Comment by anonylizard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonylizard | Hacker News Reader

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Most writing sucks. Speaking as an intense hobby writer. Bad writing is tolerated at a level that is not in any other consumer good.

We don't accept worms in our meals, we don't accept meals that are missing half the portions. Yet we expect plot holes, we expect stories that don't complete, or get hastily completed.

Most written stories suck, because it is incredibly time consuming to craft an interesting AND airtight story. Most writers resort to cliches, because cliches are 10 times faster to write. Writers resort to 'plot beats', because they are 10x easier to execute than letting character motivations and world events naturally play out. Just look at Game of Thrones, the book is original and natural, so it takes decades for 1 book. The show decided to make it fast, and we get an atrocious ending.

AI will change this. Writers will be come directors, directing the AI-simulated characters in their stories, guiding the world states. Writing becomes outlining the general plot, background setup, and themes of the story, and then the characters come alive via AI, and the story begins! With 10x faster iteration and experimentation, the quality of the stories will start spiking dramatically up.

This is the biggest change to fiction writing since the printing press. Novels will merge with comics (given images are cheap now), video games will have genuinely massive story branches (given stories can be iterated quickly), they may even have NPCs that are simulated via AI.

Fans will be able to write a proper conclusion to the Song of Ice and Fire, with AI-assisted writing. Even niche fantasy novels can get LOTR level adaptations etc.

Struggling to reconcile the first part of your post with the second

AI is extremely good at the sort of writing that sucks, because it writes tight prose, substitutes character x and related tropes into story archetype y fairly well and it can handle cliches and beats and it can reasonably be assumed will start to get a better handle on overarching structure as the number of tokens it handles gets bigger. Yes, this will allow people that can't write for toffee to attempt fanfic too, and other models will let writers who can't draw illustrate and maybe even animate their stories.

But its model of character motivations is limited at best, especially with fresh, original characters, it resorts to cliches by design since its output is literally derived from overlaps with similar concepts and training approval of those overlaps, it doesn't know what a plot hole is, and it can't tell a brilliant, original ending from an atrocious ending. It can absolutely tweak paragraphs a writer doesn't like very much and do absolutely everything for content creators that don't like writing very much and are happy with "good enough", but I don't think the bottleneck to someone like GRR Martin's creative output is that he can't think of lots of permutations himself or type out scenes fast enough.

You are correct that AI writes cliched, boring stories. I've tried writing stories with GPT since GPT2. But currently it looks like it'll only be very useful at GPT-5 levels.

That's why writers like AI way more than artists. Writers get to design the interesting stories and characters. While AI handles all the prose and detailed dialogue. That's still a massive acceleration (100%+) compared to the old ways. Writers don't usually enjoy hammering out the words, coming up with ideas is fun, writing it much less so.

I would love fiction with less plot holes. It definitely kills the immersion for me. An AI would also (eventually) have no issues with continuity which would be stellar.

The best years are ahead for fiction I think.

I'm a working screenwriter, so please forgive us, but you'd be surprised at how challenging it is to make something air-tight plot-wise.

The way it works is it's a giant Rubik's cube – but imagine a dozen people trying to complete the puzzle, each of them with veto power over each turn.

Often what happens is that someone insists on some change without realizing that it creates serious consequences later, downstream. It's obviously my job to keep all of it together - and script coordinators too – but in the rush to get it built, directors, actors, producers can all make changes that ramify down through what is the most waterfall-y of all waterfall processes.

Also there's a lot of fans – especially in, say, comic-book movies or popular shows – who go over your stuff with a fine tooth comb. It can get pretty toxic, but rest assured nobody regrets more than us those little holes and details that get missed! We're sorry!

Read in a book a decade or two ago about an early attempt by Disney to speed up animation by creating a rudimentary AI for characters generated by CGI. Instead of creating each frame, they'd instruct the character to move from point A to point B on its own. The problem came in when they wanted the character to something unusual. Mickey Mouse would refuse to step off the edge of a cliff because it had been trained too deeply that when walking from A to B, you don't step off the path. Other odd personality quirks would pop up out of nowhere, such as Donald Duck randomly brutalizing his nephews for seemingly no reason. There was a reason somewhere in the nest of rules Donald Duck had been given, but no one could figure out how to make it stop.

All of that makes me wonder if writers directing the creation of an AI assisted story could run into something similar, where the AI refuses to have a character engage in a certain activity because the AI believes it's too out of character. Alerting you to behavior that would be out of character is one thing, but if the AI simply refuses to write or acknowledge edits that it deems inconsistent with the character, you've recreated the conflict between human writers with differing ideas. Being able to convince the AI of the reasons why the character would behave in such an uncharacteristic manner will become a new skill for writers.

I must say, this post was very well written.

I currently try to learn to communicate more clearly. Are there any books you can recommend? (I just ordered “on writing well”)

No books help. Only time and deliberate practice help.

I've been writing my hobby novel for 10 years. That's how I got good. Everything I written in the first 8 years is unreadable now, that's the pace of improvement. I should note the book is not even in English. Good and clear writing is transferable across languages (As GPT-4 has shown...)

Fiction writing has been a unimaginable boon to my life, both career and happiness wise. Writing about a hacker made me try learning coding, and the clarity of communication helped me ace interviews. That being said, I didn't seek out to a 'writer', I merely wanted to bring my story to life, whatever it took.

Now that AI will actually bring the story to life, I spent the last 6 months learning every bit about AI, faster than any learning I've done before, because its pure joy.

I appreciate your answer, Thank You!

Sorry for sounding too grumpy but I don't understand how you can say that "its pure joy" to let someone else do the writing for you. In my head that just doesn't compute.

I suspect that you just don't enjoy writing. If that's the case, then how did you decide to start writing in the first place? If you just wanted to tell a story, why not choose another medium?

>> AI will change this.

How? When "AI" is trained on the output of human writers, the majority of which has all the problems you flag above? How is "AI" going to produce something so radically different than the material it was trained on?

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