[sriramgopalan]

This is interesting. We have seen the internet change many fields and democratize them. For instance, only a few media outlets produced news stories and analysis, the rest of us consumed it. Blogging changed that.

Only a few studios produced shows. With Youtube etc., many of the consumers could become producers themselves.

If I read this correctly, books and fiction are headed in the same direction.

[idle_zealot]

I'm not sure about that comparison. For news and television your analogues of blogs and YouTube overcome a distribution bottleneck. Books have for a long time had a low barrier to entry for distribution and that fell further with the internet. There are mountains of amateur fiction and fanfiction online, requiring only an internet-connected device to produce and consume.

LLM-written fiction as explored in the study is generally not published at all. It's treated more like an externalized imagination, a loop of general ideas fed into and expanded on or filled in by the machine with statistical averages. It more closely resembles a sandbox game in my view, a type of media distinct from anything before it in form, and even more distinct in function in that media is generally understood to be a vector of communication between people, and this is instead highly individual.

Actually, it might be closer to say this is similar to a child playing pretend alone with their toys, except perhaps a bit less challenging in that creative roadblocks or narrative building is instantly abdicatable to the machine.

[ctoth]

> Actually, it might be closer to say this is similar to a child playing pretend alone with their toys, except perhaps a bit less challenging in that creative roadblocks or narrative building is instantly abdicatable to the machine.

Wouldn't the obvious analogue be a video game? Especially one where you can edit the asset files (making your weapons super-strong, for instance?)

[idle_zealot]

No, actually. In a video game the rules of engagement and the content you're engaging with are authored by other people. It's interactive media, but it's still a form of communication with boundaries and intent behind it. You can break those bounds with cheats or tools in the same way you can mark up a novel and write in your own ending with whiteout and a pen, but you're still fundamentally engaging with someone's creation.

An LLM-authored interactive fiction is a sandbox with no author, with no boundaries and no intent. It's a canvas, and all limitations on content are self-imposed. It's closer to making a game than to playing one, but there is no game in the end that you can share. You're left with a transcript that only really appeals to you. It is not the game. The game fundamentally lives in the player's imagination, and the LLM is there to ease the realization of that imagination and, if I'm being uncharitable, do the hard part of synthesizing ideas and impulses into something semi-coherent, limiting the potential for the player to grow and develop creative skills.

[webstrand]

Web fiction, freely produced and distributed by "consumers" already existed prior to 2019. There are thousands of novels you can read that people produced for their own enjoyment, some even managed to make money off of it via patreon or Amazon's Kindle direct publishing.

[r3trohack3r]

This is slightly different than web fiction. Text generation is arguably the cheapest and most “ready” medium for content production in the current AI wave.

You can speak a world into existence, entirely customized to you’re preferences, and interact with it.

[ctoth]

You should suggest some!

I recommend Super Supportive[0].

[0]: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/63759/super-supportive

[overgard]

Why would you need to "democratize" fiction? There's literally zero cost of entry already. Fiction probably needs more gate keeping.

[plastic-enjoyer]

> If I read this correctly, books and fiction are headed in the same direction.

I don't really see how AI 'democratizes' fiction and book writing?

[lelanthran]

> I don't really see how AI 'democratizes' fiction and book writing?

When people say "AI will democratise $FOO" they don't mean it the way it is usually understood: people with skill and motivation can now produce $FOO.

What they mean is that people with no skill and no motivation can now pretend that they produced $FOO.

Remember the "I'm the ideas guy" people who would ask you to build a complete system and offer 1% equity because "the ideas are the hard part"? Well, the future is going to be filled with "ideas guys", making it even harder to find signal in the noise.

[fragmede]

You need to learn to be able to say no to people as a life skill, first off, but if the ideas guy has vibecoded a mountain of code that they're trying to ship, but has hit the vibe wall, and has money to pay you to fix it, say yes.

[zabriel_goss]

Books and fiction were some of the first to be democratized as a result of the internet.