Now it’s easier than ever. So the market explodes. But it makes legit writers harder to find. Its bleak.
Then they would be selling at a higher price due to this, increasing the profits for digital authors.
Doesn’t really matter what the original motivation was (money, reputation, fame), people will use LLMs as a shortcut to generate text, and we’re all poorer because of it.
The thing is ... ideas matter just as much as the writing. You cannot simply say: "Hey Claude, write me a Sherlock Holmes pastiche set in the bronze age."
I have found that a 1:4 to 1:8 ratio gives nice results. That is, for every 4-8 paras of expected output, you must provide 1 para worth of character detail, plot beats etc. So you would need 100-200 pages of your own writing to produce 800 pages worth.
But most people are lazy. So the output is too.
Just give me the prompt at this point.
People are too precious about man-made art. I don't see the point. Every book ever written might have some novelty value of its own. But it mostly has the same plots, character archetypes and other tropes found in other fiction. We think there is something special about human writing. But LLMs have read the same stuff we have. And produce similar inspired writing.
It is the same with books. Reading a story based on a plot of your design, and characters you built, dealing with situations you conceived of, and having conversations you directed works for me ... even if an LLM assisted with the writing duties.
Nah. What I have is the skeleton. You want it made flesh. That is what the prose does. It produces a fully realized world. I do not care to read stories in the form of bullet points. Which is what my character sheets and outlines are.
> There is _some_ stuff you read for the prose.
By this I mean you read it for the way the writer writes: prose qua prose. Most times, perfunctory prose that serves as the glue is sufficient
Of course you can use it to quickly try out stuff, for some editorial tasks and such. But unless you learn the craft of writing I don't think others will want to read any of this stuff.
Can the writer use AI to improve their output ... is the only outstanding question.
> It's literally an art.
So was making clothes, or shoes, or cabinets, or knives, or cooking, or so many other things. Now we mass produce all of them.
But as a person who reads (and I assume you have some care for what you're reading) why would that have anything to do with you as an audience? Like, I get why folks would want a curated set of Readers Digests, but why would you care to make -more- of that output?
Speak for yourself. I would, if the plot appeals to me and the writing quality is good (which it increasingly is).
Producing a bunch of filler content to pad things out is the opposite direction from most of the reading that I have found helpful. In fact, shortening works seems to be the main part of good writing. I don't generally want to watch a 4-hour film that could have been a tight 50 minutes. I don't want to read 800 pages that could have been a solid 200.
I'm not reading for distraction, and if I were Zane Gray and Robotech and Harliquin romance novels already have that filled- heck, I could just re-read Cujo (which probably wasn't edited very much at all, admittedly).
Generating a ton of crap, as you note, has never been a problem.
Getting rid of the 4-8 paras of thoughtlessness has always been the real work in my experience.
Padding, though it is probably the wrong word for what the LLM does when it expands the outline, lets you experience the world. The modern 8-episode tv season, for instance, might be technically well done but does not leave you with sufficient time in the world as compared to the 22-episode season with a bunch of filler episodes
And even at that point, others will continue to write using AI to simulate being one of those people.
Now you can do it in minutes, get 50 books out, 20 of them sell 10 copies, you've earned $200.
(i might be exaggerating the times and earnings, but the point stands)
Some HR systems even support that and have AI writing/rewording integrated.
Corporate hellscapes intensifying, I guess.
It's both a new technology that maps a geometry to existing language - which is very interesting from several literary theory POVs - and represents a new kind of typewriter. If you're interested in innovative techniques in fiction, I think LLMs are arguably deeply interesting. Mass-producing slop, however, is probably quite limited in terms of its theoretical interest, and in how it changes the craft.
Personally, an example of how I use gen AI when writing is that I sometimes use a little text editor I wrote. It polls a local model, and grabs the 50 most-likely next token(s), rounded to one word, based on where the cursor is.
"Voice" in fiction was already about how the author chooses to deviate from the expected-next-word. So - while you could just use the tokens returned - I find myself using them much more often to choose what words to avoid using, or how to deviate from the expected outputs, and where it might be most interesting to do that.
I think there's plenty of interesting things that can be done with gen AI in terms of fiction writing, but I think we're quite a long way from working all of them out yet. Wholesale slop generation is one of the most obvious - and most boring - things writers can do with an LLM.