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- Hacker News
- Art requires intentionality, and this is most clear in long-form fiction. Without guiding intention, you can't have consistent characters, or satisfying plots, or meaningful themes. There has to be a mind guiding it, and LLMs don't have the intentionality or interiority to do so.
Theoretically, a sufficiently skilled and dedicated prompter could guide AI precisely enough to produce a good result, but
1. There are no examples of this.
2. Anyone with the focus & talent to do that would rather not.
As a result, AI produces--and is likely to continue to produce--extremely bad fiction (though bad in totally distinct ways from bad human writers).
by Planktonne - English teachers around the world have loathed that "The curtains were blue" meme, and are absolutely right to do so, but what happens when you ask what an author meant by the blue curtains and the answer is a fairly definitive "it's just the probabilistic output of the model the author used, it doesn't mean anything"?
Sure some people are just piggies lining up at the trough to consume content like it's the custard machine from tellitubbies, but the greatest works will be human written, and I don't see that changing. What will change is the discovery mechanism for a book or any art is shot to bits right now, I could see curation of books and reviews becoming much more important.
by Devasta - While I understand the hesitancy for LLM fiction, I do look forward to LLM powered games, *IF DONE RIGHT*. I imagine a game like Skyrim, where each character has handwritten backstory and dialogue, with an LLM extending that.
Having the city guard dynamically react to what you do, stay in character, and even point you to new POI from those conversations seems like a very cool new dimension in storytelling.
I took a creative writing class back in the day, and we talked about how fiction writers often have a massive "canon" backstory to many characters and worlds, and draw from that to create the story. That same backstory details can be use to flesh out a very immersive world. You still have guidance and handwritten essential lines, just use LLMs to enhance the world.
Now, will there be lots of projects that use LLMs to take shortcuts and be far from this idealized narrative, yes. But not all of them. Some will stand out for getting it right.
by km3r - Definitely agree with LLM texts being boring and lacking personality. Which for technical text is fine, but devastating for fiction. I wonder if you could coax it into writing less average formulations with some clever prompting?
I don't oppose LLM fiction on principle, and I don't think McCormick does either, but it's just too damn boring to be worthwhile, and I think McCormick hits the nail on the head as to why. This seems like it'll be the last frontier for LLMs, good fiction requires a departure from LLM nature, and that'll inherently be difficult to solve.
I do wonder if you could do something like style transfer on texts? I'm not a very good author either, but occasionally I'll get an idea for a story and wish I had the skill to write it in a way that'd be worth reading, but my poor prose tends to get in the way. Would be cool if I could feed it my poorly written attempts and say basically "this story but in the style of [insert great author]" the way you can snap a photo and get it in the style of a Van Gogh painting.
If nothing else I think I'd enjoy a Tolkien sci fi story, or a Asimov high fantasy.
by amarant - I concur with the author. Personally I think I just won't read fiction produced after 2023. There's so much good literature already produced, why bother with the new stuff?
I feel very sorry to any budding new authors. Maybe we are entering a literary dark age?
by aleda145 - That is a perfectly valid opinion and POV to have. While I don't share it personally, I can totally understand why one has it. That does not change, that I personally actually do not care the slightest about the question of who or what wrote a novel.
But that is just me, having studied literatur and fallen into a school of literary studies that held Roland Barthes' claim of the death of the author [1] in high regard.
That might just be a German thing, but in school I hated the question of teachers asking: "What does the author wanted to tell us with this story." Because -> The author never wrote that down. And deriving their intentions from a fictional text felt just like making shit up. You either hit the interpretation of your teacher or received a bad grade.
So when entering university and learning, that to analyse a text, to understand how structures within a text enable us humans to interpret and generate meaning, regardless of what the author originally might have intended, was freedom to me.
To make a long story even longer: As long as the story is good - I don't give a rat's ass if an LLM wrote this, a monkey on a typewriter or a human being (or a group of authors writing under a pseudonym).
by sdoering - I would like to read "actual" LLM fiction in the same sense I would like to read fiction from a lion. I wonder if that kind of alien writing is even possible with this kind of technology. The RL process would have to be quite different at least and even then it is still using human content as the base. Anyone seen any good or even decent or OK fiction of this type?by amberjack
- I won't (if I know) either, but for me it's because a very big part of reading fiction or enjoying any art is that you have a relationship of a kind with its creator. When a passage surprises me or a song lifts me or a painting inspires me it's partly because I'm amazed that someone was able to do that, and that they were able to reach me like that.
Everyone borrows or steals from prior art but I'm still amazed by the people that build on what came before to create something new. I just don't have that experience if I know it's generated by a LLM. I appreciate that it will be harder to know the difference as time goes on, and I'll need to be careful not to cast a side-eye at a lot of legitimate stuff unfairly in the future because of that.
by imathew