[ants_everywhere]

My writing style is pretty labor intensive [0]. I go through a lot of drafts and read things out loud to make sure they work well etc. And I tend to have a high standard for making sure I source things.

I personally think an LLM could help with some of this, and this is something I've been thinking about the past few days. But I'd have to build a pipeline and figure out a way to make it amplify what I like about my voice rather than have me speak through its voice.

I used to have a sort of puritanical view of art. And I think a younger version of myself would have been low key horrified at the amount of work in great art that was delegated to assistants. E.g. a sculptor (say Michelangelo) would typically make a miniature to get approval from patrons and the final sculpture would be scaled up. Hopefully for major works, the master was closely involved in the scaling up. But I would bet that for minor works (or maybe even the typical work) assistants did a lot of the final piece.

The same happens (and has always happened) with successful authors. Having assistants do bits here or there. Maybe some research, maybe some corrections, maybe some drafts. Possibly relying on them increasingly as you get later in your career or if you're commercially successful enough to need to produce at greater scale.

I think LLMs will obviously fit into these existing processes. They'll also be used to generate content that is never checked by a human before shipping. I think the right balance is yet to be seen, and there will always be people who insist on more deliberate and slower practices over mass production.

[0] Aside from internet comments of course, which are mostly stream of consciousness.

[bgwalter]

Michelangelo worked alone on the David for more than two years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_(Michelangelo)#Process

Maybe later he got lazier. I haven't really heard of famous authors using assistants for drafts instead of research (I don't mean commercial authors like Stephen King).

Even research many authors simply could not afford.

[ants_everywhere]

Maybe Michelangelo was a bad choice, but I hope it's clear from my wording that I was using Michelangelo as an example and not saying anything specific his use of assistants compared to his peers. And David is a masterpiece not a minor work.

I don't see where the article says he worked alone on David. It does seem that he used a miniature (bozzetto) and then scaled up with a pointing machine. One possibility is he made the miniature and had assistants rough out the upscaled copy before doing the fine work himself. Essentially, using the assistants to do the work you'd do on a band saw if you were carving out of wood.

> I haven't really heard of famous authors using assistants for drafts instead of research (I don't mean commercial authors like Stephen King).

Restricting to non-commercial authors would narrow it down since hiring assistants to write drafts probably only makes financial sense if the cost of the assistant is less than the cost of your time it would take drafting.

Alexander Dumas is maybe a bit higher brow than Stephen King

> He founded a production studio, staffed with writers who turned out hundreds of stories, all subject to his personal direction, editing, and additions. From 1839 to 1841, Dumas, with the assistance of several friends, compiled Celebrated Crimes, an eight-volume collection of essays on famous criminals and crimes from European history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Dumas

But in general I agree, drafts are often the heart of the work and it's where I'd expect masters to spend a lot of their time. Similarly with the statue miniatures.

[netule]

James Patterson comes to mind. He simply writes detailed outlines for the plots of his novels and has other authors write them for him. The books are then published under his name, which is more like a brand at that point.

[suddenlybananas]

Yeah but hardly a great artist.

[tombarys]

Good point! Thanks.

I like the perspective of "choices" during creation. It is an essential principle of the real art that it is a result of thousands/millions of deliberate choices. This is what we admire on the art. If you use mostly machine (or other kind of ways that decide instead and for you) for creation, you as an creator simply do less choices.

In this case, you delegate many of your experienced/crazy/hard decisions to the model (which is based on such decision made already by other artists but combines them in a random way). It is like decompressing JPG – some things are just hallucinated by machine.

From the perspective of pure human creativity, the result is thin, diluted. Even it seems like deliberate. In my opinion art lovers will seek for the dense art made by human, maybe asking even more for some kind of "proof" of the human-based process. What do you think?

[Forgeties79]

At its most basic level I just like throwing things I’ve written at ChatGPT and telling it to rewrite it in “x” voice or tone, maybe condense it or expand on some element, and I just pick whatever word comes to mind for the style. Half the time I don’t really use what it spits out. I am a much stronger editor than I am a writer, so when I see things written a different way it really helps me break through writer’s block or just the inertia of moving forward on something. I just treat it like a mediocre sounding board and frankly it’s been great for that.

When I was in high school I really leaned on friends for edits. Not just because of the changes they would make (though they often did make great suggestions), but for the changes I would make to their changes after. That’s what would inevitably turn my papers from a B into an A. It’s basically the same thing in principle. I need to see something written in a way I would not write it or I start talking in circles/get too wordy. And yes this comment is an example of that haha