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The latest Hunger Games novel may have been co-authored by AI

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Re: The latest Hunger Games novel may have been co-authored by AI

#21

Post by ageitgey »

herculity275 wrote: post #18
glimshe wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing is tough. If you are famous author and not invested in the publisher's cash grab request, it would make sense to have someone else writing it while you perform basic QA for branding purposes. Its not good at all , but makes financial sense.

My issue with that as a reader is that when I purchase a book authored by Suzanne Collins I expect it to have been actually written by Suzanne Collins, not by somebody she contracted to imitate her style.

We are so far past that in mass market fiction. It's folding back in on itself.

Tom Clancy has new books coming out every year and he's been dead for over a decade. They don't hide the "ghostwriter" but they also put Tom Clancy in huge letters at the top even though he had less than nothing to do with it.

https://www.amazon.com/Clancy-Line-Demarcation-Jack-Novel-eb...

Re: The latest Hunger Games novel may have been co-authored by AI

#22

Post by herculity275 »

OJFord wrote: post #19
herculity275 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue with that as a reader is that when I purchase a book authored by Suzanne Collins I expect it to have been actually written by Suzanne Collins, not by somebody she contracted to imitate her style.

It's interesting though isn't it, because if she contracts someone good, the ghostwriter does an excellent job of imitating her style, then really you do get exactly what you wanted? I don't like the idea of it either, fwiw, but it's hard to rationalise. (But then why stop there, have the estate of the esteemed author go on contracting ghostwriters! Does it only work if you keep the death a secret, or would a license…

Reminds me, there was a Stephen King interview from a ~decade ago where he observed that when he passes away his son (Joe Hill) could probably keep publishing under his name for at least a few years since he's perfected imitating King's general style.

I think the distinction, for me, is that when I pay for a book I want access to the author's creative thoughts and personality, not just their particular "brand". I realize that a lot of readers don't care, especially in the YA space, but I'd rather read a worse novel from the person who conceived The Hunger Games than a perfect imitation from someone who's merely imitating the brand.

Re: The latest Hunger Games novel may have been co-authored by AI

#23

Post by herculity275 »

OJFord wrote: post #11

'Embellishment' seems absolutely standard for a novel, some authors more than others, and it's exactly what you're taught to do clumsily in school. The actions in the train scene didn't seem so bizarre to me, and even if they did we can still write bizarre events and characters? Similarly the spiderweb skin, where's the line between 'no human would ...' and writing a strange character? I don't have anything like the…

> The moment our hearts shattered? It belongs to us.

I'm ambivalent about a lot of other cited examples (could be AI, could just be bad ghostwriting) but this particular sentence does have very distinct AI smell.

Re: The latest Hunger Games novel may have been co-authored by AI

#24

Post by slyall »

precompute wrote: post #15
pjc50 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing magic about physical books in a way that might protect them, and it's a terribly low-margin industry that's vulnerable to this kind of behavior.

That's a broad statement that's untrue for most genres, at least right now. However, it is true for the YA lit / chic-lit and the smut-disguised-as-fantasy genres. These already have authors pumping out a book every few months with different characters jammed into similar situations. And people have personalized these kinds of interactions already (CharacterAI and others). Literature is literature, whether human or L…

Lots of stories on youtube seem to be AI written or highly assisted (With AI generated voices, subtitles and pictures).

I was listening to "HFY Sci-Fi" at one point but there are hundreds of channels with "Getting revenge on the Boss" or 50 other story genres. Each pumping out a new story every week. Some taken from other sources, some AI generated.

