51–60 of 103 posts
The best fantasy/sci-fi literature involves a lot of world building. For some, the world building came first and the stories were an offshoot of that. Tolkien needed a world and stories to bring life to the languages he was inventing. Raymond E Feist's Midkemia was a massive collaborative effort for a RPG world. He has stated: "I don't write fantasy; I write historical novels about an imaginary place. At least that's…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
I agree with your point that most of us probably couldn't direct much worthwhile, but surely art/game/movie directors have more than an "idea". Granted the only creative directors that I know of are the ones that did an exceptional job, so that might be a skewed perspective. I guess my objection is largely that the creative process is the fumbling around, treating LLMs as a shortcut to a creative product because you…
1.) probably human, low on style but a solid twist (CORRECT) 2.) interesting imagery but some continuity issues, maybe AI (INCORRECT) 3.) more a scene than a story, highly confident is AI given style (CORRECT) 4.) style could go either way, maybe human given some successful characterization (INCORRECT) 5.) I like the style but it's probably AI, the metaphors are too dense and very minor continuity errors (CORRECT) 6.) some genuinely funny stuff and good world building, almost certainly human (CORRECT) 7.) probably AI prompted to go for humor, some minor continuity issues (CORRECT) 8.) nicely subverted expectations, probably human (CORRECT)
My personal ranking for scores (again blind to author) was:
6 (human); 8 (human); 4 (AI); 1 (human) and 5 (AI) -- tied; 2 (human); 3 and 7 (AI) -- tied
So for me the two best stories were human and the two worst were AI. That said, I read a lot of flash fiction, and none of these stories really approached good flash imo. I've also done some of my own experiments, and AI can do much better than what is posted above for flash if given more sophisticated prompting.
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.
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 twist had potential, but to me wasn’t executed as well as it could have been. I was hoping for some stronger irony — e.g. if the mainlanders had pushed for the bridge, but not the islanders; or a sentence about how the demons were very surprised, but nonetheless went on to take over the world before they knew what had happened. As it is, it felt underdeveloped and slightly uncanny in an AI-like way.
Here are my notes and guesses on the stories in case people here find it interesting. Like some others in the blog post comments I got 6/8 right: 1.) probably human, low on style but a solid twist (CORRECT) 2.) interesting imagery but some continuity issues, maybe AI (INCORRECT) 3.) more a scene than a story, highly confident is AI given style (CORRECT) 4.) style could go either way, maybe human given some successful…
Because unfortunately, one reason why readers can’t tell the difference between the AI and human authors is because they don’t have much exposure to the greats. The average person reads something like 2 books a year, and they probably aren't reading Nabokov.
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…
I think if you compared the AI stories to works by “top” authors, the results wouldn’t really be as close. No one is confusing a story by Kafka or Conrad with a ChatGPT one. Because unfortunately, one reason why readers can’t tell the difference between the AI and human authors is because they don’t have much exposure to the greats. The average person reads something like 2 books a year, and they probably aren't read…
Have a read through the 10 dragon stories where the prompt was "Meeting a dragon" and you'll see what I mean.
https://mark---lawrence.blogspot.com/2023/09/so-is-ai-writin...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I think that's an odd way of viewing creativity: unless you can pull off the whole thing, you're not really creative/ What about people who are not native speakers? Who are dyslexic? Do we deny them the spark of creativity because they can't write perfect prose without help? Heck, what about most sci-fi writers? Their editors often do a lot of heavy lifting to make the final product good. If you have a killer idea fo…
If you don't create anything, you're not being creative. My assertion is that just coming up with an idea is not sufficient to create something; an idea alone isn't manifest. An idea without expression, in whatever medium, isn't very useful.
Why does prose need to be "perfect" (whatever that means) in order for the act of writing to be "creative"? Much poetry isn't "perfect prose", and that it doesn't follow a known, accepted grammatical standard is often its defining quality as poetry.
Have you created a joke if you just think of it (the "idea") and it is never told to anyone (the "execution")?
Have you created a joke if someone is exposed to it but they don't laugh? (You may have created something by telling it to someone, but it probably isn't a joke if no one finds it funny, and delivery is a good portion of what can make a joke funny, and delivery is part of the execution).
If your intent is to exercise your creativity by writing a book, but all you do is come up with an idea and have an LLM write it, did you write a book? If you intend to write a joke and say "it would be funny if we had a joke for this" and someone else comes up with a joke, did you write the joke because you had the idea of it?
> If you have a killer idea for a meme or a really clever concept of a four-panel comic strip, but don't know how to use Photoshop or can't draw very well, is it a sin to ask a machine to help?
Asking for help isn't a sin (nor do I know why one would use that word). But claiming you did something that you didn't do is a lie, and lying is a sin.
If it's the idea that is killer, then the quality of the output doesn't matter as long as the idea is communicated, so one's ability with Photoshop isn't relevant. A well drawn four-panel comic doesn't turn a shit idea into gold. But a lot of meme gold isn't gold because of the quality of drawing — which means you don't need to draw to some arbitrarily high standard to produce meme gold. The assertions that somehow it's not creative unless it's "perfect" and the use of an LLM can result in "perfection" are ideas that have to die.
> Is your idea somehow worthless just because you previously couldn't do that?
Well, my original observation at the top of the thread is that HN has considered ideas to be largely worthless if they don't have meaningful execution. In the case of writing — books, jokes, or memes — expression is the execution.