5 ms·

A short sci-fi story written with GPT-3 and illustrated with DALL-E 2

125 points by andreyk 4y ago

Hi there HN, Disclaimer: I've submitted a Show HN as well as the link for this general project before, but particularly like this one short story so want to submit one for it specifically. Hope it's not considered spammy! I and a collaborator who writes sci-fi just released the short story "The Great Filter Button" - https://storiesby.ai/p/the-great-filter-button https://storiesby.ai/p/the-great-filter-button Here's why it's relevant to HN: most of the text for it was generated by GPT-3 (with human curation, using SudoWrite) and it was entirely illustrated using DALL-E 2 and MidJourney, and a bit of DreamStudio aka Stable Diffusion (of course with human selection of prompts) AND it narrated using neural voice synthesis (via BeyondWords). And I think it came out very well! To my mind it is a pretty good example of how the newest commercial tools by powered by learned media synthesis models can be leveraged by humans to make art. It also shows some of the limits: DALLE-2, MidJourney, and Stable Diffusion all have trouble with more complex prompts and don't follow various aspects of them, the voice synthesis is still pretty robot-y, and the GPT-3 written parts are heavily guided by human text (and the whole story is quite short). We plan to keep exploring these realm of human-AI creative collaboration by releasing weekly short stories with this newsletter, and would love feedback, suggestions, or even entire submissions of your own creative work done using AI. Feel free to just comment here on HN, email us at contact@storiesby.ai, or comment here - https://storiesby.ai/p/submit-your-stories-ideas https://storiesby.ai/p/submit-your-stories-ideas Last thought: even with AI doing the "heavy lifting" of writing and illustration, a great deal of creative decision making is still left up to us with respect to subject matter, style, formatting, etc. I hypothesize that sturgeon's law will remain true in the age of AI-generated text/images (most of everything will be crap), and the job of literary agents, producers, etc. will just become far more involved. Sort of like A24 is mostly a distributor (and to some extent producer) yet have made a huge name for themselves - this may become the norm. Edit: wow thanks for feedback HN! To the comments saying this is at best a mediocre story/outline, totally agree. Since we want to put something out weekly, these stories are quickly generated with the intent to be a neat example of human-AI collaboration, rather than with the intent to reach the bar of published sci short stories. Maybe one day...

