Comment by habinero
7 days ago
> Then, I can produce billions of War And Peace
You cannot and will never lol.
This so fundamentally misunderstands (1) the point of writing a novel and (2) what makes a novel interesting.
A novel isn't just a buncha words slapped together, bing bam slop boom, done.
What makes a novel interesting is the author and the author's choices, like all art. It's the closest you can get to experiencing what it's like to be someone else. You can't generate that, it's specific to a person.
The GP assumes that an LLM is able to write such novel. So I was working from there. My thesis is that even IF LLMs are able to produce "novelty", it will become the norm and we will simply demand even more exotic novelty.
> An interesting thought experiment is whether it's possible that AI tools could write a novel that's better than War and Peace. A quick google shows a lot of (poorly written) articles about how "AI is just a machine, so it can never be creative," which strikes me as a weak argument way too focused on a physical detail instead of the result. War and Peace and/or other great novels are certainly in the training set of some or all models, and there is some real consensus about which ones are great, not just random subjective opinions.
It can have anything you like in a training set, you still can't build specific human experiences.
I haven't read War & Peace -- I don't have the patience for Russian literature -- but a much more accessible example is the Vorkosigan series by Lois Bujold. She uses a lot of Tolstoy lol.
While you can read them as fun military scifi, that's not why the series is so good and so famous. In her books, humanity invented two critical things: wormhole FTL travel and uterine replicators.
A lot of the series is exploring how people actually would use and abuse those two things. And then on another layer the books are about her thoughts on parenting, marriage, power, inheritance, and so on.
Good art isn't about accepting someone's opinion that it's good art. Good art impacts you. I think about things differently after those books.
You cannot write a good novel using the algorithmic mean of a lot of different stories.