Re: The latest Hunger Games novel may have been co-authored by AI

#25

Post by watwut »

glimshe wrote: post #17
lapcat wrote: post #14

What I found more disturbing was this: > It would be considered standard industry practice to hire a ghostwriter for these prequels The use of ghostwriters is the main problem, I think. AI is just another ghostwriter. I recently read a book that's 3rd in a trilogy. I loved the first 2 books but didn't like the 3rd at all and indeed stopped reading after about 100 pages. It felt like the 3rd book was just a perfunctor…

Writing is tough. If you are famous author and not invested in the publisher's cash grab request, it would make sense to have someone else writing it while you perform basic QA for branding purposes. Its not good at all , but makes financial sense.

> Writing is tough. If you are famous author and not invested in the publisher's cash grab request, it would make sense to have someone else writing it while you perform basic QA for branding purposes.

And it would then make 100% sense to put that other persons name on the cover. The QA doing person can be there as "editor".

Re: The latest Hunger Games novel may have been co-authored by AI

#26

Post by watwut »

OJFord wrote: post #19
herculity275 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue with that as a reader is that when I purchase a book authored by Suzanne Collins I expect it to have been actually written by Suzanne Collins, not by somebody she contracted to imitate her style.

It's interesting though isn't it, because if she contracts someone good, the ghostwriter does an excellent job of imitating her style, then really you do get exactly what you wanted? I don't like the idea of it either, fwiw, but it's hard to rationalise. (But then why stop there, have the estate of the esteemed author go on contracting ghostwriters! Does it only work if you keep the death a secret, or would a license…

> It's interesting though isn't it, because if she contracts someone good, the ghostwriter does an excellent job of imitating her style, then really you do get exactly what you wanted? I don't like the idea of it either, fwiw, but it's hard to rationalise.

There is nothing hard about rationalizing this. If this was what "I wanted" they would just put the ghostwriters name on cover with "written in style of X" in bold letters.

But, it is not what people wanted and they would buy the book less.

Re: The latest Hunger Games novel may have been co-authored by AI

#27

Post by iamsaitam »

lapcat wrote: post #14

What I found more disturbing was this: > It would be considered standard industry practice to hire a ghostwriter for these prequels The use of ghostwriters is the main problem, I think. AI is just another ghostwriter. I recently read a book that's 3rd in a trilogy. I loved the first 2 books but didn't like the 3rd at all and indeed stopped reading after about 100 pages. It felt like the 3rd book was just a perfunctor…

Interesting that in music, ghostwriters are known and pretty much not hidden in any way.

Re: The latest Hunger Games novel may have been co-authored by AI

#28

Post by precompute »

dns_snek wrote: post #20
precompute wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I don't think it's easy or that one can be completely sure about it. And in my experience, LLMs aren't very good at changing their voice. If you have any examples to the contrary, I'd like to see em.

I don't have examples, I'm asking you to provide evidence which supports your extraordinary claim. You claimed, with a high level of confidence, that the text isn't written by AI because it lacks obvious "tells" which you believe to be present in any LLM generated text. But if the absence of these "tells" reliably indicated human writing then LLM detectors would have false negative rate of approximately 0%, do they?

It's not necessary for the tell to be easily computable. It's not something that's true everywhere, but it has been true more often than not when I've tried to use LLMs. And I haven't seen a LLM-generated piece of writing that's sufficiently long and complicated enough to rule this tell out.

Re: The latest Hunger Games novel may have been co-authored by AI

#30

Post by lapcat »

iamsaitam wrote: post #27
lapcat wrote: post #14

What I found more disturbing was this: > It would be considered standard industry practice to hire a ghostwriter for these prequels The use of ghostwriters is the main problem, I think. AI is just another ghostwriter. I recently read a book that's 3rd in a trilogy. I loved the first 2 books but didn't like the 3rd at all and indeed stopped reading after about 100 pages. It felt like the 3rd book was just a perfunctor…

Interesting that in music, ghostwriters are known and pretty much not hidden in any way.

Ghostwriters are by definition hidden.

Recording artists release songs composed by other songwriters, but those writers are credited on the album.

Music is different in that it includes both writing and performance, but books include no performance component (except books on tape, I suppose, but then the narrator is credited).

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