AI-generated fiction is flooding literary magazines – but not fooling anyone | Hacker News Reader

AI-generated fiction is flooding literary magazines – but not fooling anyone

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4 pointswyem6 comments

The people who make AI out to be great at writing are people who have never studied literature beyond high school and their own experiences with reading. Even the more complicated long form AI writing fails at subtext and does worse than than the average person with no real writing experience, it may be able to maintain plot but even genre fiction is more than plot.

I think AI is going to increase the importance of the agent and greatly expand the agents role. As of now the agent largely deals with writers who have established themselves on some level even if it is just a few published short stories. There is a massive gap in the market, the agent largely ignores anyone with no publishing history. AI is going to cause the publishing industry to put more on the agent, it will be their job to sift AI from human which will expand the agent's role to include authors who are just starting out.

Overall I think this is a good thing, it will provide much needed guidance for the writer who is just starting out, they will be able to get an agent from the get go and that agent's job will be to help the writer achieve their goals, it will force agents to take a longer term view and not just be middle men. Literature has largely lost the mentor/student relationship, this will force the agent to take up some of that, they will have to deal with the writer who is just starting out if they want to survive.

Interesting take. And yeah, I agree that present AI is far from being of acceptable quality with the long form content, especially for fiction writing.

The big problem with AI writing is that the subtext is 100% unintentional, which leaves it very inconsistent and constantly conflicting with itself. The average person with no real understanding of subtext or writing experience still manages to have a consistent subtext, their own experience and perspective fills that in, they have that intuitive understanding which AI completely lacks. I suspect this will become a major role of the agent, to help the writer who is just starting understand and develop their innate use of subtext.

Most books on amazon have zero subtext. Tell me PercyJackson has subtext. Pick a romance novel or a lit_rpg and show me the subtext. That's just it.. the stories don't have to be good. They have to be good-enough. Sadly they'll get better really fast.

Subtext is not theme, everything people write has subtext. When someone posts on the internet we can often tell if the person is angry or happy or depressed even if they are not being overt about it, we get that through their subtext. A writer like Stephen King is not a great writer by objective literary standards but he is an effective writer because he understands subtext, he knows that fear is not just one thing, there are gradations of fear, there is the fear of tomorrow, the fear of loss, the fear of death, the fear of being late for work and there is the childhood fear of the monster under the bed. King knows he can exploit the common everyday fears everyone has to build that into an irrational fear of something that may even be absurd out of the context he provides. AI lack this and is a very long ways from it.

Romance is overflowing with subtext. No idea about lit_rpg, never read anything of that sort but I am sure it is there. Even your short post is ripe with subtext.

Could someone please post a representative snippet of such a story created by AI so we can judge it directly? Especially something that aroused the attention of the editor.

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