[jdw64]

Why do people use Gen AI for writing? What's the motivation? For academic papers, it's probably citation metrics and the number of publications. For novels, it's likely economic factors. If those factors disappear, would people still use Gen AI for writing?

[podgietaru]

Get rich quick scams, this market existed before GenAI. They’d hire ghost writers, and then put them on audible.

Now it’s easier than ever. So the market explodes. But it makes legit writers harder to find. Its bleak.

[grey-area]

It’s easier than actually writing, which is very hard to do well; authors spend years working on books.

Doesn’t really matter what the original motivation was (money, reputation, fame), people will use LLMs as a shortcut to generate text, and we’re all poorer because of it.

[sieve]

I have hundreds of plot ideas from 40 years of reading and watching crappy books and films/tv. Never had the time or energy to explore those. LLMs let me try out various plots. To see which ones work and which don't. I haven't really thought about publishing anything though. Too much work and bureaucracy.

The thing is ... ideas matter just as much as the writing. You cannot simply say: "Hey Claude, write me a Sherlock Holmes pastiche set in the bronze age."

I have found that a 1:4 to 1:8 ratio gives nice results. That is, for every 4-8 paras of expected output, you must provide 1 para worth of character detail, plot beats etc. So you would need 100-200 pages of your own writing to produce 800 pages worth.

But most people are lazy. So the output is too.

[Panoramix]

A bunch of ideas doesn't make a book. Actual writing takes place, the length of each sentence, the specific choice of words, the pace, the choices, the editing. It's literally an art. Nobody wants to read what ChatGPT wrote based on your prompts.

Of course you can use it to quickly try out stuff, for some editorial tasks and such. But unless you learn the craft of writing I don't think others will want to read any of this stuff.

[sieve]

I have read thousands of books in my lifetime. I don't really have too many hobbies outside of reading. Trust me when I say there is an audience for literal crap. LLMs actually raise the bar significantly. I do not think they will ever exceed Hugo, or TS Eliot, or Borges, but they are far superior to the random author publishing random crap every single day.

Can the writer use AI to improve their output ... is the only outstanding question.

> It's literally an art.

So was making clothes, or shoes, or cabinets, or knives, or cooking, or so many other things. Now we mass produce all of them.

[scarecrowbob]

Yeah, but my shoes get worn out, and I can't share them- the media stuff has always already been mass produced and there has been way more useful stuff to look at so the industrially automation of literal crap may find an audience.

But as a person who reads (and I assume you have some care for what you're reading) why would that have anything to do with you as an audience? Like, I get why folks would want a curated set of Readers Digests, but why would you care to make -more- of that output?

[scarecrowbob]

As a writer and cognition-enjoyer, much of the reading I do has been done by people who were using that writing as an adjunct to their own thoughts.

Producing a bunch of filler content to pad things out is the opposite direction from most of the reading that I have found helpful. In fact, shortening works seems to be the main part of good writing. I don't generally want to watch a 4-hour film that could have been a tight 50 minutes. I don't want to read 800 pages that could have been a solid 200.

I'm not reading for distraction, and if I were Zane Gray and Robotech and Harliquin romance novels already have that filled- heck, I could just re-read Cujo (which probably wasn't edited very much at all, admittedly).

Generating a ton of crap, as you note, has never been a problem.

Getting rid of the 4-8 paras of thoughtlessness has always been the real work in my experience.

[skeledrew]

Just self-publish! That's the route I think many authors are moving towards.

[epolanski]

But why would I want to read that?

Just give me the prompt at this point.

[sieve]

You could say that for any book.

People are too precious about man-made art. I don't see the point. Every book ever written might have some novelty value of its own. But it mostly has the same plots, character archetypes and other tropes found in other fiction. We think there is something special about human writing. But LLMs have read the same stuff we have. And produce similar inspired writing.

