[Aeolun]

Personally I’m having a blast reading AI generated fiction. As long as the direction is human, and often enough corrected to keep the minor inconsistencies out, the results are pretty good.

For me it’s no different from generating code with Claude, except it’s generating prose. Without human direction your result ends up as garbage, but there’s no need to go and actually write all the prose yourself.

And I guess that just like with code, sometimes you have to hand craft something to make it truly good. But that’s probably not true for 80% of the story/code.

[antihipocrat]

Who's voice are you using when adding your hand crafted prose? Mimicking the style of the 80% or switching to your own?

Perhaps I'm a Luddite, or just in the dissonance phase toward enlightenment, but at the moment I don't want to invest in AI fiction. A big part of the experience for me is understanding the author's mind, not just the story being told

[CuriouslyC]

Plot twist, people who do first drafts and structural edits with AI can still do line edits and copy edits by hand for personal voice (and you have to anyhow if you want the prose to be exceptional).

[Aeolun]

I think there’s only a very small subset of fiction that uses the prose to that extent. Much like code really. If you are writing original algorithms you cannot use the LLM. If you are just remixing existing ones, it becomes a lot more useful.

Also, I guess I missed the brunt of your question, though the answer is similar. Most voice works for most characters. There’s only so many ways to say something, but occassionally you have to adjust the sentence or re-prompt the whole thing (the LLM has a tendency to see the best in characters).

[exmadscientist]

Perhaps on a relative scale "most" fiction doesn't carry any sort of deeper meaning, but if you look at things like "Hugo or Nebula Award nominees" (to pluck out the SF/F genre as a category), I'd say that almost every single one of them, going back all those decades, has something more to say than just their straightforward text.

And unless reading is your day job or only hobby, that's a massive, massive corpus of interesting text. (In just one genre! There are more genres!) So on an absolute scale, there is so much fiction to read with more-than-surface-level meaning that I personally just don't understand why anyone would have the least interest in reading AI slop.

(I also don't have any real interest in most Kindle Unlimited works, probably for similar reasons. Though I am quite certain there are diamonds there, I've just not had particularly much time for/good luck at finding them.)

[Aeolun]

Sure, but that more than surface level meaning comes out in the story, not often in the specific way the sentences are written (I acknowledge those exist, I just don’t consider them the majority).

Also, you say you don’t understand why anyone would be interested in the AI slop. But from the article we learn that one is indistinguishable from the other (apparently even to the one professional author that tried)

[exmadscientist]

I was disappointed that the results shown didn't break things down a bit more between star ratings given and authorship guesses. I didn't think any of these stories were amazing flash fiction, and I think that's relevant here. I'm curious to know what people who liked them all, or at least really liked one of them, had to say on judging AI-vs-human.

[add-sub-mul-div]

> A big part of the experience for me is understanding the author's mind, not just the story being told

AI content is really exposing how people fall into a group that does go further than the surface text into deeper layers of context/subtext, and a group that doesn't.

[Seattle3503]

I could be in either group, depending on my inclination at the moment.

[sram1337]

I would love to read some of this. Where do you find AI generated fiction?

[Aeolun]

https://www.royalroad.com/fictions/search?globalFilters=fals...

Though I’ll admit I can’t speak to the quality of that except my own stuff (which I’m naturally predisposed to like).

This was my attempt at fully AI generated (though edited by human):

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/101072/inherited-wounds

[strken]

I've had two separate experiences reading a story on RoyalRoad, getting ten chapters in, noticing that any individual chapter is technically great but I just don't care about the characters or plot can't be bothered reading further, and then noticing the story was AI-assisted.

I think the AI seems to struggle with consistency of characters and themes, and particularly with character growth over time: it can write touching moments, but these don't fit properly with the character's actions before and then after. It reads a bit like a story written by a hundred professional authors who can skim-read all the previous chapters but are on a strict time limit and don't have access to each other's notes. This makes me wonder if they're just not giving the AI notes on structure and character.

[deadbabe]

The only AI generated fiction I read is stuff I create on the fly. Why would you read AI generated fiction made by other people when it’s the same as reading regular fiction?