5 ms·

Are readers generating fiction with AI models?

37 points by ilamont 3mo ago

sriramgopalan 3mo ago
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.
- zabriel_goss 3mo ago
  Books and fiction were some of the first to be democratized as a result of the internet.
- webstrand 3mo ago
  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.
  - ctoth 3mo ago
    You should suggest some! I recommend Super Supportive[0]. [0]: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/63759/super-supportive https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/63759/super-supportive
  - r3trohack3r 3mo ago
    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.
- idle_zealot 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
    > 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 3mo ago
      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.
- plastic-enjoyer 3mo ago
  > 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 3mo ago
    > 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 3mo ago
      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.
- overgard 3mo ago
  Why would you need to "democratize" fiction? There's literally zero cost of entry already. Fiction probably needs more gate keeping.
_matt_ 3mo ago
Interesting analysis, but data "was collected between April 2023 and May 2024", so this predates even the release of GPT 4o.
MarkusQ 3mo ago
> Are readers generating fiction with AI models? Why not? Journalists, lawyers and pundits of various stripes are already doing it. Why shouldn't readers?
- overgard 3mo ago
  Because nobody wants to read AI generated text?
  - rhdunn 3mo ago
    Tell that to the LLM RP crowd.
    - mirabilis 3mo ago
      I think you lose that draw of interactivity when you’re essentially reading someone else’s RP, though.
      - rhdunn 3mo ago
        You're not reading someone else's RP, though. Not with the applications that support this. There are things like the character(s) you interact with, the initial setting, and some background information predefined, but the responses/evolution of the RP vary depending on things like the model used and the user's interactions. It's somewhat like taking a D&D setting/scenario. Each group plays it differently.
        mirabilis 3mo ago
        Ah, the point I was trying to make was more akin to “why would I read your AI-generated story that you’ve posted as a static text/ebook trying to make a profit when I could do [essentially the scenario you described].”
      - LoganDark 3mo ago
        As someone with extensive experience with this: no, you don't. As much as it's nice to know another shares my interest (and will partake in it with me), I can't always get that. When I can't get that, LLMs are not a worthless substitute, especially if what I actually want is just to play out a situation. I want to act and then get back a description of reaction. LLMs can describe reaction, therefore I find value in them. Like how in D&D you go to do whatever and the dungeon master tells you what happens in response. LLMs fit there for me. They don't fill the void of social interaction or anything like that, but I don't strictly need that here. Take a look at services like AI Dungeon to see the kind of thing I'm talking about. It doesn't really replace social anything, but it's kind of like text adventure. It's plenty interactive enough.
piloto_ciego 3mo ago
I had a sci-fi plot sketched out in my head, I had Codex give a whack at it. It was "ok" - not the worst content I've ever read, not the best. It was "sufficient."
- QuercusMax 3mo ago
  Probably would be good to write up a TTRPG adventure, though!
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- GoodJokes 3mo ago
  Don’t outsource your brain. Give your brain a whack at it.
- jdkdkeidj 3mo ago
  [dead]
- fragmede 3mo ago
  It's a very fun to go on an exploration of a theme! I had one where the technology was that people could go to sleep for free, but they had to pay to wake up, and when, and the economics and how society got rebuilt around that, and of course the hero trying to break the system.
- jagged-chisel 3mo ago
  But now you have a starting point to edit from. Just find a bit more motivation to continue writing...
  - zem 3mo ago
    my speculation is that not having written the original text means you don't have a mental history of all the decisions that went into writing it, and the context from being immersed in the work, making it a lot harder and less motivating to go write the next draft.
lubujackson 3mo ago
So fans have fan fiction because they love certain worlds and characters and want more of it, or to riff on the base to take stories in new directions. We have things like TV tropes so it is no small stretch to, say, generate sitcom-type stories from Harry Potter or GoT that can continue forever. But where does all of this lead? Music has sinilar issues, but I think of this like the compression/loudness issue in music production. Everything gets amplified so the range of everything is compressed. And then it gets boring and people slowly jump ship for something else. I think there will be a wave of AI slop that improves and might actually be exciting on some vector, but we will get bored eventually. Humans crave newness, even if that new thing is worse in exactly the ways that defined good previously, like punk in response to complex rock albums. AI can combine ideas in interesting ways, but it is by design a predictor of what is most likely. This is directly odds with the concept of newness (and arguably, human-ness) which is baked in to what we consider interesting and relevant.
- fluoridation 3mo ago
  I don't get your point. Do people not get bored and move on to something else one way or the other? What exactly is different?
  - lubujackson 3mo ago
    The point is, what people are interested in is more social than inherent in the thing itself. Art is communicative and socially-bound.
- yorwba 3mo ago
  Humans may crave newness, but it only needs to be new to them and also still mostly recognizably familiar. So artists who spent too much time steeped in the output of prior artists ended up with Dadaist literature and abstract paintings, while the average person still enjoys conventional novels and paintings that look like something. I'm not sure whether Harry Potter pioneered the "school + wizards" mashup, but the school has many aspects you would expect of a school (save for the wizards) and the wizards have many aspects familiar from previous fictional wizards (save for the school part.) The novelty comes from combining the concepts in more or less straightforward ways. Even a writing AI that is only capable of taking an existing plot and adapting it for a different setting could produce enough reading material to last a lifetime by taking all existing novels in the public domain and putting each in a different random mashup for modern audiences. And I think many people wouldn't tire of this at all.
Sebguer 3mo ago
SillyTavern and the size of like Character.ai at its peak shows pretty obviously that people are doing exactly this!
bawolff 3mo ago
> We show that users especially gravitate toward fanfiction and erotica Why am i not surprised its primarily porn
- lonely_wanderer 3mo ago
  Erotica is a whole separate class of smut than porn (in the cultural sense, that we understand the term “porn”). It’s literally like calling a book a movie. It’s also, on the whole, a much more ethical and engaging form of smut. I don’t really have an issue with the choices of consenting adults, but the (video and image) pornography industry is so seldom that.
  - tbrownaw 3mo ago
    I've heard that word used to refer to (still) pictures, and in more casual/offhand use to refer to text. I don't understand it as being quite so restricted by media-type as you seem to.
- LoganDark 3mo ago
  - If you can generate something you're happy with, that's typically enough. External validation usually isn't a requirement for getting off to yourself, as opposed to other content where many of the primary benefits often are sharing - Plenty of people are into very niche things. Sometimes almost nothing exists (or is discoverable) that exactly hits the spot. Generative AI lets you hit the spot that nothing else has - AI is less complex than managing a real friendship. Even if people exist who can help you out with this, it can be difficult to arrange, or you lose access to them etc. AI doesn't lose interest in you, get busy with life stuff or decide you don't deserve a second chance. Also sharing is still a huge benefit if you can manage it. Sometimes you will only find other people share your spot once you start posting the type of content they've been looking for. (Woe is me that FurAffinity unconditionally bans any LLM assistance now)
  - jadbox 3mo ago
    Fwiw, the unconditionally bans can almost be viewed as 'proof of human' when so many bots are running on autopilot on places like DA. UwU
saltwatercowboy 3mo ago
Language game solipsism
m_m_carvalho 3mo ago
[flagged]
isoprophlex 3mo ago
For fun I wrote three chapters, and let opus write the 4th. It was god fucking awful. No amount of prompting could fix it.
technopastor_77 3mo ago
[flagged]
0gs 3mo ago
I think I probably did 12 whole books before I realized no one else would read them, or that if they did, I would feel guilty. some of them are really good though even knowing they are purely plan-based expression!
SilentM68 3mo ago
Yes, they are. People have to find ways to make money to pay rent, bills and eat, particularly when their resumes are not as densely packed as others. This is one way to do it. Wish I could do it, too :)
vlian2088 3mo ago
LLMs suck at creative writing, all their edges get smoothed the fuck out of with RLHF for (brand) safety, so they write like they have a HR lady in the room with them, scrutinizing every sentence for adherence to the set of values very few people honestly hold. if you feed Claude/GPT/Gemini 100 chapters of ASOIAF and prompt it to continue, the story and the prose will degenerate into sterile purple slop within a few pages.
miki_tyler 3mo ago
I did: https://thelydianstone.com/ https://thelydianstone.com/

