I have yet to see an LLM produce even a competent short story, an extremely popular and manageable genre. The best I've seen still has the structure and sophistication of a children's story.
It feels dystopian to have AI reading my kids bedtime stories now that I think about it.
For a contrast, look at NovelAI. They only use (increasingly custom) Llama-derived models, but their service outputs much more narratively interesting (if not necessarily long-term coherent) text and will generally try and hit the beats of whatever genre or style you tell it. Extrapolate that out to the compute power of the big players and I think you'd get something much more like the Star Trek holodeck method of producing a serviceable (though not at all original) story.
For example, when someone wanted a holonovel with Kiera Nerys, Quark had to scan her to create it so when using specific people they have to get concrete data as opposed to historical characters that were generated. Likewise, Tom Paris gave the computer lots of “parameters” as they called them to create the stories like the Adventures of Captain Proton and based on dialog he knew how the stories were supposed to play out on all his creations, if not how they ended each run through.
The creative details and turns of the story still need to come from the human.
For those of us not steeped in AI culture, this appears to be short for "Reinforcement learning from human feedback".
https://chatgpt.com/share/66ff5c94-4dc0-8000-b33b-9321b4f99a...
https://chatgpt.com/share/66ff5d23-9ba8-8000-8a37-7bef91c688...
Someone should try promoting it for creative story prompts :p
I’d bet very few if any.
By contrast, when you let the AI do its job in multiple steps and plan ahead, it seems to do much better. (Again, much like humans using a process.)
We’re often comparing apples to oranges evaluating the AI — comparing a single forward pass from the AI to an iterative process for the human.
There's a big difference between:
"Write me a story"
and things like
* "As the last star in the sky died, the shadows began to coalesce into a presence that wore the face of my own mother."
* "The red trees whispered quietly in the wind, their mana flowing around them in twisted strands. I reached out, pulled, twisted..."
* or even just: "write 10 dark fantasy prompts" (to give you a start. )
And it also depends on if you have the LLM write the whole story by itself, or if you're helping (or vice versa: have the LLM help you). And Claude, Llama and ChatGPT each give very different results! )
I mean, if you've convinced yourself that these tools can never lead to creativity, then I can't change your mind. But if you're a person who wants to see how one's creativity can be supported: Maybe you can get some ideas, perhaps just enough to break out of writer's block some time.