donkarma 4y ago
- yreg 4y ago
  Be kind.
Blammar 4y ago
Don't take this the wrong way, but in my opinion, the story would get a form rejection letter from a SF magazine, but with a handwritten note saying, interesting pictures!
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  It's been done before, multiple times, Rick and Morty even did a take on it ( https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/The_Ricks_Must_Be_Crazy https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/The_Ricks_Must_Be_Crazy ) I guess that, these ML approaches are trained on lots of existing text, and therefor derivative works are to be expected?
- TigeriusKirk 4y ago
  True, but then I get form rejection letters from SF magazines too. I have a nice collection of them! That bar is pretty high.
tmjdev 4y ago
I feel it's the typical HN reaction to be negative about generated content. I enjoyed it. I think it could have used another pass on editing but I felt the idea was interesting and I wanted to hear it through.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
manholio 4y ago
Without the human written parts it's an incoherent word salad. As an intelectual worker, I feel relieved - for a few more years at least.
- _joel 4y ago
  Fear not, GPT-4 will soon be out ;)
_joel 4y ago
I understand people comparing this to some human written content but let's not forget how far this has come and at least in my estimation, how far it could, and probably will, go.
whalesalad 4y ago
I have never had so much fun and so much interest in machine learning until now. My new favorite thing to do when feeling down or stressed is to fire up Dall•E and go nuts. I buy credits like they are farmville coins.
kevinash 4y ago
https://livebookai.com/category https://livebookai.com/category - tons of AI generated stories
nonameiguess 4y ago
Reads like a pretty decent outline. It's a sufficiently interesting premise for a story. But no named characters or even characters at all seems like a shortcoming. Understandable, as I don't believe GPT-3 is anywhere close to being able to create consistent, believable fictional people and relationships that can exist across paragraphs just yet, but I'm sure some future version will get there eventually. That is, of course, the hardest part for human authors as well.
anthropodie 4y ago
Clickable links https://storiesby.ai/p/the-great-filter-button https://storiesby.ai/p/the-great-filter-button https://storiesby.ai/p/submit-your-stories-ideas https://storiesby.ai/p/submit-your-stories-ideas
kevinash 4y ago
Our A.I stories and illustration generation service is live and installed at Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH_qLoWMgKY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH_qLoWMgKY Contact me if interested in investing/customers: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kashlik/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/kashlik/
huevosabio 4y ago
I did a more modest version of this as a handful of simple children book-like stories [0,1 2]. I had just gotten access to Dalle and was so excited about how thr future could look like. I can't wait for a future where MMORPGs have characters, scenarios and landscapes filled in by AI. The users and the developers can give the skeleton of the in game lore, and then the AI tools can fill in with beautiful detail. [0] story of a seamstress, https://twitter.com/RamonDarioIT/status/1552152241959669760?s=20&t=ONMWUkY3gCqts9CM7FnmRA https://twitter.com/RamonDarioIT/status/1552152241959669760?... [1] story of a bnb host, https://twitter.com/RamonDarioIT/status/1552162769176109056?s=20&t=ONMWUkY3gCqts9CM7FnmRA https://twitter.com/RamonDarioIT/status/1552162769176109056?... [2] story of playing chess against Magnus, https://twitter.com/RamonDarioIT/status/1552164214462025728?s=20&t=ONMWUkY3gCqts9CM7FnmRA https://twitter.com/RamonDarioIT/status/1552164214462025728?...
jrochkind1 4y ago
Knowing it's an AI that wrote it, it seems impressive. (Although I'm not sure how much human guidance it has). The premise is I think actually pretty good -- but maybe the premise and basic plot really comes from the human-written parts? The actual writing? If I didn't know an AI had created it and thought a human had, I'd say the writing is pretty terrible. At the sentance level and at the story level, it's just pretty poorly written and hard to follow, with weird choices. But... sure, maybe it's too much to expect an AI to write a well-written story at this point, the fact that it seems to be a somewhat coherent story at all is the point? OK if so, but yeah.
- andreyk 4y ago
  wrt "(Although I'm not sure how much human guidance it has)" - at the top it says "Text Formatting: Human-written text is italic, AI-generated text is normal" so that kind of demonstrates the ratio [and the human selects the AI completions among a few options each time] And yeah, generally agree - as we say on our About page, these stories are sort of explorations/demonstrations of what AI can do, as much as they are attempts at entertaining writing. So in a sense we want to keep the "weird choices" AI makes to let the story go in weird directions. Since we release weekly, the intent is in general not to go for a lot of polish but rather for a fun concept and just an entertaining read.
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    Fair. But i'm not talking as much about the story "going in weird directions", as I am about the way the sentences and paragraphs are constructed. Or apparent contradictions like "We found that planets with life on them were rare" followed by "But life did develop on one planet" -- so is that "rare" or just one? "which evolved one of the most diverse biospheres we had ever seen" -- wait, so how many "biospheres" (implying life) have you seen, again? "one of the most... we've seen" is a weird thing to say if you've seen only one, or even only a few! It's just like, wait, what are you trying to tell me here, what parts of these sentances serve the story? Is the feedback I'd give if this were a writing workshop, I'm not talking about the way the plot developed, I'm talking about the way the words are constructed into sentances and sentances into paragraphs. It just seems... sloppy, like someone wasn't trying very hard just kind of throwing words on a page without thinking very much and not editing. But it is all understandable more-or-less grammatical English which is a coherent (if poorly-written) narrative, so, sure, that's a thing.
mikotodomo 4y ago
This is horrifying. It's like the AI is hinting at what it will do once we run a few more experiments with it.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  Yeah but they're pushing it to do this. The plot is human-generated. And in any case it passes the buck onto the inside universe to come up with the excursion that escapes endlessly outward. It's a little like Rick and Morty. I think they have an episode about this with energy, infinite recursion then something happens then you get excursion.
germinalphrase 4y ago
How much text was edited away to leave this piece? The images are nice, but both the images and text have only partial coherence (which is to be expected, of course).
jcims 4y ago
Capabilities like the textual inversion post from yesterday is going to really push story illustration into high gear. https://github.com/hlky/sd-enable-textual-inversion https://github.com/hlky/sd-enable-textual-inversion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32643564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32643564
lxe 4y ago
Think of GPT-3 raw output as a markov chain operating on paragraphs and contexts instead of tokens. You can't write a coherent short story with it without your own "inpainting". Check out https://novelai.net/ https://novelai.net/ if you're looking for ways to preserve continuity.
dang 4y ago
This isn't a valid Show HN. Please read the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. We've taken "Show HN" out of the title now.
- andreyk 4y ago
  Got it, my bad! This project was partially inspired by this Show HN "I had some time yesterday so I made a GPT3 podcast to help you sleep" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29428910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29428910 So it seemed like the same sort of thing and therefore valid.
wudangmonk 4y ago
Seems like AI generated art will give everyone access to decent art. GPT-3 and such I see as only useful to create spam on the internet by flooding it with tons of useless content. Theres a huge gap between these two technologies. I guess our mind helps the art because it doesn't need to make sense, but a story has to be consistent with itself and I just don't see how that is possible without actual understanding.
jaggs 4y ago
I thought it was amazing. Especially considering it's the equivalent of a day old baby crafting it. This is truly exciting, terrifying and intriguing in equal measures. It's all moving so darn fast! :)
kumarmanket 4y ago
[dead]
sanroot99 4y ago
It was pretty impressive especially AI that completed the plot in intresting direction ,but image illustration was still not at that level ,I bet a human would do better here , images were too vague and out of context

