[Animats]

we are as far away from being able to use AI to write a best seller as we are from landing on the Sun.

Harlequin Romances, though, those little soft-core porn pamphlets for women found at supermarket checkouts, could probably be generated. There are about 4,000 of them, and they're written to a set formula - “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl on page 56, and, by page 180, the book would end with a marriage proposal.” Load up the training set and profit.

[tartoran]

But that’s not good writing, it’s just junk remixed, what would be the point? And that could be procedurally be generated.

In general I don’t see utility of having AI write stuff for us to read, it’s not like we are running out of things to read. What I’m more interested in is getting an computer to memorize facts, understand the context and then subleties of a convetsarion to the extent that you could ask back questions and infer answers from that ingested knowledge we fed it. And I think we’re far from it though we’re making fast strides towards a different direction.

[lacker]

AI is pretty far away from those, too. The "window" mechanism that GPT-3 and similar methods use basically prevents it from staying on-topic over the course of a few paragraphs.

[dumpsterdiver]

Well, it's not just women, I have read and enjoyed such writing. But you are correct, writing that lacks substance intended for people who expect nothing more. Sex is easy to write about. It doesn't take much to turn people on.

[watwut]

I used to read a lot of junk paperbacks - mostly horrors, but also stories about truck drivers, detectives and western stories. They were schematic to the extreme. Looking back, it was the same story over and over and over. I liked them back then. I used to read also a lot of repetitive sci-fi: those small start trek books.

I never read Harlequin, but it being repetitive is not something special. Back when people read a lot of books, we did not read James Joyce and Charles Dickens exclusively. I mean, spiderman comics, ninja turtles comics, they were all the same story repeated again and again too.

We read easy for fun books.

[anthk]

>I used to read a lot of junk paperbacks - mostly horrors, but also stories about truck drivers, detectives and western stories. They were schematic to the extreme.

He, ditto in Spain. In most cases the (same) authors would rehash a detective story as some sci-fi based short novel by just changing some devices and lore and call it done.

Well, in the end cyberpunk it's just futuristic noir.

[sunshineforever]

Dan brown seems to do this. Da Vinci code, angels and demons, and the one about the NSA all have the same plot structure.

[anthk]

Altough my case was about really cheap short novels from the 70's, they almost were Pulp Fiction.

An infamous crime in Chicago with mafia and detectives -> some crime in Orion with spaceships, Martian troops and so on.

Altough some of them were fairly good, like one about a time travel paradox.

[anthk]

Just copycat Broken Sword so nobody notices anything.

[sunshineforever]

Junk paperbacks about truck drivers sound interesting... Remember any titles?

[sunshineforever]

Yes, when signing up for the beta I almost included 'eroticc but I thought better of it.