Comment by gabriel666smith
6 days ago
Ah, fair enough. I believe quite strongly that creative works' meaning exists for the reader / audience / user. I don't think interpretation of art is towards an authorial, authoritative truth - rather that it's a lens to view the world through, and change one's perspective on it - so this is where we differ. But I understand your viewpoint.
I do agree that the LLM's idea of achieving the 'best possible story' is defined entirely by its design and prompting, and that is obviously completely ridiculous - not least because appreciating (or enduring) a story is a totally subjective experience.
I do disagree that one needs to ask "to what end?" when talking about writing stories, the same way one shouldn't need to ask "to what end?" about a pencil or a paintbrush. The joy of creating should be in the creation.
Commercial software is absolutely a more nuanced, complex topic - it's so much more intertwined with people's jobs, livelihoods, aeroplanes not falling out of the sky, power grids staying on, etc. That's a different, separate question. I don't think it's fair to equate them.
I think LLMs are the most interesting paintbrush-for-words we've come up with since the typewriter (at least), and that, historically, artists who embrace new technologies that arise in their forms are usually proven to be correct in their embrace of them.
I think that is a fair perspective. When I say "to what end" I am mostly implying the "end" of a product for the market. I think writing in particular is always a thing where if you tell people you do it as a hobby, they assume your goal is a published book, not the process itself. Creativity as the end is a wonderful thing, but I just have a feeling AI is going to be more widely adopted to pump out passable (or even arguably "good") content that people will pay money for.
Again the same thing with writing software, where you can be creative with it and it can enhance the experience. But most people just use AI to help them do their job better—and in an era where many software companies appear to have a net negative effect on society, it's hard to see the good in that.
> "but I just have a feeling AI is going to be more widely adopted to pump out passable (or even arguably "good") content"
Absolutely! And, as you say - the vast majority of books are already written to be passable-enough for publication. I guess it'll be slightly less charming when it's unclear whether a book you're buying has had at least one human believe it is good. Maybe this is already the case on Amazon!
> "that people will pay money for."
Haha - authors aren't making much money as it stands. I do really hope that a (much) higher volume of 'slop-work' means audiences value 'good-work' more, as 'good-work' will be harder to seek out, and that as a result of this better revenue models for creators of freely-duplicatable work (like books and music) are forced into creation. That's the best possible outcome. But - I think we agree that material reward isn't a good incentive for the creation of art.
I'm not wildly concerned about the arts, in this sense - I think it's (over a long enough timespan) a highly meritocratic world. I trust readers / audiences / users. Good work finds its audience and time and floats eventually. And DRM-locked, Kindle-Unlimited-type work will, by design, not be on anybody's shelves in fifty or a hundred years.
The alternative, I think, is that LLMs start making beautiful art completely unprompted (something I've seen zero evidence of being possible thus far). That's a universe I would be fascinated to exist in. A shame its probably paradoxical - I can imagine it being like whalesong :-)
Software is very different, as you say, not least because of its contingency on utility and temporality. Another thing that I find nice to imagine is a future canon of 'classical' software. I'm sure that this will exist at some point, given how young a form it is, relatively speaking. That too, I hope, will be predicated on beauty of design, as we've done with all our other canons.
> The joy of creating should be in the creation
> I think LLMs are the most interesting paintbrush-for-words we've come up with since the typewriter
I cannot reconcile these thoughts in my head
For me, the joy of creating does not come from asking the computer to create something for me. It doesn't matter what careful prompt I made, I did not create the outcome. The computer did
And no, this is not the same as other computer tools. A drawing tablet may offer tools to me, but I still have to create myself
AI is not a "tool" it is the author
Prompt engineers are editors at best
I understand that point of view.
Perhaps this is contextually useful - when writing prose fiction, one technique I've played with recently which I found interesting is generating a really broad spectrum of 'next tokens' halfway through a sentence, via multiple calls to different models on different temp. settings, etc.
It's fascinating to see the expected route for a sentence, and (this is much harder to get LLMs to output!) the unexpected route for a sentence.
But seeing some expected routes, per the LLM, can make the unexpected, surprising, or interesting routes much more clear in the mind's eye. It makes sentences feel closer to music theory.
You are right that this does create a more 'editorial' relationship between yourself and the work.
I'd stress that this isn't a negative thing, and has heavy literary precedence - an example that comes to mind is Gordon Lish's "intuitive structuring" principle, in which you just write the best-sounding next word, and see what the story becomes by itself, then edit from there - a totally sonic approach.
My example here with "arrays of next tokens" is a super granular, paintbrush-type example, but I want to be clear that I'm not at all advocating for the workflow of 'write a prompt, get a piece of art'.
I do however think that there's a vast middleground between "write me a whole book" and "show me the expected next token", and that this middleground is absolutely fascinating.
Not least because it makes literature (an artform previously more resistant to mathematics than say, music, or painting) more in touch with its own mathematics, which were previously very hidden, and are only currently being discovered.
To some, the joy in writing is in producing a story. To others, it lies in crafting the words. If you want to "direct" a story, an LLM that could take your exposition of your plot and make it into something enjoyable to read could still let you enjoy the process. If what you care about is crafting the perfect sentence, an LLM that could assist with the plot could still let you enjoy the process. Maybe more, because not everyone enjoys every aspect of the process.
And even authors who enjoy both might hate the many subsequent steps to publishing a book, such as getting editorial feedback and doing rewrites that can sometimes feel like a gut-punch (I sat on my first editorial feedback for a month, agonising over what to accept and what to ignore, and it was anxiety-inducing and felt awful - since I don't expect to make much money from my novels, I decided to ignore a lot of it, even when I knew the editor was probably right from a mass-market appeal point of view, but it sure as hell was not an enjoyable part of the process).
And some people don't enjoy the actual writing at all, but enjoys coming up with high-level plots and seeing what pops out.
In other words: It's not all or nothing, and people enjoy wildly different things about the process.
Or to put it yet another way: Some people - even adults - enjoy paint by numbers too. Not everyone want to create - sometimes people just want to be adjacent to creation and discover things.