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- Hacker News
- Love it. The next step that I've been patiently waiting for, even before LLMs were a thing, is the automatic generation of anime from manga. Got works that I've been wishing for so long would get an anime adaptation, or even in progress anime that fell off with parts of the manga left uncovered. Going to be wild when people can point AI to a manga with the prompt "adapt this into an anime series/movie, using the style of X other manga with an anime adaptation". Heck it's actually already possible, given Hell Grind[0] exists; just for someone to bring the particular pieces together.
[0] https://higgsfield.ai/original-series/hell-grind/episode-1
by skeledrew - Their entire analysis is based on the assumption that Pangram 3.3 is a reliable tool for detecting AI-generated content. What if not?by blurayfin
- I don’t see a world in which this doesn’t just annihilate the current market for books.
If I can write a query into Amazon for a book on topic X, I can write that query into ChatGPT or whatever and cut out the middleman.
Some of this may work in the short term while some people still equate the format “book” with “went through a rigorous process”.
That erosion was underway before AI (e.g. on Amazon I instinctually ignore any self-published Kindle books), but I can’t imagine this will last.
I think/hope the market will somehow make human-written books easy to recognize.
by FinnLobsien - I feel like the genie is out of the bottle. Second order effects and third order effects to markets all around, societal impacts deriving from economic changes and changing incentives galore are yet to be seen. Appreciation of original creative works, motivation to create original works when AI can spit out vast amounts of content, (newly) the effort required to even discover and curate original work that's been created with intention and thought, etc., a lot of these new things have to be reckoned with.
But it doesn't feel good. At the moment it feels scary. Crossing my fingers we get through this somehow.
by pen2l - I wonder if this spells the end for online bookshops. I can imagine that small bookshops – or even online bookshops that focus primarily on selling curated books – are the future.
The book retail in my city is thriving, and consists mainly of shops where the owners curate the books.
- Gen AI is at a point now where it can write good chapters. You still need a human editor to make it coherent, plug plot holes and tie it all together. So if you can write a good book, but can't write good chapters, a Gen AI ghostwriter is an ideal tool. Output quality will vary.by FreeTrade
- I don’t see how this market ("mostly" AI-written books) won’t get arbitraged to death with the cheaper and open-weight models that keep coming outby MasterScrat
- the market they analyse is specifically self-published fiction. Most of the traditionally published books are not AI generated and they make significantly more money as a category than self publishing does. It is not really possible to flood that market in this form with 0 entry barriers.
So yes, allowing AI slop in a market where anyone can publish anything and quality is not a very strict criteria, of course it will dillute the market. But we are unlikely to see this shift in traditional publishing houses.
by altmanaltman - The problem is not about money it is that we are made massively culturally poorer by the flood of ahistorical, amoral, incoherent, rococco, contradictory yet plausible shit produced by LLMs.
Both the internet and books have been flooded with ‘content’ which appears like human content but has no coherence or intention to it and tends to fall apart completely the longer form the story.
Even our autocomplete is being infected with LLM suggestions, distorting and guiding how people write.
This is a VERY significant problem for our culture long term.
by grey-area - Why do people use Gen AI for writing? What's the motivation? For academic papers, it's probably citation metrics and the number of publications. For novels, it's likely economic factors. If those factors disappear, would people still use Gen AI for writing?by jdw64
- Spamming online marketplaces with massive amounts of slop. Even if you only get a few sales per book, you win in volume.by Gigachad
- I can understand being interested in it from a Modernist perspective.
It's both a new technology that maps a geometry to existing language - which is very interesting from several literary theory POVs - and represents a new kind of typewriter. If you're interested in innovative techniques in fiction, I think LLMs are arguably deeply interesting. Mass-producing slop, however, is probably quite limited in terms of its theoretical interest, and in how it changes the craft.
Personally, an example of how I use gen AI when writing is that I sometimes use a little text editor I wrote. It polls a local model, and grabs the 50 most-likely next token(s), rounded to one word, based on where the cursor is.
"Voice" in fiction was already about how the author chooses to deviate from the expected-next-word. So - while you could just use the tokens returned - I find myself using them much more often to choose what words to avoid using, or how to deviate from the expected outputs, and where it might be most interesting to do that.
I think there's plenty of interesting things that can be done with gen AI in terms of fiction writing, but I think we're quite a long way from working all of them out yet. Wholesale slop generation is one of the most obvious - and most boring - things writers can do with an LLM.
- I've gotten yearly performance reviews that have been obviously ChatGPT-generated. People are just lazy.
Some HR systems even support that and have AI writing/rewording integrated.
