Are readers generating fiction with AI models?

sriramgopalan

This is interesting. We have seen the internet change many fields and democratize them. For instance, only a few media outlets produced news stories and analysis, the rest of us consumed it. Blogging changed that. Only a few studios produced shows. With Youtube etc., many of the consumers could become producers themselves. If I read this correctly, books and fiction are headed in the same direction.

_matt_

Interesting analysis, but data "was collected between April 2023 and May 2024", so this predates even the release of GPT 4o.

MarkusQ

> Are readers generating fiction with AI models? Why not? Journalists, lawyers and pundits of various stripes are already doing it. Why shouldn't readers?

piloto_ciego

I had a sci-fi plot sketched out in my head, I had Codex give a whack at it. It was "ok" - not the worst content I've ever read, not the best. It was "sufficient."

lubujackson

So fans have fan fiction because they love certain worlds and characters and want more of it, or to riff on the base to take stories in new directions. We have things like TV tropes so it is no small stretch to, say, generate sitcom-type stories from Harry Potter or GoT that can continue forever. But where does all of this lead? Music has sinilar issues, but I think of this like the compression/loudness issue in music production. Everything gets amplified so the range of everything is compressed. And then it gets boring and people slowly jump ship for something else. I think there will be a wave of AI slop that improves and might actually be exciting on some vector, but we will get bored eventually. Humans crave newness, even if that new thing is worse in exactly the ways that defined good previously, like punk in response to complex rock albums. AI can combine ideas in interesting ways, but it is by design a predictor of what is most likely. This is directly odds with the concept of newness (and arguably, human-ness) which is baked in to what we consider interesting and relevant.

Sebguer

SillyTavern and the size of like Character.ai at its peak shows pretty obviously that people are doing exactly this!

bawolff

> We show that users especially gravitate toward fanfiction and erotica Why am i not surprised its primarily porn

saltwatercowboy

Language game solipsism

isoprophlex

For fun I wrote three chapters, and let opus write the 4th. It was god fucking awful. No amount of prompting could fix it.

0gs

I think I probably did 12 whole books before I realized no one else would read them, or that if they did, I would feel guilty. some of them are really good though even knowing they are purely plan-based expression!

SilentM68

Yes, they are. People have to find ways to make money to pay rent, bills and eat, particularly when their resumes are not as densely packed as others. This is one way to do it. Wish I could do it, too :)

vlian2088

LLMs suck at creative writing, all their edges get smoothed the fuck out of with RLHF for (brand) safety, so they write like they have a HR lady in the room with them, scrutinizing every sentence for adherence to the set of values very few people honestly hold. if you feed Claude/GPT/Gemini 100 chapters of ASOIAF and prompt it to continue, the story and the prose will degenerate into sterile purple slop within a few pages.

miki_tyler

I did: https://thelydianstone.com/