Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tivert 730 days ago
> You can use your human creativity to come up with an outline of a story, then have AI do first drafts of chapters according to your outline. It's tremendously faster to go back and rewrite the AI draft than it is to generate a first draft by hand and to be honest for most writers the quality will be better.

It's also tremendously crappy and less creative. If all you want to do is an outline, just publish that instead of fattening it up with AI slop.

Also, your idea is great if you always want to be a terrible writer and develop your writing skills poorly, and just care about volume of output. IIRC, real writers say the writing part isn't actually the hard part, but for some reason that's what you want to automate. The hard (and creative) part is the thinking you have to do when you're figuring out what to write.

There are books I've read where I seriously wish the author just published an outline, with maybe a bit more exposition around world-building (yeah, they were sci-fi). And that was human written stuff, reading AI slop would an even bigger waste of time.

1 comments

I've known literally dozens of published writers and I can tell you that the reason that pro writers say that putting the words down on paper is not the hard part is because they've trained themselves to mostly vomit on the page, then edit it to where it needs to be. Writers that try to write good prose out of the gate get blocked, almost always. It's a basic piece of tradecraft that people who write for a living all know.

The process is outline, trash draft (who gives a shit who does this) then refine until you can't bear to read your work anymore and neither you or anyone you share the work with has critical points that don't have very solid counter arguments. Most wannabe writers have notebooks of worldbuilding and story arcs but can't even get the trash draft done.