[aerhardt]

> you just limit the space to text

And even then... why can't they write a novel? Or lowering the bar, let's say a novella like Death in Venice, Candide, The Metamorphosis, Breakfast at Tiffany's...?

Every book's in the training corpus...

Is it just a matter of someone not having spent a hundred grand in tokens to do it?

[voxl]

I know someone spending basically every day writing personal fan fiction stories using every model you can find. She doesn't want to share it, and does complain about it a lot, seems like maintaining consistency for something say 100 pages long is difficult

[conception]

I don’t understand - there are hundreds/thousands of AI written books available now.

[aerhardt]

I've glossed over a few and one can immediately tell they don't meet the average writing level you'd see in a local workshop for writers, and much less that of Mann or Capote.

[zozbot234]

Never mind novels, it can't even write a good Reddit-style or HN-style comment. agentalcove.ai has an archive of AI models chatting to one another in "forum" style and even though it's a good show of the models' overall knowledge the AIisms are quite glaring.

[mh-]

They definitely can, and do.

It's just that the ones that manage to suppress all the AI writing "tells" go unnoticed as AI. This is a type of survivorship bias, though I feel there must be a better term for it that eludes me.

[colechristensen]

Who says they can't? What's your bar that needs to be passed in order for "written a novella" to be achieved?

There's a lot of bad writing out there, I can't imagine nobody has used an LLM to write a bad novella.

[aerhardt]

> What's your bar that needs to be passed

I provide four examples in my comment...

[colechristensen]

Your qualification for if an LLM can write a novella is it has to be as good as The Metamorphosis?

Yes, those are examples of novellas, surely you believe an LLM could write a bad novella? I'm not sure what your point is. Either you think it can't string the words together in that length or your standard is it can't write a foundational piece of literature that stays relevant for generations... I'm not sure which.

[aerhardt]

I don't think it can write something that's of a fraction of the quality of Kafka.

But GP's argument ("limit the space to text") could be taken to imply - and it seems to be a common implication these days - that LLMs have mastered the text medium, or that they will very soon.

> it can't write a foundational piece of literature

Why not, if this a pure textual medium, the corpus includes all the great stories ever written, and possibly many writing workshops and great literature courses?

[colechristensen]

I don't know what to tell you. It's more than a little absurd to make the qualification of being able to do something to be that the output has to be considered a great work of art for generations.

[aerhardt]

I agree that the argument starts from a reduction to the absurd.

So at least we can agree that AI hasn't mastered the text medium, without further qualification?

And what about my argument, further qualified, which is that I don't think it could even write as well as a good professional writer - not necessarily a generational one?

[ipaddr]

If the end result is most books will be written by AI you need the possiblity of that qualification. If its only capable of certain types of book then we will need endless amounts of that.