Corporate hellscapes intensifying, I guess.
by photios - "back then", you had to write for months to get a book out, and it sold 20 copies and you earned $20.
Now you can do it in minutes, get 50 books out, 20 of them sell 10 copies, you've earned $200.
(i might be exaggerating the times and earnings, but the point stands)
by ajsnigrutin - Even if all extrinsic motivations for writing disappear, some people will continue to write (without AI) for personal reasons.
And even at that point, others will continue to write using AI to simulate being one of those people.
by _diyar - I have hundreds of plot ideas from 40 years of reading and watching crappy books and films/tv. Never had the time or energy to explore those. LLMs let me try out various plots. To see which ones work and which don't. I haven't really thought about publishing anything though. Too much work and bureaucracy.
The thing is ... ideas matter just as much as the writing. You cannot simply say: "Hey Claude, write me a Sherlock Holmes pastiche set in the bronze age."
I have found that a 1:4 to 1:8 ratio gives nice results. That is, for every 4-8 paras of expected output, you must provide 1 para worth of character detail, plot beats etc. So you would need 100-200 pages of your own writing to produce 800 pages worth.
But most people are lazy. So the output is too.
by sieve - It’s easier than actually writing, which is very hard to do well; authors spend years working on books.
Doesn’t really matter what the original motivation was (money, reputation, fame), people will use LLMs as a shortcut to generate text, and we’re all poorer because of it.
by grey-area - Get rich quick scams, this market existed before GenAI. They’d hire ghost writers, and then put them on audible.
Now it’s easier than ever. So the market explodes. But it makes legit writers harder to find. Its bleak.
by podgietaru - I grew up and went into school in seventies in Soviet Union. I remember myself discovering local libraries, bookstores etc. I still love books, I have a lot of them, but process of discovery is very different. When I was young almost every book I found in library or bookstore about topic I was interested in, was almost certainly worth to read. Publishing books was slow and expensive process and there was a very slim chance that not good books were published at all. During last decades it hasn't been a case any more and I had to develop a skills how to find a stuff worth to read – what reviews to trust etc. In AI age these skills became almost worthless as well and I trust only recommendations from people I know and trust.by obscurette
- Shallow, haphazardly-written books full of mistakes were a thing even back then. It looks like the publication process expensiveness wasn't a good-enough filter since 1970s.by garganzol
- For any kind of online entertainment really.
The overwhelming majority of content on Youtube is also plagued by AI.
You're 6 minutes in a documentary about Russo-Ottoman wars and only then you start noticing something's wrong, paintings are made up, the voice sounds similar to voices of other videos and the script has an odd non-human character to it.
Then you dig into it, and indeed it's a bunch of crap prompts glued together on top of some lame ai-generated internet research.
by epolanski - YouTube essays have been slop for a while though. Before AI it was just people reading the Wikipedia page on the topic.by Gigachad
- It's funny cause on the embedded youtube app they show you like 30 second clip and in about 10-15 seconds AIsm makes it pretty clear it's just going to be a grating voice over with horrible prose.by cyanydeez
- No passion, no independent research, only the drive to make money with as little effort as possibleby ducktective
- Prominent and formerly good youtuber Hank Green was just caught reading an AI script. In a video about the bouba/kiki effect he just read out something like "You're right to push back on this. If you'd like, I can reword this..." and didn't even flinch, didn't edit the sentence out, because his brain has been rotted by AI use.by inigyou
- I have been tinkering with this over the past few months. One story with a specific genre and demographic target, but as I've been reading each draft there are so many small issues that crop up, inconsistency across various parts of the story, items that are introduced, questions that go unanswered etc. Unless your goal is to become an editor of AI content, it's not worth the effort.
Perhaps in time it will be better but you will need a proper pipeline to write, assess, track changes etc... perhaps all that's needed is a GitHub of sorts for writing.
However... what is the chance of any book finding an audience if there are so many to compete with. It might make more sense in having something created just for you though.
by illwrks - > inconsistency across various parts of the story, items that are introduced, questions that go unanswered etc.
This is a workflow problem.
What the LLM normally needs:
- very basic outline: what the story is about
- basic cast of characters: like fiction/plays of the 18-1900s
Then you go chapter-by-chapter. But the most critical thing is that you MUST provide the chapter beats. From start to end. Location, environment, events, any critical conversations. For a chapter that is 2-3K words, this chapter outline often becomes 2-400 words or more. Because you have the story in your head, you can handle the stuff that the LLM is likely to screw up.
There are ways to build a system where the LLM can keep track of many things, but then that becomes programming, which is just as boring.
by sieve