Some humans will read this

Reading Alexander Wales’ Eager Readers in Your Area!

It’s a basic work of “follow the graph, see where it leads”; written 3 years ago, bites the “AI will obviously be better at writing than humans soon enough—why would anyone choose to read human writing again?” bullet. One may indeed wonder how strong the—genuine!—human value of authenticity might be, in the face of superstimulus AOC hyperWales vamped-Bjartur.

Perhaps it would dwindle and fall instantly. Already I read more fiction from LLMs than from actual humans. Though in my case it’s because I don’t much like reading non-tailored fiction—sometimes I even read the fiction from humans through LLMs, to lay flat the authors’ ideas instead of getting them through prose.

This isn’t a state I wish to maintain, however. When there are 1 trillion humans rather than 0.08, everyone is immortal, all toil is automated, human art will be vastly more impressive than it is in 2025AD. (Though of course, it will never be able to hold a candle to a candle of what the AIs will be able to achieve.)

Hear the music.

I claim to value authenticity enough that I would choose deliberately not to read silicon divine art, in favor of carbon slop.

I’m unsure whether this will be considered a legal move, in worlds where we achieve utopia at all. But the human CEV is inescapably good: if I feel nauseous at a description of a future, that future is probably not in the CEV (or at least, not in mine). And if it is the best future, and I’m merely unenlightened at present… then I guess that’s that.

Regardless, I currently do not want to live in a world in which this paragraph unfolds:

The first chapter had ten views, which might just have been phantoms. The eleventh chapter had a single view. The twelfth chapter, no one read, and it stayed unread for days. She kept plugging away at it.

I mean this just makes me want to cry. Hits the clueyness neuron.

Can we build a future with no clueyness in it? That Mad Olympiad is a similar future to Eager Readers in Your Area!, but certainly contains less clueyness. The “true meaning of music” used to be people dancing around a fire, not listening, alone, to pre-recorded albums. Why would writing be any different? The “true meaning of writing”, after all, used to be people talking around a fire.

Would utopia have to involve our interaction with the arts being purely human-mediated? Is this practical/possible?

Google has been storing the internet for a while now, in physical tapes. If you want to use a Google whose outputs is purely human, this is going to be possible at some point.¹

Ways of ensuring output is human-written, for instance “ditch computers altogether in a localized Gutenberg press LARP” or “use those AIs you’ve aligned to ensure people can’t cheap through the software”. If humans truly are in control of the future, and those who desire authenticity don’t foolishly wire themselves up to written heroine, then reaching a Mingyuan-approved future won’t be so difficult.²

Wales is a good enough writer that his story makes me feel extremely bad for the protagonist. I notice my second knee-jerk reaction to that sadness (after “write about this in my notes”) is sharing the story with my default Claude Opus 4.5 context window, explaining how it made me feel, running over the likelihood of such a future, etc.

“Uh oh”.