4 ms·

There have been people capable of similar feats long before LLMs were developed. Walter B. Gibson (who wrote many of the stories featuring The Shadow) boasted

There have been people capable of similar feats long before LLMs were developed. Walter B. Gibson (who wrote many of the stories featuring The Shadow) boasted of cranking out up to 10,000 words per day. He reportedly had typewriters in every room of his house, with a story in progress on each one. In his peak year, he produced 1,680,000 words - roughly 24 full-length novels. That was in the days of typewriters, snail mail, physical printing pressess, and truck distribution. Putting something in the Kindle Store takes less than five minutes, and it's for sale world-wide within a day. I'll bet Gibson could've churned out a quickie on the Maui fires within two days, if he'd had any way to get it on the market that fast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_B._Gibson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_B._Gibson

jacquesm 3y ago
I write very fast but that is seriously impressive. Wow. My record is a 25 page single spaced report in two marathon days. I also took the week off after that. The customer was in a hurry and we made it work but normally it goes quite a bit slower than that. When writing fiction I guess it is a bit easier, you are not going to be raked over the coals for some subtle contradiction. But still that is a massive output.
- mikro2nd 3y ago
  Have to say that when writing fiction (and taking that seriously) my output slows down by a very significant factor. It's not the physical act of writing that takes time, but the time needed to think about the scene, characters, etc. I've said before that I never realised that writing (fiction) is a performance art. The performance might all be solely in your own head, but it's as real as any, and harder, because it has to make sense on the written page, in light of all that's been written before it and has yet to be written after. eta: Writing fiction I consider myself doing really well if I achieve 500 words in an hour. Non-fiction? 1000 is quite easily done.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    That's interesting. And it makes intuitive sense: when the facts are what they are there isn't much that you can do other than to translate those facts into good prose and to try to accentuate that which is important and to de-emphasize that which is not. But when you are constructing a whole world from first principles or when you have to imagine a series of events that have to be plausible it gets harder. My job is mostly constrained to avoid writing fiction! I have never tried my hand at writing fiction, so I probably should shut up about that :) At the same time, I told / tell my kids bedtime stories that I pull out of my fantasy at the drop of a hat and they can go on for as long or as short as I want. But those are not to be compared to anything novel (or even novella) sized. 15 minutes tops.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      For non-fiction, I won't say I routinely do it but if I know the topic area (no real research needed), have a bunch of quotes, have some introductory boilerplate to introduce some topic, some basic facts on e.g. a product announcement, I can crank out 1,000 words of serviceable prose in certainly a couple hours. Probably can't scale to more than about 3,000 words per day--and wouldn't want to do that on a day-in day-out basis--but I have friends who are faster so 10,000 words per day is not totally out of the ballpark. When I was an analyst, my benchmark was about 2,000 "memo grade" words per day--typically mixed in with some phone calls, etc. More carefully constructed reports etc. took longer especially if research were involved.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        I just did a check on that document, here are the stats, apparently it was a few more pages than I remembered: Pages 31 Words 17212 Characters 97347 Characters excluding spaces 80354 Unfortunately I can not find exact statistics on the writing activity. So that's roughly within the ballpark of your maximum. I was pretty happy with this particular report and so was the customer, but to do that kind of thing sustainably would be beyond me. Edit: and, more so because this was before COVID and that hit me pretty hard.
malfist 3y ago
24 full length novels is two per month. That's a lot. But this book in question is a full length novel published in -1 days.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  Is it a full-length novel, though? It's apparently been removed, so I can't get a word count.
  - cowsandmilk 3y ago
    Screenshot shows 44 pages, so definitely not a full length novel.
    - hoppyhoppy2 3y ago
      I'm not sure why y'all are calling it a novel; it at least purports to be nonfiction. (Is it a comment on the propensity of LLMs to hallucinate?)
      - Turing_Machine 3y ago
        No one is calling it a novel. "Novel" is just being used as a measure of length.
    - QuiDortDine 3y ago
      I seem to recall doing some math and finding out the limit for some models of LLM was pretty close to that. If so, this book is likely the result of a single prompt, which seems to me like a lazy way to be lazy.
add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
Extreme outliers arent useful to the discussion. If all people were capable of outputting this volume of shit at scale, then LLMs wouldn't be changing the game. But people aren't, and LLMs are a net enshittening force.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  > Extreme outliers arent useful to the discussion. Your opinion. Gibson was an outlier, but not an "extreme" outlier. Isaac Asimov wrote over 500 books in his lifetime, all of which were of reasonable quality. Enid Blyton wrote over 800 books. Barbara Cartland wrote 700. R.L. Stine is well over 400 and still writing. There are many others.

