Retroactive Sentiment

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 only purpose conveying some objective information. I have at least one other purpose in reading: to gain a shared understanding…