I think this is similar to AI generated images: it puts a new creative tool in the hands of people who might have had good ideas, but didn't have a mastery of the medium. In that respect, it's cool: if you had a great idea for a sci-fi story but no talent for writing, and if an LLM let you realize your vision, that's neat. It has some negative externalities for the craftsmen, but overall, more creativity is hardly a bad thing.
The real problem is that the most lucrative uses of the tech aren't that. It's generating 10,000 fake books on Amazon on subjects you don't care about. It's cranking out SEO spam, generating monetizable clickbait, etc.
thwarted · 50m ago
> I think this is similar to AI generated images: it puts a new creative tool in the hands of people who might have had good ideas, but didn't have a mastery of the medium.
Reading this sentence reminded me of the classic HN position of "ideas are worthless, what matters is the execution", usually mentioned in the context of an "ideas person" looking for their "technical cofounder" and the ideas person thinking they deserve at least 50%, often more, of the ownership of what would be built because without them there'd be no idea.
> if you had a great idea for a sci-fi story but no talent for writing, and if an LLM let you realize your vision, that's neat.
If your "vision" is only the "idea for a sci-fi story", is that really a vision? Good books leave the reader changed/influenced in some fashion, through the way the idea is presented and developed over the course of the story, not just from a blurb on the book jacket.
> overall, more creativity is hardly a bad thing.
Is coming up with an idea for a for a sci-fi story the meat of creative act such that that flooding the market with ideas counts as an increase in creativity overall?
vunderba · 43m ago
Agreed. Have a read through the 10 dragon stories - the majority of them are rich in spices, but bereft otherwise.
LLMs seem to revel in throwing layer after layer of decorative paint in the hope that people will fail to notice that they're not actually painting anything.
As a writer, the best advice that I can give is to build your house upon the rock and not upon the sand.
d0100 · 8m ago
> If your "vision" is only the "idea for a sci-fi story", is that really a vision?
We have art, games and movie directors
AI just enables anyone to be a "director", but most people can't direct anything worthwhile
hyperadvanced · 41m ago
I also think that just having “an idea” isn’t exactly the same as increasing net creativity. Oftentimes with art, the impact of something truly creative results in changing the parameters of the medium or genre itself, not merely sticking to the script and producing a new work in the style of X. If you take, for example, J Dilla and his impact on hip-hop, the fact that there’s an entire subgenre or two focused on some of his hallmark innovations (micro-rhythm/wonky beats, neo-soul, lofi sampling/creative use of samples) speaks to that kind of “real” creativity. I frankly think that kind of genre-bending is possible with the use of LLMs, but if you just say, “here’s my story idea, make it so”, without any eye towards the actual technique or craft, you won’t be getting the next Blood Meridian out of it.
gtowey · 1h ago
And they haven't even gotten around to adding advertising into them yet! Imagine when chat assistants subtly steer you towards certain products. Would you even know it was manipulating you?
perching_aix · 44m ago
They kind of did though. Thing tries to make me generate diagrams every step of the way (as a kind of feature demo), even though they're rarely ever a good idea, and even when they are, the pictures and diagrams generated are useless.
Aeolun · 2h ago
Personally I’m having a blast reading AI generated fiction. As long as the direction is human, and often enough corrected to keep the minor inconsistencies out, the results are pretty good.
For me it’s no different from generating code with Claude, except it’s generating prose. Without human direction your result ends up as garbage, but there’s no need to go and actually write all the prose yourself.
And I guess that just like with code, sometimes you have to hand craft something to make it truly good. But that’s probably not true for 80% of the story/code.
antihipocrat · 1h ago
Who's voice are you using when adding your hand crafted prose? Mimicking the style of the 80% or switching to your own?
Perhaps I'm a Luddite, or just in the dissonance phase toward enlightenment, but at the moment I don't want to invest in AI fiction. A big part of the experience for me is understanding the author's mind, not just the story being told
CuriouslyC · 1h ago
Plot twist, people who do first drafts and structural edits with AI can still do line edits and copy edits by hand for personal voice (and you have to anyhow if you want the prose to be exceptional).
Aeolun · 1h ago
I think there’s only a very small subset of fiction that uses the prose to that extent. Much like code really. If you are writing original algorithms you cannot use the LLM. If you are just remixing existing ones, it becomes a lot more useful.
Also, I guess I missed the brunt of your question, though the answer is similar. Most voice works for most characters. There’s only so many ways to say something, but occassionally you have to adjust the sentence or re-prompt the whole thing (the LLM has a tendency to see the best in characters).
exmadscientist · 30m ago
Perhaps on a relative scale "most" fiction doesn't carry any sort of deeper meaning, but if you look at things like "Hugo or Nebula Award nominees" (to pluck out the SF/F genre as a category), I'd say that almost every single one of them, going back all those decades, has something more to say than just their straightforward text.
And unless reading is your day job or only hobby, that's a massive, massive corpus of interesting text. (In just one genre! There are more genres!) So on an absolute scale, there is so much fiction to read with more-than-surface-level meaning that I personally just don't understand why anyone would have the least interest in reading AI slop.
