Comment by rahimnathwani
3 days ago
I used the GPT-4.5 API to write a novel, with a reasonably simple loop-based workflow. The novel was good enough that my son read the whole thing. And he has no issue quitting a book part way through if it becomes boring.
I guess I don't really understand why. I'm a writer. The joy in storytelling is telling a story. Why outsource that to a bot?
Books create joy for people other than the authors. The joy isn't confined to the writing process.
No, but knowing that a book was written by a bot would hinder my enjoyment of it to the point that I'd drop it.
I’m curious: what was the novel about?
It's a comedic adventure novel set in the Minecraft universe.
Actually I forgot there's a second one he read all the way through, for which he defined the initial concept and early plot, but then the rest of the plot and the writing were all done by GPT-4.5.
The code is kind of basic, and each chapter is written without the full text of prior chapters, but the output isn't bad.
https://gist.github.com/rahimnathwani/41e5bc475163cd5ea43822...
Very fascinating, I tried doing the same years ago with a simple Markov chain model. The biggest problem back then was inconsistency. I'd love to read a chapter of the Minecraft or hard magic / sci-fi books to check out the writing.
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Not having access to earlier chapters is a terrible thing, but maybe possible if you aren’t too bothered by inconsistency (or your chapter summaries are explicit enough about what is supposed to happen I suppose).
I find the quality rapidly degrades as soon as I run out of context to fit the whole text of the novel. Even summarizing the chapters doesn’t work well.
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