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Comment by sieve | Hacker News Reader

I have hundreds of plot ideas from 40 years of reading and watching crappy books and films/tv. Never had the time or energy to explore those. LLMs let me try out various plots. To see which ones work and which don't. I haven't really thought about publishing anything though. Too much work and bureaucracy.

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.

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A bunch of ideas doesn't make a book. Actual writing takes place, the length of each sentence, the specific choice of words, the pace, the choices, the editing. It's literally an art. Nobody wants to read what ChatGPT wrote based on your prompts.

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.

I have read thousands of books in my lifetime. I don't really have too many hobbies outside of reading. Trust me when I say there is an audience for literal crap. LLMs actually raise the bar significantly. I do not think they will ever exceed Hugo, or TS Eliot, or Borges, but they are far superior to the random author publishing random crap every single day.

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.

Yeah, but my shoes get worn out, and I can't share them- the media stuff has always already been mass produced and there has been way more useful stuff to look at so the industrially automation of literal crap may find an audience.

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?

Because I care about the world and the characters? And want to read stories set in that world instead of five pages of bullet points?

> Nobody wants to read what ChatGPT wrote based on your prompts.

Speak for yourself. I would, if the plot appeals to me and the writing quality is good (which it increasingly is).

Just self-publish! That's the route I think many authors are moving towards.

Yeah, if I think something is worth publishing, I might do that. I don't do this for the money. I do it because I enjoy building a completely lived in world from character sheets and outlines

As a writer and cognition-enjoyer, much of the reading I do has been done by people who were using that writing as an adjunct to their own thoughts.

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.

> Producing a bunch of filler content to pad things out is the opposite direction from most of the reading that I have found helpful.

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

But why would I want to read that?

Just give me the prompt at this point.

You could say that for any book.

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.

I mean, you’re right in a way that motifs, stylistic devices and archetypes recur in fiction, and that an LLM could produce similarly inspired texts – so what? That’s no reason not to write yourself – unless you don’t enjoy writing and just want some sort of result, some sort of product. And you sound as though you don’t actually enjoy writing, but would still like to produce a book. But why bother at all if you don’t enjoy writing? Writing as a hobby carries no stakes that would in any way justify the use of LLMs. There is nothing that needs to be optimised in order to produce value.

Think of it this way. You like well-designed houses. Like looking at them, living in them. So you design a house per your liking having bought a plot overlooking a stream and a meadow. And you hire someone to build it for you. You may not enjoy the actual process of building, but you do like living in the final product, right?

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.

So, if you hire a builder to implement your design, the end product is functional, i.e. it should provide you with shelter and keep you warm. The builder's craft serves a purpose beyond itself. But when you "hire" an LLM to write prose, what is the functional product? It's the prose. You don't read a novel and then throw away the sentences to get at the story underneath. The sentences are the story. So outsourcing the writing isn't like hiring a builder, it's more like designing a house and then handing someone else the keys.

There is some stuff you read for the prose. Most books, I read for the characters and the plot. So the LLM-assisted output works for me.

When I take you at face value, it makes even less sense to me. If what you care about is the characters and the plot, you already have those, you wrote them yourself. That's what your 100-200 pages of notes are you mentioned in your previous post. So what exactly is the LLM adding? It's expanding your notes into prose you claim not to care about. You're generating 800 pages of the thing you say doesn't matter to you, which is a lot of effort spent on something you're indifferent to. Also, I do believe that the separation between prose and characters isn't as clean as you suggest.

> If what you care about is the characters and the plot, you already have those, you wrote them yourself.

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

'Writing' covers a lot of creative tasks. You might very well enjoy creating plots, characters, ideas, situations, but find the actual business of putting thousands of words down on a page tedious.

Yes, but then you are just an idea guy. Why bother, when you are not interested in the act of writing, or worse, don't enjoy the experience of writing at all, including the struggles that come with writing? There are no stakes in writing as a hobby. Once fiction exists in abundance as a product, the question arises all the more as to why one should adopt a production-centred perspective on writing.

The actually act of writing is a lot of raw time sunk doing something that might not be very enjoyable. Time that can be spent doing other things, like preparing the plot, etc for another book or just enjoying reading other works or whatever. The LLM handles that bulk of tedium that the author doesn't want to deal with, where in the past they were forced to whether they enjoyed doing it or not. Nothing wrong with being an ideas person; heck this is now the age of the ideas person.

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