(I also don't have any real interest in most Kindle Unlimited works, probably for similar reasons. Though I am quite certain there are diamonds there, I've just not had particularly much time for/good luck at finding them.)
add-sub-mul-div · 1h ago
> A big part of the experience for me is understanding the author's mind, not just the story being told
AI content is really exposing how people fall into a group that does go further than the surface text into deeper layers of context/subtext, and a group that doesn't.
Seattle3503 · 1h ago
I could be in either group, depending on my inclination at the moment.
sram1337 · 1h ago
I would love to read some of this. Where do you find AI generated fiction?
We're at a key milestone in the IP wars; IP was inducted into our civilization to protect the few who had the ability to create.
This idea is well past it's due date. We should move to a liberal IP regime, with copyright strictly reduced to 7-10 years, with all works then entering public domain. Our society will universally thrive with the abundance that will come.
I understand and empathize that a class of vocations today will go away, but so did lamplighters. The roles may become extinct; but we will endure as a people.
HPMOR · 12m ago
Why is it always taken as a conclusion that humans will persist? Lots of species go extinct, and it is not clear that won’t be true here as well.
kristopolous · 1h ago
ai fiction really shines in baffling surreal prompts that it tries hard to satisfy. Here's an example:
"let's write a story where donald trump is giving a speech to a crowd as people slowly discover he is secretly a northern red oak tree in a human suit to the shock of fans and reporters! The tips of his fingers become branches as he tries to deny it as wildly impossible meanwhile his human disguise continues to fail"
The story plot was "Meeting a dragon". As both a human and a writer, challenge accepted:
Long ago, there lived a golden dragon whose fractal-like scales gleamed in the glow of the morning in her cave. She was known for her kindness, and many came not with sword or spear, but with humble requests - for you see, it was widely believed that the mystical scales of a dragon would heal illness, cure ailments, and provide fortune.
One such visitor timidly looked up at her great shining body and beseeched, "Oh glorious dragon, might I have a single scale?"
Of course, the dragon replied warmly. She delicately, almost lovingly, with a slight twinge, used a single claw to prise off a single golden scale, leaving a dull patch.
Over the eons, more and more people would come as supplicants. The scales were used for good luck, for warmth, to ward off evil, as the draconic equivalent of a rabbit's foot.
In the end, the poor dragon was stripped bare - the fire from her burning furnace now showed clearly through to her patchwork, sensitive, and naked skin.
When winter came, she huddled in the cold darkness. And still, when a peasant would come asking for a scale - just one, a single scale nothing more, she would not refuse. In her eternal generosity she would carefully break off another. This time it took longer to find one left upon her body, as the humans had stripped her bare like a tree come winter.
Then thus came a knight. "I'm sorry, good sir, but I have no scales left to give," she said pitiably.
"Why, your scale was a choking hazard and wasn’t labeled not for ages under 5! Prepare for a class-action lawsuit and also to be impaled upon a lance."
The End.
I'll pretend I intended it as a parable of the destructive nature of mass tourism or something something Lorax something something truffula trees.
eulgro · 48m ago
Thanks, I love it.
akoboldfrying · 1h ago
I applaud OP's transparency and willingness to call this result what it is.
bsder · 1h ago
Perhaps what this is pointing out is that a lot of writers of the genre of "fantasy" produce mostly formulaic, trope-laden piles of crap that AI is pretty good at mimicking?
It does suggest that publishers might want to screen new writing with a quick "Did AI write this?" and only publish the ones where it is obvious to humans that AI did not write it.
exmadscientist · 17m ago
Yes, the human-written stories that I guessed wrong about were the ones that seemed to have nothing to say. When the plot's stereotypical and trite, there's no subtext (difficult to do in flash, but not impossible; some can do it well), and it scans like anyone could have written it anywhere or anytime, well, that looks like AI.
(In that vein I am baffled how anyone could think the fourth story, especially, was anything but AI.)
(And, as well, the seventh story is interesting because it reads, to me, exactly like someone who's used to writing something longer trying to write flash. It doesn't land anything, it doesn't conclude, but it looks like if it had about twice the length it might be interesting. And it's got some dissonance from breaking with the usual demon-bargaining template. So I pegged that as human. Oops!)
spondylosaurus · 37m ago
I thought it was interesting/telling (but maybe not surprising) that the AI-generated stories scored the highest according to reader rankings, yet pinged to me as immediately flat and generic. But I really liked the idiosyncrasies of a few of the human-authored entries!
Just wanted to be first to say I'm a huge fan of Mark Lawrence. I didn't know he blogged! Now I'll go actually read the post.
dwd · 1h ago
Big fan of Janny Wurts, particularly the Empire series she co-wrote with Raymond E Feist. Very surprised she was outed as an AI, though she is the only author I've ever had to pull out the dictionary as she used a word I had never seen and wanted to be sure of the meaning in the context.
The real problem is that the most lucrative uses of the tech aren't that. It's generating 10,000 fake books on Amazon on subjects you don't care about. It's cranking out SEO spam, generating monetizable clickbait, etc.
Reading this sentence reminded me of the classic HN position of "ideas are worthless, what matters is the execution", usually mentioned in the context of an "ideas person" looking for their "technical cofounder" and the ideas person thinking they deserve at least 50%, often more, of the ownership of what would be built because without them there'd be no idea.
