[vumgl]

Computer-played chess or go games are already more interesting than the human-played ones. If you get computer-written novels indistinguishable from the best human-written novels, or even better, would you read them? There will be 1 million of them generated every day, all better than Harry Potter, or by taste, War and Peace.

[causality0]

The better question is, would you read anything else? What happens when we can just dial up the story we want? What happens when these models combine the skillfulness of a human writer with the command of facts, theories, behaviors, and lore of computer records?

Imagine. You could feed it all of Tolkien's writings and tell it to give you an epic saga of novels set in the First Age of Middle Earth. You could tweak a parameter and instantly get a version of your favorite novel that proceeds with a different main character or a different choice and have it be indistinguishable from a version written by the original author and one hundred percent consistent with events and previous plots.

I'm not too ashamed to say that if memory-erasure technology existed I'd be sorely tempted to experience my favorite media for the first time over and other. Creative AI is the looming spectre of that danger, as it becomes more and more skilled at giving us the best, we will grow intolerant of anything less.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Imagine. You could feed it all of Tolkien's writings and tell it to give you an epic saga of novels set in the First Age of Middle Earth. You could tweak a parameter and instantly get a version of your favorite novel that proceeds with a different main character or a different choice and have it be indistinguishable from a version written by the original author and one hundred percent consistent with events and previous plots.

Arguably, you are describing about 80% of the Fantasy genre, only it's all written by humans.

Sorry if that sounded like a "shallow dismissal" as per the HN guidelines. I used to love F/SF and then I found I couldn't read it anymore because it all felt like the same few story elements were reused over and Over and OVER again. I get the same feeling of dread boredom when I browse the Fantasy isle at bookshops today. <evil power> is rising in the <cardinal direction>. <Hero> must <undertake heroic quest> to defeat <evil power>. It all got so formulaic you could write a Cluedo variant based on it: The Orc Captain with the Great Axe in the Dark Tower.

This, btw, was all before I (very belatedly, because I'm not a native English speark and so I read only what was translated to Greek) discovered Terry Pratchett, Jeff Noon and Iain M. Banks, who were a breath of fresh air (unfortunately rarely refreshed since then) and yeah, as a kid, I read a lot of F/SF. Explains my school grades, hah.

[Digit-Al]

Don't you think there's a danger you'd end up with stories that looked like JRR Tolkien as written by George RR Martin?

[causality0]

I mean, maybe if I was running GPT-3 on a Raspberry Pi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oShTJ90fC34

[xkeysc0re]

Chess and go are both constrained games with no hidden information. Literature is anything but.