jacquesm 3y ago

I write very fast but that is seriously impressive. Wow. My record is a 25 page single spaced report in two marathon days. I also took the week off after that. The customer was in a hurry and we made it work but normally it goes quite a bit slower than that. When writing fiction I guess it is a bit easier, you are not going to be raked over the coals for some subtle contradiction. But still that is a massive output.

mikro2nd 3y ago
Have to say that when writing fiction (and taking that seriously) my output slows down by a very significant factor. It's not the physical act of writing that takes time, but the time needed to think about the scene, characters, etc. I've said before that I never realised that writing (fiction) is a performance art. The performance might all be solely in your own head, but it's as real as any, and harder, because it has to make sense on the written page, in light of all that's been written before it and has yet to be written after. eta: Writing fiction I consider myself doing really well if I achieve 500 words in an hour. Non-fiction? 1000 is quite easily done.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  That's interesting. And it makes intuitive sense: when the facts are what they are there isn't much that you can do other than to translate those facts into good prose and to try to accentuate that which is important and to de-emphasize that which is not. But when you are constructing a whole world from first principles or when you have to imagine a series of events that have to be plausible it gets harder. My job is mostly constrained to avoid writing fiction! I have never tried my hand at writing fiction, so I probably should shut up about that :) At the same time, I told / tell my kids bedtime stories that I pull out of my fantasy at the drop of a hat and they can go on for as long or as short as I want. But those are not to be compared to anything novel (or even novella) sized. 15 minutes tops.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    For non-fiction, I won't say I routinely do it but if I know the topic area (no real research needed), have a bunch of quotes, have some introductory boilerplate to introduce some topic, some basic facts on e.g. a product announcement, I can crank out 1,000 words of serviceable prose in certainly a couple hours. Probably can't scale to more than about 3,000 words per day--and wouldn't want to do that on a day-in day-out basis--but I have friends who are faster so 10,000 words per day is not totally out of the ballpark. When I was an analyst, my benchmark was about 2,000 "memo grade" words per day--typically mixed in with some phone calls, etc. More carefully constructed reports etc. took longer especially if research were involved.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      I just did a check on that document, here are the stats, apparently it was a few more pages than I remembered: Pages 31 Words 17212 Characters 97347 Characters excluding spaces 80354 Unfortunately I can not find exact statistics on the writing activity. So that's roughly within the ballpark of your maximum. I was pretty happy with this particular report and so was the customer, but to do that kind of thing sustainably would be beyond me. Edit: and, more so because this was before COVID and that hit me pretty hard.

malfist 3y ago

24 full length novels is two per month. That's a lot. But this book in question is a full length novel published in -1 days.

Turing_Machine 3y ago
Is it a full-length novel, though? It's apparently been removed, so I can't get a word count.
- cowsandmilk 3y ago
  Screenshot shows 44 pages, so definitely not a full length novel.
  - hoppyhoppy2 3y ago
    I'm not sure why y'all are calling it a novel; it at least purports to be nonfiction. (Is it a comment on the propensity of LLMs to hallucinate?)
    - Turing_Machine 3y ago
      No one is calling it a novel. "Novel" is just being used as a measure of length.
  - QuiDortDine 3y ago
    I seem to recall doing some math and finding out the limit for some models of LLM was pretty close to that. If so, this book is likely the result of a single prompt, which seems to me like a lazy way to be lazy.

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago

Extreme outliers arent useful to the discussion. If all people were capable of outputting this volume of shit at scale, then LLMs wouldn't be changing the game. But people aren't, and LLMs are a net enshittening force.

Turing_Machine 3y ago
> Extreme outliers arent useful to the discussion. Your opinion. Gibson was an outlier, but not an "extreme" outlier. Isaac Asimov wrote over 500 books in his lifetime, all of which were of reasonable quality. Enid Blyton wrote over 800 books. Barbara Cartland wrote 700. R.L. Stine is well over 400 and still writing. There are many others.