should not change my sentiment implies that text and reading are solely for the purpose of conveying some objective information.
I have at least one other purpose in reading: to gain a shared understanding with another person. I want to have a version of a thought that was shaped by another human, and know we both had our own version of this shared thought. It is this connection, not just the text, that matters to me. Also see: Text is a shadow of thought.
Imagine a person had ethical or religious reason to not eat meat – or even just a preference. Imagine that person enjoyed a meal and was then told: “Ha! That was meat and you couldn’t even tell!” Would you say all that matters was whether they enjoyed it or not?
