| HN Mirror

I don't know how to answer your question. But. I will say that I could see a future where one has a brainstormed setting / plot outline / concept and one could have the LLM output a first draft of whatever length, then make changes / tweaks to the story / copy over time.

The hardest part of writing for me is the first draft. Editing an existing copy to my own human artistic vision is much easier. No, this character doesn't act like this, he acts like that.

Presuming you don't have an allergic reaction to AI affected writing copy (even though the publishing houses are going to outsource their copyedits and style guide edits to LLMs, that is not hard to predict), an author could have the copy start with the souless and then hand edit until they like it from there.

Then it makes the copy go into hybrid world where AI was used to be a power tool, not the entire product. Copyright law may frustrate that for a time where if say over 5% of the final copy is AI-generated, it is ineligible for copyright protections, but otherwise, there will be stories and the best stories win.

1. Hand crafted on a fountain pen through all the edits, digitized to an opendoc (ok who are we kidding, .docx but I can dream for open file formats)

2. This story was started and is digital native through scrivener / yWriter and eventually dumped to a .docx

3. This story started in an LLM chat response and edited muchly to match the artist's human vision

All 3 stories will exist. and there will be a sea of slop that used (3) and then barely edited a thing, hoping to sell a book by SEO tag manipulation and an 'eye-catching'/lurid cover, just as there is now with (2) hastily thrown together rip-offs of others text.

But you can believe that I will be glad to go all Star Trek Holodeck on my idea concepts for books and tabletop campaigns.

Computer, give me a questline for a faction called the Silver Carders, there's a catfolk named Marvin who is the adopted son of a human named Doug Alvaro and he is the old flame of the founder of the faction and there's political intrigue that X Y and Z, please find a good mix-in for these 4-7 TV tropes links I like to play with, go.

Ok now swap out the absentminded professor gadgeteer with a cloud cuckoolander grandma mechanic.

Ok now find me a few entrypoints to this faction for my party characters who are currently A, B, and C.

Oh yeah, the max context this stuff will be useful for will be great.

Can I do that now with manual digital tools? Of course. But this lessens the activation energy/boilerplate of typing this stuff up a lot.

Will long-term it make future generations unable to cope without the tool? Yes. Just like I cannot use a slide rule or do any geometry outside of my class, I have computer tools for that. LLMs will be a tool that after 20 years will be normalized enough.

Granted it will be odd when we have 3-book series come out covering a recent current events that captures the public's imagination within weeks of the event, instead of the 3-years-later that usual entertainment media like books and movies take today.

Or odd when people can pay to have their own version of the story made, either inserting characters or 'what if'ing the story where they can pay to alter a single plot point and see how the characters react and how that modifies the overall story.

We will all be more literarily conversant whether we want to or not, and I'm not sure whether I like that or I'm annoyed by it yet. Too soon to tell.