Why should I be bothered to read what nobody could be bothered to write?
The point of writing is communication and creative writing is specifically about the human experience… something a LLM can mimic but never speak to authoritatively.
There are some long abandoned fanfiction that nobody would bother to continue and which I would have liked to see a continuation of a sufficient quality.
for instance, people like Minecraft-generated worlds even though no human has crafted them
(Am I being downvoted for not playing enough Minecraft? I apologise.)
https://github.com/EQ-bench/creative-writing-bench/blob/main...
Not clear on how these elaborate prompts relate to the very short prompts in the samples.
Kinda like RLHF?
I tend to agree but, for the sake of argument: what if you don't know?
It seems most people who say they can tell, actually can't.
I won't argue that any of what the LLM came up with would stand on its own as particularly interesting - often quite the opposite - but it showed me examples of all the "obvious directions to go" as well as some other RPG cliches that I could either adopt or choose to avoid, and ultimately served as an excellent brainstorming assistant with interesting ideas and the ability to carry through and embellish them with enough detail to get a sense for either what works or what doesn't.
When the model would reply as multiple characters at once, or interleave narration with the dialogue, I'd usually just play along - most commonly it would decide for 2 or 3 steps to carry on the dialogue just hallucinating the things I would say.
I did a lot of experimenting with different ways to frame the dialogue, from a Zork-like adventure game, to an instant messenger chat, to just paragraphs of prose with dialogue mixed in as if from a novel. I found all of these methods to have different strengths or weaknesses, but the model also tended to blur between them after a few messages so I'd just play along as far as I could each time.
In an art-criticism sense I broadly agree with you, but I think you go too far from a reader-experience point of view.
> The point of writing is communication and creative writing is specifically about the human experience
That's a point of writing, but the point of reading is only sometimes about communication. It's also about entertainment, enrichment, or expressing half-formed thoughts and feelings.
Take a step back from the autonomously-written novel and imagine something a bit more collaborative. Many players of open-world-ish games develop an emergent story, what if that story could be semi-automatically novelized to document the unique narrative of the playthrough?
SimCity 2000 had "mad-lib" newspaper articles that commented on the city's status; consider ones written by an LLM with full knowledge of the game's state and context.
> something a LLM can mimic but never speak to authoritatively.
Supposing a reader can't tell the difference between an average human-written novel and an average LLM-written novel, where does this authority lie?
OP said "why should I be bothered to read what nobody could be bothered to write," which I think is silly, because I enjoy all kinds of things that nobody bothered to create. Things that exist naturally, randomly, or arise through rules or physical laws. Waves on the beach, a fractal, a game of sudoku, a campfire at night.
Until recently, humans were the only source of writing. If you wanted to read something, it had to be something written by a human. Now you can read things that weren't written by a human, just like you can watch or smell or feel things not created by humans. I think that's neat. I don't think it devalues writing, at least not inherently.
Why should you watch a movie nobody could be bothered to film?
Why should you bother to run a program nobody could be bothered to write?
My gut response was to agree with you, but it seems like the most obvious answer is entertainment, with plenty of other answers along for the ride.
The purpose of a program (for me) is to solve a particular problem, or help me in some other way. They're usually categorized as "Works well enough" and "Not for me", and it's easy to see without using them, what category I'll file them into.
But media is different. They're not supposed to "solve" anything, just supposed to make me feel something for a duration of time, and after that they're "consumed" until I forget about them, or until I engage with it again. I usually don't know how I feel about the thing until after I've consumed it.
Personally, I've found LLMs to greatly help with creating small utility programs for myself, which I've been doing since I started programming, but now I spend maybe 20-30 minutes (mostly just refactoring stuff by hand takes time) before the utility is helpful, vs many hours which it used to take to put together the same thing.
Media that is 100% created with ML tooling tends to be very different in quality than human made media. I'm not 100% convinced it's because of the tooling itself, as much as the people who use the tooling don't have enough experience to create media from before to know what to create, or what it should be.
I don't think it's much longer until they will be generating content you will actually want to read.
Meanwhile a lot of people are find use for LLMs for partner-writing or lower stakes prose or roleplay.
"AI" is supposed to make our lives better. Proponents want it to replace soul-crushing, boring clerical work, to free us up for things more meaningful to us, which for many people is to create and consume art.
Why do tech people keep having the impulse to replace the best parts of being human?
Are you really telling me that the vast corpus of human-generated creative writing isn't enough for you, and you have an itch to read something that can only be written by an AI? That seems crazy to me.
...or are you just a publisher, and wish you could make more money without needing to pay those pesky human authors? And in that case, I won't try to argue with you -- just give you a heartfelt middle finger.
Well said