> if you had a great idea for a sci-fi story but no talent for writing, and if an LLM let you realize your vision, that's neat.
If your "vision" is only the "idea for a sci-fi story", is that really a vision? Good books leave the reader changed/influenced in some fashion, through the way the idea is presented and developed over the course of the story, not just from a blurb on the book jacket.
> overall, more creativity is hardly a bad thing.
Is coming up with an idea for a for a sci-fi story the meat of creative act such that that flooding the market with ideas counts as an increase in creativity overall?
LLMs seem to revel in throwing layer after layer of decorative paint in the hope that people will fail to notice that they're not actually painting anything.
As a writer, the best advice that I can give is to build your house upon the rock and not upon the sand.
We have art, games and movie directors
AI just enables anyone to be a "director", but most people can't direct anything worthwhile
For me it’s no different from generating code with Claude, except it’s generating prose. Without human direction your result ends up as garbage, but there’s no need to go and actually write all the prose yourself.
And I guess that just like with code, sometimes you have to hand craft something to make it truly good. But that’s probably not true for 80% of the story/code.
Perhaps I'm a Luddite, or just in the dissonance phase toward enlightenment, but at the moment I don't want to invest in AI fiction. A big part of the experience for me is understanding the author's mind, not just the story being told
Also, I guess I missed the brunt of your question, though the answer is similar. Most voice works for most characters. There’s only so many ways to say something, but occassionally you have to adjust the sentence or re-prompt the whole thing (the LLM has a tendency to see the best in characters).
And unless reading is your day job or only hobby, that's a massive, massive corpus of interesting text. (In just one genre! There are more genres!) So on an absolute scale, there is so much fiction to read with more-than-surface-level meaning that I personally just don't understand why anyone would have the least interest in reading AI slop.
(I also don't have any real interest in most Kindle Unlimited works, probably for similar reasons. Though I am quite certain there are diamonds there, I've just not had particularly much time for/good luck at finding them.)
AI content is really exposing how people fall into a group that does go further than the surface text into deeper layers of context/subtext, and a group that doesn't.
Though I’ll admit I can’t speak to the quality of that except my own stuff (which I’m naturally predisposed to like).
This was my attempt at fully AI generated (though edited by human):
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/101072/inherited-wounds
This idea is well past it's due date. We should move to a liberal IP regime, with copyright strictly reduced to 7-10 years, with all works then entering public domain. Our society will universally thrive with the abundance that will come.
I understand and empathize that a class of vocations today will go away, but so did lamplighters. The roles may become extinct; but we will endure as a people.
"let's write a story where donald trump is giving a speech to a crowd as people slowly discover he is secretly a northern red oak tree in a human suit to the shock of fans and reporters! The tips of his fingers become branches as he tries to deny it as wildly impossible meanwhile his human disguise continues to fail"
After some back and forth, here is what I got:
https://9ol.es/md/trump
No human would write something that crazy...
Long ago, there lived a golden dragon whose fractal-like scales gleamed in the glow of the morning in her cave. She was known for her kindness, and many came not with sword or spear, but with humble requests - for you see, it was widely believed that the mystical scales of a dragon would heal illness, cure ailments, and provide fortune.
One such visitor timidly looked up at her great shining body and beseeched, "Oh glorious dragon, might I have a single scale?"
Of course, the dragon replied warmly. She delicately, almost lovingly, with a slight twinge, used a single claw to prise off a single golden scale, leaving a dull patch.
Over the eons, more and more people would come as supplicants. The scales were used for good luck, for warmth, to ward off evil, as the draconic equivalent of a rabbit's foot.
In the end, the poor dragon was stripped bare - the fire from her burning furnace now showed clearly through to her patchwork, sensitive, and naked skin.
When winter came, she huddled in the cold darkness. And still, when a peasant would come asking for a scale - just one, a single scale nothing more, she would not refuse. In her eternal generosity she would carefully break off another. This time it took longer to find one left upon her body, as the humans had stripped her bare like a tree come winter.
Then thus came a knight. "I'm sorry, good sir, but I have no scales left to give," she said pitiably.
"Why, your scale was a choking hazard and wasn’t labeled not for ages under 5! Prepare for a class-action lawsuit and also to be impaled upon a lance."
The End.
I'll pretend I intended it as a parable of the destructive nature of mass tourism or something something Lorax something something truffula trees.
This is neither new nor news. "The Well-Tempered Plot Device" is almost 4 decades old (see: https://news.ansible.uk/plotdev.html).
It does suggest that publishers might want to screen new writing with a quick "Did AI write this?" and only publish the ones where it is obvious to humans that AI did not write it.
(In that vein I am baffled how anyone could think the fourth story, especially, was anything but AI.)
(And, as well, the seventh story is interesting because it reads, to me, exactly like someone who's used to writing something longer trying to write flash. It doesn't land anything, it doesn't conclude, but it looks like if it had about twice the length it might be interesting. And it's got some dissonance from breaking with the usual demon-bargaining template. So I pegged that as human. Oops!)