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Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

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Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#81

Post by scarecrowbob »

sieve wrote: post #9
jdw64 wrote: post #2

Why do people use Gen AI for writing? What's the motivation? For academic papers, it's probably citation metrics and the number of publications. For novels, it's likely economic factors. If those factors disappear, would people still use Gen AI for writing?

I have hundreds of plot ideas from 40 years of reading and watching crappy books and films/tv. Never had the time or energy to explore those. LLMs let me try out various plots. To see which ones work and which don't. I haven't really thought about publishing anything though. Too much work and bureaucracy. The thing is ... ideas matter just as much as the writing. You cannot simply say: "Hey Claude, write me a Sherloc…

As a writer and cognition-enjoyer, much of the reading I do has been done by people who were using that writing as an adjunct to their own thoughts.

Producing a bunch of filler content to pad things out is the opposite direction from most of the reading that I have found helpful. In fact, shortening works seems to be the main part of good writing. I don't generally want to watch a 4-hour film that could have been a tight 50 minutes. I don't want to read 800 pages that could have been a solid 200.

I'm not reading for distraction, and if I were Zane Gray and Robotech and Harliquin romance novels already have that filled- heck, I could just re-read Cujo (which probably wasn't edited very much at all, admittedly).

Generating a ton of crap, as you note, has never been a problem.

Getting rid of the 4-8 paras of thoughtlessness has always been the real work in my experience.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#82

Post by scarecrowbob »

sieve wrote: post #51
Panoramix wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bunch of ideas doesn't make a book. Actual writing takes place, the length of each sentence, the specific choice of words, the pace, the choices, the editing. It's literally an art. Nobody wants to read what ChatGPT wrote based on your prompts. Of course you can use it to quickly try out stuff, for some editorial tasks and such. But unless you learn the craft of writing I don't think others will want to read any of…

I have read thousands of books in my lifetime. I don't really have too many hobbies outside of reading. Trust me when I say there is an audience for literal crap. LLMs actually raise the bar significantly. I do not think they will ever exceed Hugo, or TS Eliot, or Borges, but they are far superior to the random author publishing random crap every single day. Can the writer use AI to improve their output ... is the on…

Yeah, but my shoes get worn out, and I can't share them- the media stuff has always already been mass produced and there has been way more useful stuff to look at so the industrially automation of literal crap may find an audience.

But as a person who reads (and I assume you have some care for what you're reading) why would that have anything to do with you as an audience? Like, I get why folks would want a curated set of Readers Digests, but why would you care to make -more- of that output?

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#83

Post by skeledrew »

plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #68
FreeTrade wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Writing' covers a lot of creative tasks. You might very well enjoy creating plots, characters, ideas, situations, but find the actual business of putting thousands of words down on a page tedious.

Yes, but then you are just an idea guy. Why bother, when you are not interested in the act of writing, or worse, don't enjoy the experience of writing at all, including the struggles that come with writing? There are no stakes in writing as a hobby. Once fiction exists in abundance as a product, the question arises all the more as to why one should adopt a production-centred perspective on writing.

The actually act of writing is a lot of raw time sunk doing something that might not be very enjoyable. Time that can be spent doing other things, like preparing the plot, etc for another book or just enjoying reading other works or whatever. The LLM handles that bulk of tedium that the author doesn't want to deal with, where in the past they were forced to whether they enjoyed doing it or not. Nothing wrong with being an ideas person; heck this is now the age of the ideas person.

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#84

Post by skeledrew »

Panoramix wrote: post #46
sieve wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have hundreds of plot ideas from 40 years of reading and watching crappy books and films/tv. Never had the time or energy to explore those. LLMs let me try out various plots. To see which ones work and which don't. I haven't really thought about publishing anything though. Too much work and bureaucracy. The thing is ... ideas matter just as much as the writing. You cannot simply say: "Hey Claude, write me a Sherloc…

A bunch of ideas doesn't make a book. Actual writing takes place, the length of each sentence, the specific choice of words, the pace, the choices, the editing. It's literally an art. Nobody wants to read what ChatGPT wrote based on your prompts. Of course you can use it to quickly try out stuff, for some editorial tasks and such. But unless you learn the craft of writing I don't think others will want to read any of…

> Nobody wants to read what ChatGPT wrote based on your prompts.

Speak for yourself. I would, if the plot appeals to me and the writing quality is good (which it increasingly is).

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#85

Post by jormp_ »

sieve wrote: post #66
illwrks wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't go into too much detail, but I have a plot outline, development bible, story mountain, character outlines, style guide and more. I have four agents running on various tasks; writing, error checking, consistency and critique. They can generate a good story but there are holes and issues so it's far from perfect and I wouldn't give it away for free, never mind put a price on it. To add to this, in my 9-5 I work…

I tried the programmer's method. Automating stuff. Then I realized I prefer the wood carver's method. So I take it slow. I think and write the outline for a chapter. Then I have the LLM produce it. I read the draft. Tweak things. Reroll. Take the best from multiple rolls and merge them to produce a organic whole. Manually patch the minor differences in pacing and tone. Rinse and repeat. It takes 100-250 hours across…

If you have all that already why don't you just write the book yourself?

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#86

Post by sieve »

plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #75
sieve wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some stuff you read for the prose. Most books, I read for the characters and the plot. So the LLM-assisted output works for me.

