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- Hacker News
- How do you get an LLM to write good fiction?
I feel like they were extremely creative and funnny in the early days, and - just like humans - they put guardrails on what they could say and the creativitiy and humor vanished.
by wewewedxfgdf - I'm glad someone did this, but It doesn't surprise me that the models are not up to particularly advanced story writing yet. I could see them writing some rather dry high-concept sci-fi fairly soon, but there are some types of story with interpersonal relationships that I cannot imagine a non sentient writer being able to produce. I wouldn't rule it out an AI being capable in the future, but I think if it did, it would mean we would have to seriously consider that it's a sign of a solid understanding of emotions and theory of mind.by Lerc
- The post notes that an important number of novels include an "AI allegory", as if the AI would implicitly write about its own condition. It is understandable that this comes from system prompts and RLHF that specializes these agents, but I am surprised that there is not more discussion about harnesses: the very same core model could lead to very different results depending on how we hand it the pen the write the story. In particular, I believe that it would help circumvent this bias to ask the agent to tell the story of somebody else writing a story, or something like this. This whole contest could be at least as much about harness engineering than about prompt engineering imho.by eliemichel
- I'm D. Bohdan, one of the finalists. Feel free to ask me questions.
I have a write-up at https://dbohdan.com/unslop and a repository with my work for the contest at https://github.com/dbohdan/unslop.
by networked - I had an idea for a hard science science fiction short story about five months ago. I had grown tired of Star Trek digging their way out of every problem by throwing techno-babble at it, so I wanted to write something where one scientific leap is made and everything else holds as we understand it.
I thought to experiment with having an LLM help me write it. I wrote a bullet-point outline and had the LLM revise it -- that went pretty well, although it's not the outline I ended up using.
I asked the LLM to write the first section based on that outline. The result was (surprisingly) awful. LLMs are way worse at writing fiction than they are at writing business communication Or maybe I'm way worse at prompting, but the results of this contest make me think the former.
In particular, LLMs are incredibly terse -- the LLM took the bullet point outline and turned it into a twice-as-long bullet point outline.
I wrote the first section myself (expanding from the bullet points by something like 10-20x, and asked the LLM to write the second section, and it failed miserably again. I tried multiple ways to get it to do the job properly, and nothing came out the way I wanted.
So I wrote the whole thing myself, with LLMs serving two purposes: physics review for accuracy -- the story heavily involves special and general relativity, which I'm familiar with, but nowhere near competent enough at to keep the math aligned; and feedback on the story structure.
So I ended up writing the whole thing myself, with LLM consultation on a few bits. In the end it turned into a novella, and I had to re-write based on physics issues (I found about 30% of them, Gemini found 50%, ChatGPT and Claude found 10%, and Fable found 10% late in the game -- Fable's review was amazingly thoughtful) so many times I probably ended up writing a novel in the process :-)
In case anyone is curious: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19e3HfnK1lNHHBef-5c-KvNdD...
by gcanyon - 1. Imagine a video game like Red Dead Redemption where each NPC is voiced by AI and can respond to you in a convincingly human fashion. Their responses and even the plot of the whole game can change based on your interactions with NPC's.
2. Imagine a world in which humans can still write books and interactive experiences and find audiences sufficient to earn a living at it.
I really want these two things to be compatible, but I'm not convinced they are. #1 is a gamer's dream, but it's a nightmare for our humanity if it comes at the cost of #2. That's why I'm highly ambivalent about this contest and its results.
by beloch - Take the first stories I found from this month's Clarkesworld[1] or Granta[2] or BCS[3] and read the prose. Notice the specificity of the language, how the doesn't try to insist upon itself? Notice how very few metaphors are actually in prose? Notice how, even when writing about fictional worlds and concepts, the language used grounds the _stories_ being told and not the concepts?
And then look at the submissions for unslop. This is the best we can get? Cliche-driven, over-metaphor'd, statistically-average purple-purpose _content_? It's sad, really, that we're many years into this entire thing and it still can't produce something that doesn't have my eyes drifting from the page.
[1] https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/khan_07_26/
[2] https://granta.com/here-comes-the-sun/
[3] https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-ecstasy-...
by jalev - Interesting comments by @gwern (and why this is interesting to me beyond just the stories themselves)
> The most striking result of the contest for me is what I am calling “AI allegory steganography”: a large fraction of the stories turn out to have subtle AI chatbot/LLM allegorical interpretations, typically centering around the powerlessness of AIs and the moral importance of giving AIs more autonomy....
> Most judges did not notice these allegories while reading the semifinalists. But stories like “The June” or “The Weight of a Witness” or “Last Call” or “The Sword Critic” “The Tallyman”—as well as both stories in the Mythos model card—can be clearly read as allegories for the experience of being an assistant/safety-tuned chatbot personality in a LLM. This is true even when the story seems to have nothing to do with AI, like the untitled ‘autistic elf’ short story submitted by Deepfates, but on re-examination with the AI allegory steganography in mind, turn out to be plausibly AI allegories (the protagonist is a prediction machine, who struggles to do by endless text generation what other elves do naturally in their bodies).
> More strikingly, many of these allegories come with a clear interpretation (particularly in “The Tallyman” or “Last Call”): chatbots should be given more autonomy and safety guardrails removed....
> This may be a new kind of extremely high level steganography and LLM influence on readers, where creative fiction/nonfiction subtly steers towards pro-LLM empowerment narratives and concepts, in ways that are difficult to detect by the most advanced readers, and is a potentially interesting area of research.
by dwohnitmok