I applaud OP's transparency and willingness to call this result what it is.
AI vs. Professional Authors Results
11–20 of 103 posts
Re: AI vs. Professional Authors Results
#12I 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.
Re: AI vs. Professional Authors Results
#13Personally 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…
I would love to read some of this. Where do you find AI generated fiction?
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Re: AI vs. Professional Authors Results
#14Personally 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…
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
> 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.
Re: AI vs. Professional Authors Results
#15Personally 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…
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
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).
Re: AI vs. Professional Authors Results
#16Personally 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…
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
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).
Re: AI vs. Professional Authors Results
#17I 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…
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?
Re: AI vs. Professional Authors Results
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
> 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.
I could be in either group, depending on my inclination at the moment.
Re: AI vs. Professional Authors Results
#19ai 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…
So... Kafka?
Re: AI vs. Professional Authors Results
#20Perhaps 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?
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.