[plastic-enjoyer]

I mean, you’re right in a way that motifs, stylistic devices and archetypes recur in fiction, and that an LLM could produce similarly inspired texts – so what? That’s no reason not to write yourself – unless you don’t enjoy writing and just want some sort of result, some sort of product. And you sound as though you don’t actually enjoy writing, but would still like to produce a book. But why bother at all if you don’t enjoy writing? Writing as a hobby carries no stakes that would in any way justify the use of LLMs. There is nothing that needs to be optimised in order to produce value.

[FreeTrade]

'Writing' covers a lot of creative tasks. You might very well enjoy creating plots, characters, ideas, situations, but find the actual business of putting thousands of words down on a page tedious.

[plastic-enjoyer]

Yes, but then you are just an idea guy. Why bother, when you are not interested in the act of writing, or worse, don't enjoy the experience of writing at all, including the struggles that come with writing? There are no stakes in writing as a hobby. Once fiction exists in abundance as a product, the question arises all the more as to why one should adopt a production-centred perspective on writing.

[sieve]

Think of it this way. You like well-designed houses. Like looking at them, living in them. So you design a house per your liking having bought a plot overlooking a stream and a meadow. And you hire someone to build it for you. You may not enjoy the actual process of building, but you do like living in the final product, right?

It is the same with books. Reading a story based on a plot of your design, and characters you built, dealing with situations you conceived of, and having conversations you directed works for me ... even if an LLM assisted with the writing duties.

[plastic-enjoyer]

So, if you hire a builder to implement your design, the end product is functional, i.e. it should provide you with shelter and keep you warm. The builder's craft serves a purpose beyond itself. But when you "hire" an LLM to write prose, what is the functional product? It's the prose. You don't read a novel and then throw away the sentences to get at the story underneath. The sentences are the story. So outsourcing the writing isn't like hiring a builder, it's more like designing a house and then handing someone else the keys.

[_diyar]

Even if all extrinsic motivations for writing disappear, some people will continue to write (without AI) for personal reasons.

And even at that point, others will continue to write using AI to simulate being one of those people.

[quikoa]

Some people may continue using AI and publish books but the amount of AI slop would be dramatically lower without extrinsic motivations.

[photios]

I've gotten yearly performance reviews that have been obviously ChatGPT-generated. People are just lazy.

Some HR systems even support that and have AI writing/rewording integrated.

Corporate hellscapes intensifying, I guess.

[gabriel666smith]

I can understand being interested in it from a Modernist perspective.

It's both a new technology that maps a geometry to existing language - which is very interesting from several literary theory POVs - and represents a new kind of typewriter. If you're interested in innovative techniques in fiction, I think LLMs are arguably deeply interesting. Mass-producing slop, however, is probably quite limited in terms of its theoretical interest, and in how it changes the craft.

Personally, an example of how I use gen AI when writing is that I sometimes use a little text editor I wrote. It polls a local model, and grabs the 50 most-likely next token(s), rounded to one word, based on where the cursor is.

"Voice" in fiction was already about how the author chooses to deviate from the expected-next-word. So - while you could just use the tokens returned - I find myself using them much more often to choose what words to avoid using, or how to deviate from the expected outputs, and where it might be most interesting to do that.

I think there's plenty of interesting things that can be done with gen AI in terms of fiction writing, but I think we're quite a long way from working all of them out yet. Wholesale slop generation is one of the most obvious - and most boring - things writers can do with an LLM.

[ajsnigrutin]

"back then", you had to write for months to get a book out, and it sold 20 copies and you earned $20.

Now you can do it in minutes, get 50 books out, 20 of them sell 10 copies, you've earned $200.

(i might be exaggerating the times and earnings, but the point stands)

[charlieyu1]

I had about 2000 hours invested in a few books. I think I have made less than $2/hour so far after all the years.

[Gigachad]

Spamming online marketplaces with massive amounts of slop. Even if you only get a few sales per book, you win in volume.