125 points by andreyk 4y ago

donkarma 4y ago

yreg 4y ago
Be kind.

Blammar 4y ago

Don't take this the wrong way, but in my opinion, the story would get a form rejection letter from a SF magazine, but with a handwritten note saying, interesting pictures!

SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
It's been done before, multiple times, Rick and Morty even did a take on it ( https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/The_Ricks_Must_Be_Crazy https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/The_Ricks_Must_Be_Crazy ) I guess that, these ML approaches are trained on lots of existing text, and therefor derivative works are to be expected?
TigeriusKirk 4y ago
True, but then I get form rejection letters from SF magazines too. I have a nice collection of them! That bar is pretty high.

tmjdev 4y ago

I feel it's the typical HN reaction to be negative about generated content. I enjoyed it. I think it could have used another pass on editing but I felt the idea was interesting and I wanted to hear it through.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

manholio 4y ago

Without the human written parts it's an incoherent word salad. As an intelectual worker, I feel relieved - for a few more years at least.

_joel 4y ago
Fear not, GPT-4 will soon be out ;)

_joel 4y ago

I understand people comparing this to some human written content but let's not forget how far this has come and at least in my estimation, how far it could, and probably will, go.

whalesalad 4y ago

I have never had so much fun and so much interest in machine learning until now. My new favorite thing to do when feeling down or stressed is to fire up Dall•E and go nuts. I buy credits like they are farmville coins.

kevinash 4y ago

https://livebookai.com/category https://livebookai.com/category - tons of AI generated stories

nonameiguess 4y ago

Reads like a pretty decent outline. It's a sufficiently interesting premise for a story. But no named characters or even characters at all seems like a shortcoming. Understandable, as I don't believe GPT-3 is anywhere close to being able to create consistent, believable fictional people and relationships that can exist across paragraphs just yet, but I'm sure some future version will get there eventually. That is, of course, the hardest part for human authors as well.

anthropodie 4y ago

Clickable links https://storiesby.ai/p/the-great-filter-button https://storiesby.ai/p/the-great-filter-button https://storiesby.ai/p/submit-your-stories-ideas https://storiesby.ai/p/submit-your-stories-ideas

kevinash 4y ago

Our A.I stories and illustration generation service is live and installed at Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH_qLoWMgKY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH_qLoWMgKY Contact me if interested in investing/customers: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kashlik/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/kashlik/

huevosabio 4y ago

I did a more modest version of this as a handful of simple children book-like stories [0,1 2]. I had just gotten access to Dalle and was so excited about how thr future could look like. I can't wait for a future where MMORPGs have characters, scenarios and landscapes filled in by AI. The users and the developers can give the skeleton of the in game lore, and then the AI tools can fill in with beautiful detail. [0] story of a seamstress, https://twitter.com/RamonDarioIT/status/1552152241959669760?s=20&t=ONMWUkY3gCqts9CM7FnmRA https://twitter.com/RamonDarioIT/status/1552152241959669760?... [1] story of a bnb host, https://twitter.com/RamonDarioIT/status/1552162769176109056?s=20&t=ONMWUkY3gCqts9CM7FnmRA https://twitter.com/RamonDarioIT/status/1552162769176109056?... [2] story of playing chess against Magnus, https://twitter.com/RamonDarioIT/status/1552164214462025728?s=20&t=ONMWUkY3gCqts9CM7FnmRA https://twitter.com/RamonDarioIT/status/1552164214462025728?...

