Comment by MarkusQ
14 hours ago
> Are readers generating fiction with AI models?
Why not? Journalists, lawyers and pundits of various stripes are already doing it. Why shouldn't readers?
14 hours ago
> Are readers generating fiction with AI models?
Why not? Journalists, lawyers and pundits of various stripes are already doing it. Why shouldn't readers?
Because fiction is a different genere and historically at least AI was much worse at it.
The big differences:
- fiction tends to be longer, AI struggles with making a satisfying coherent plot structure after a certain length.
- fiction tends to be subtler. You want characters to have nuance, shades of grey, symbolism, etc. Not everything should be shouted in your face. This is the opposite of writing persusaive literature where you are trying to convince someone of something.
And also: there's no money in writing fiction.
There's money in copywriting, there's money in writing code, but long form creative writing? Almost an opposite of money.
Thus, very little incentive for AI labs to spend any effort on improving long form creative writing performance.
Most of tunes on this generation of AI systems are basic RLAF, and aimed at something like "punchy short form writing". The potential is largely unexplored.
I tried it once. Maybe 8-9 months back.I recall doing it soon after one travel, so that's why I can pinpoint it and this may be useful to figure which AI versions were available then.
The challenge is length and the context window. I had to own the plot since once it compacts, it has already lost the plot :)
I will give it pointers and tell where to go next. It will do it but either 1) stop after 3-4 paragraphs, or 2) write in a totally different direction than I expected. So I will nudge it to course correct, and it will do it. And then you keep iterating.
It was a good experiment for a couple of days. It saved me typing and it sometimes gave me lines of thinking that were interesting. But nothing that could be published.
But now that I think about it, I found a use case. If only GRRM could use its help :)
My point was, LLMs always generate fiction (bad fiction, but fiction nonetheless); what they generate is plausible, grammatical text that may have many points of congruence with the truth, but are not in any way constrained to do so. In short, fiction.
If they could reliably generate high quality non-fiction, that would be news.
"wrong" or "random" is not the same as "fiction"
"non-fiction" doesn't mean "correct".
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I suspect that those other groups are largely not trying to generate fiction.
I didn't see the word "try" in the headline, did you?
Because nobody wants to read AI generated text?
No, nobody wants to read someone else's AI-generated text. Some people don't mind reading text generated to their own specifications.
This is quite an important point.
I think it's pretty clear from the discussed study that _someone_ wants to read that.
Tell that to the LLM RP crowd.
I think you lose that draw of interactivity when you’re essentially reading someone else’s RP, though.
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You do not represent everyone
Yeah, but i do, and i agree with the parent comment
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