Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

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I asked ChatGPT “ Write a one paragraph pitch for a novel that combines genres and concepts in a way that’s never been done before.”

I’m not going to claim this is Pulitzer-worthy, but it seems fairly novel:

> In Spiritfall: A Symphony of Rust and Rose Petals, readers traverse the borders of time, taste, and consciousness in a genre-bending epic that effortlessly fuses neo-noir detective intrigue, culinary magic realism, and post-biotechnological body horror under the simmering threat of a cosmic opera. Set in a floating, living city grown from engineered coral-harps, the story follows a taste-shaper detective tasked with unraveling the murder of an exiled goddess whose voice once controlled the city’s very tides. As he navigates sentient cooking knives, ink-washed memory fractals, and teahouses that serve liquid soul fragments, he uncovers conspiracies binding interdimensional dream-chefs to cybernetic shamans, and finds forbidden love in a quantum greenhouse of sentient spices. Every chapter refracts expectations, weaving together genres never before dared, leaving readers both spellbound and strangely hungry for more.

...that pitch is a mess. The majority of it is nonsense and it doesn't sound like a good story to me (I think. I can hardly parse it.)

Like I said, it’s not good, but I was using it to falsify the claim that LLMs can only produce concepts that are in the training set or prompt.

If I were using this for real I’d ask it to iterate, to create a story arc, etc.

Well, all of the conceptual elements it used are in the training set; it just combined them in ways that don't even make syntactic sense. Yes, I know we "just" combine ideas too when we're creating. My point is that I don't think it was producing new concepts, just slamming words together in grammatically acceptable ways. Do any of its absurd phrases mean anything to you? They don't mean anything to me. I could create something conceptually sound based on its absurd phrases, but that's still me doing the work where the LLM is acting as an algorithmic name generator.

I'd be curious if it could explain those concepts and use them in consistent ways. If so, I'd be curious how novel it could really get. Is it just going to be repackaging well-trod scifi and fantasy devices, or studied philosophy? Or could it offer us a story with truly new understandings? For example, to my knowledge, House of Leaves is something truly novel. It's probably not the first book with intentional printing errors, or with layered narration, or with place-horror, etc. But I think House of Leaves is pretty widely considered a sort of "step forward" for literature, having a profound impact on the reader unlike anything that came before it.

(A really serious discussion will require analyzing exactly what that impact is and how it's novel.)

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