jrochkind1 4y ago

Knowing it's an AI that wrote it, it seems impressive. (Although I'm not sure how much human guidance it has). The premise is I think actually pretty good -- but maybe the premise and basic plot really comes from the human-written parts? The actual writing? If I didn't know an AI had created it and thought a human had, I'd say the writing is pretty terrible. At the sentance level and at the story level, it's just pretty poorly written and hard to follow, with weird choices. But... sure, maybe it's too much to expect an AI to write a well-written story at this point, the fact that it seems to be a somewhat coherent story at all is the point? OK if so, but yeah.

andreyk 4y ago
wrt "(Although I'm not sure how much human guidance it has)" - at the top it says "Text Formatting: Human-written text is italic, AI-generated text is normal" so that kind of demonstrates the ratio [and the human selects the AI completions among a few options each time] And yeah, generally agree - as we say on our About page, these stories are sort of explorations/demonstrations of what AI can do, as much as they are attempts at entertaining writing. So in a sense we want to keep the "weird choices" AI makes to let the story go in weird directions. Since we release weekly, the intent is in general not to go for a lot of polish but rather for a fun concept and just an entertaining read.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  Fair. But i'm not talking as much about the story "going in weird directions", as I am about the way the sentences and paragraphs are constructed. Or apparent contradictions like "We found that planets with life on them were rare" followed by "But life did develop on one planet" -- so is that "rare" or just one? "which evolved one of the most diverse biospheres we had ever seen" -- wait, so how many "biospheres" (implying life) have you seen, again? "one of the most... we've seen" is a weird thing to say if you've seen only one, or even only a few! It's just like, wait, what are you trying to tell me here, what parts of these sentances serve the story? Is the feedback I'd give if this were a writing workshop, I'm not talking about the way the plot developed, I'm talking about the way the words are constructed into sentances and sentances into paragraphs. It just seems... sloppy, like someone wasn't trying very hard just kind of throwing words on a page without thinking very much and not editing. But it is all understandable more-or-less grammatical English which is a coherent (if poorly-written) narrative, so, sure, that's a thing.

mikotodomo 4y ago

This is horrifying. It's like the AI is hinting at what it will do once we run a few more experiments with it.

daniel-cussen 4y ago
Yeah but they're pushing it to do this. The plot is human-generated. And in any case it passes the buck onto the inside universe to come up with the excursion that escapes endlessly outward. It's a little like Rick and Morty. I think they have an episode about this with energy, infinite recursion then something happens then you get excursion.

germinalphrase 4y ago

How much text was edited away to leave this piece? The images are nice, but both the images and text have only partial coherence (which is to be expected, of course).

jcims 4y ago

Capabilities like the textual inversion post from yesterday is going to really push story illustration into high gear. https://github.com/hlky/sd-enable-textual-inversion https://github.com/hlky/sd-enable-textual-inversion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32643564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32643564

lxe 4y ago

Think of GPT-3 raw output as a markov chain operating on paragraphs and contexts instead of tokens. You can't write a coherent short story with it without your own "inpainting". Check out https://novelai.net/ https://novelai.net/ if you're looking for ways to preserve continuity.

dang 4y ago

This isn't a valid Show HN. Please read the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. We've taken "Show HN" out of the title now.

andreyk 4y ago
Got it, my bad! This project was partially inspired by this Show HN "I had some time yesterday so I made a GPT3 podcast to help you sleep" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29428910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29428910 So it seemed like the same sort of thing and therefore valid.

wudangmonk 4y ago

Seems like AI generated art will give everyone access to decent art. GPT-3 and such I see as only useful to create spam on the internet by flooding it with tons of useless content. Theres a huge gap between these two technologies. I guess our mind helps the art because it doesn't need to make sense, but a story has to be consistent with itself and I just don't see how that is possible without actual understanding.

jaggs 4y ago

I thought it was amazing. Especially considering it's the equivalent of a day old baby crafting it. This is truly exciting, terrifying and intriguing in equal measures. It's all moving so darn fast! :)

kumarmanket 4y ago

[dead]

sanroot99 4y ago

It was pretty impressive especially AI that completed the plot in intresting direction ,but image illustration was still not at that level ,I bet a human would do better here , images were too vague and out of context