[bogtog]

I agree with the bit about creative writing, and I would add writing more generally. Gemini also allows dumping in >500k tokens of your own writing to give it a sense of your style.

The other big use-case I like Gemini for is summarizing papers or teaching me scholarly subjects. Gemini's more verbose than GPT-5, which feels nice for these cases. GPT-5 strikes me as terrible at this, and I'd also put Claude ahead of GPT-5 in terms of explaining things in a clear way (maybe GPT-5 could meet what I expect better though with some good prompting)

[dingnuts]

using an LLM for "creative writing" is like getting on a motorcycle and then claiming you went for a ride on a bicycle

no, wait, that analogy isn't even right. it's like going to watch a marathon and then claiming you ran in it.

[Ferret7446]

It's more like buying a medal vs winning one in a marathon. Depending on your goal, they are either very different or the exact same

[waldrews]

If your goal is to prove what an awesome writer you are, sure, avoid AI.

If your goal is to just get something done and off your plate, have the AI do it.

If your goal is to create something great, give your vision the best possible expression - use the AI judiciously to explore your ideas, to suggest possibilities, to teach you as it learns from you.

[sumitkumar]

AI/non-AI/human/hybrid: It doesn't matter which one is the writer.

It's the reader who decides how good the writing is.

The joy which the writer gets by being creative is of no consequence to the reader. Sacrifice of this joy to adopt emerging systems is immaterial.

[fennecbutt]

Using a pencil is cheating. You should be marking paper with your fingernails.

[brokencode]

Just imagine you’re trying to build a custom D&D campaign for your friends.

You might have a fun idea don’t have the time or skills to write yourself that you can have an LLM help out with. Or at least make a first draft you can run with.

What do your friends care if you wrote it yourself or used an LLM? The quality bar is going to be fairly low either way, and if it provides some variation from the typical story books then great.

[Wilduck]

Personally, as a DM of casual games with friends, 90% of the fun for me is the act of communal storytelling. That fun is that both me and my players come to the table with their own ideas for their character and the world, and we all flesh out the story at the table.

If I found out a player had come to the table with an LLM generated character, I would feel a pretty big betrayal of trust. It doesn't matter to me how "good" or "polished" their ideas are, what matters is that they are their own.

Similarly, I would be betraying my players by using an LLM to generate content for our shared game. I'm not just an officiant of rules, I'm participating in shared storytelling.

I'm sure there are people who play DnD for reasons other than storytelling, and I'm totally fine with that. But for storytelling in particular, I think LLM content is a terrible idea.

[irl_zebra]

It sounds like in the example the character idea was their own, and they then used an LLM to add come context.

[altopex]

LLMs have issues with creative tasks that might not be obvious for light users.

Using them for an RPG campaign could work if the bar is low and it's the first couple of times you use it. But after a while, you start to identify repeated patterns and guard rails.

The weights of the models are static. It's always predicting what the best association is between the input prompt and whatever tokens its spitting out with some minor variance due to the probabilistic nature. Humans can reflect on what they've done previously and then deliberately de-emphasize an old concept because its stale, but LLMs aren't able to. The LLM is going to give you a bog standard Gemini/ChatGPT output, which, for a creative task, is a serious defect.

Personally, I've spent a lot of time testing the capabilities of LLMs for RP and storytelling, and have concluded I'd rather have a mediocre human than the best LLMs available today.

[AlotOfReading]

You're talking about a very different use than the one suggested upthread:

    I use it to criticize my creative writing (poetry, short stories) and no other model understands nuances as much as Gemini.

In that use case, the lack of creativity isn't as severe an issue because the goal is to check if what's being communicated is accessible even to "a person" without strong critical reading skills. All the creativity is still coming from the human.