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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

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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