When I take you at face value, it makes even less sense to me. If what you care about is the characters and the plot, you already have those, you wrote them yourself. That's what your 100-200 pages of notes are you mentioned in your previous post. So what exactly is the LLM adding? It's expanding your notes into prose you claim not to care about. You're generating 800 pages of the thing you say doesn't matter to you,…

> If what you care about is the characters and the plot, you already have those, you wrote them yourself.

Nah. What I have is the skeleton. You want it made flesh. That is what the prose does. It produces a fully realized world. I do not care to read stories in the form of bullet points. Which is what my character sheets and outlines are.

> There is _some_ stuff you read for the prose.

By this I mean you read it for the way the writer writes: prose qua prose. Most times, perfunctory prose that serves as the glue is sufficient

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#87

Post by sieve »

grey-area wrote: post #78
sieve wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not expect the LLMs to do everything. They are assistants. You still bear the responsibility of stitching everything together into a cohesive whole. Make changes as required. That is where expectations differ I guess.

But they generate objectively bad text. Why do you need an assistant to do that? Perhaps for some uses (say a summary of some business document, or generating code which is then discarded or edited) that's acceptable. For literature, do you really feel they are useful tools? So many changes would be required IMO that you're better off just writing the story you want to tell.

> But they generate objectively bad text.

They don't. I don't think people are taking full advantage of their capabilities. They produce perfectly functional prose. Sometimes, they produce something genuinely amazing to read. But that is quite rare.

People should stop expecting brilliant prose from LLMs without doing the preparatory work themselves first. Very few human authors can manage that in any case

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#88

Post by sieve »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #82
sieve wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have read thousands of books in my lifetime. I don't really have too many hobbies outside of reading. Trust me when I say there is an audience for literal crap. LLMs actually raise the bar significantly. I do not think they will ever exceed Hugo, or TS Eliot, or Borges, but they are far superior to the random author publishing random crap every single day. Can the writer use AI to improve their output ... is the on…

Yeah, but my shoes get worn out, and I can't share them- the media stuff has always already been mass produced and there has been way more useful stuff to look at so the industrially automation of literal crap may find an audience. But as a person who reads (and I assume you have some care for what you're reading) why would that have anything to do with you as an audience? Like, I get why folks would want a curated s…

Because I care about the world and the characters? And want to read stories set in that world instead of five pages of bullet points?

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#89

Post by shalmanese »

sieve wrote: post #60
illwrks wrote: post #35

I have been tinkering with this over the past few months. One story with a specific genre and demographic target, but as I've been reading each draft there are so many small issues that crop up, inconsistency across various parts of the story, items that are introduced, questions that go unanswered etc. Unless your goal is to become an editor of AI content, it's not worth the effort. Perhaps in time it will be better…

> inconsistency across various parts of the story, items that are introduced, questions that go unanswered etc. This is a workflow problem. What the LLM normally needs: - very basic outline: what the story is about - basic cast of characters: like fiction/plays of the 18-1900s Then you go chapter-by-chapter. But the most critical thing is that you MUST provide the chapter beats. From start to end. Location, environme…

I had an amazing AI system that did this and worked well for me.

What you did was you started off with the high level vision of the story, you'd figure out the characters in detail, supply their motivation, think about how those things might conflict with each other etc. Then you'd think about how to add various plot points into it so different characters with motivation might find productive tension with each other. You map it out chapter by chapter, what beats go where, what things happen to push interesting conflict.

But the amazing thing about this AI system was it let you go deeper, you could go into individual conversations and actually place the words people said to each other, add color to the words by appending it with stuff like "she said, hesitatingly". Entire descriptions of scenes could be vibe generated by you imagining in your head exactly what it would look like and finding perfect words such that the image in your head would be transmitted over to the reader.

Finally, the AI system had a way to inspect the psychological state of people who might want to read your work by recruiting people who are friends of yours to read each work in progress and you can interrogate them just like a chatbot over what worked well, what didn't, did you understand what was going on over here? Did you feel invested in the characters? You can use this feedback to spin up a brand new version.

Anyway, all this stuff is a lot of work but don't believe the people who say you can just press a button and get a good story out. If you put in the effort, this AI program called notepad.exe can have you generating genuinely human sounding prose!

Re: Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books

#90

Post by sieve »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #81
sieve wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have hundreds of plot ideas from 40 years of reading and watching crappy books and films/tv. Never had the time or energy to explore those. LLMs let me try out various plots. To see which ones work and which don't. I haven't really thought about publishing anything though. Too much work and bureaucracy. The thing is ... ideas matter just as much as the writing. You cannot simply say: "Hey Claude, write me a Sherloc…

As a writer and cognition-enjoyer, much of the reading I do has been done by people who were using that writing as an adjunct to their own thoughts. Producing a bunch of filler content to pad things out is the opposite direction from most of the reading that I have found helpful. In fact, shortening works seems to be the main part of good writing. I don't generally want to watch a 4-hour film that could have been a t…

> Producing a bunch of filler content to pad things out is the opposite direction from most of the reading that I have found helpful.

Padding, though it is probably the wrong word for what the LLM does when it expands the outline, lets you experience the world. The modern 8-episode tv season, for instance, might be technically well done but does not leave you with sufficient time in the world as compared to the 22-episode season with a bunch of filler episodes

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