37 points by ilamont 3mo ago

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.

zabriel_goss 3mo ago
Books and fiction were some of the first to be democratized as a result of the internet.
webstrand 3mo ago
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.
- ctoth 3mo ago
  You should suggest some! I recommend Super Supportive[0]. [0]: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/63759/super-supportive https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/63759/super-supportive
- r3trohack3r 3mo ago
  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.
idle_zealot 3mo ago
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 3mo ago
  > 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 3mo ago
    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.
plastic-enjoyer 3mo ago
> 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 3mo ago
  > 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 3mo ago
    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.
overgard 3mo ago
Why would you need to "democratize" fiction? There's literally zero cost of entry already. Fiction probably needs more gate keeping.

_matt_ 3mo ago

Interesting analysis, but data "was collected between April 2023 and May 2024", so this predates even the release of GPT 4o.

MarkusQ 3mo ago

> Are readers generating fiction with AI models? Why not? Journalists, lawyers and pundits of various stripes are already doing it. Why shouldn't readers?

overgard 3mo ago
Because nobody wants to read AI generated text?
- rhdunn 3mo ago
  Tell that to the LLM RP crowd.
  - mirabilis 3mo ago
    I think you lose that draw of interactivity when you’re essentially reading someone else’s RP, though.
    - rhdunn 3mo ago
      You're not reading someone else's RP, though. Not with the applications that support this. There are things like the character(s) you interact with, the initial setting, and some background information predefined, but the responses/evolution of the RP vary depending on things like the model used and the user's interactions. It's somewhat like taking a D&D setting/scenario. Each group plays it differently.
      - mirabilis 3mo ago
        Ah, the point I was trying to make was more akin to “why would I read your AI-generated story that you’ve posted as a static text/ebook trying to make a profit when I could do [essentially the scenario you described].”
    - LoganDark 3mo ago
      As someone with extensive experience with this: no, you don't. As much as it's nice to know another shares my interest (and will partake in it with me), I can't always get that. When I can't get that, LLMs are not a worthless substitute, especially if what I actually want is just to play out a situation. I want to act and then get back a description of reaction. LLMs can describe reaction, therefore I find value in them. Like how in D&D you go to do whatever and the dungeon master tells you what happens in response. LLMs fit there for me. They don't fill the void of social interaction or anything like that, but I don't strictly need that here. Take a look at services like AI Dungeon to see the kind of thing I'm talking about. It doesn't really replace social anything, but it's kind of like text adventure. It's plenty interactive enough.

piloto_ciego 3mo ago

I had a sci-fi plot sketched out in my head, I had Codex give a whack at it. It was "ok" - not the worst content I've ever read, not the best. It was "sufficient."

QuercusMax 3mo ago
Probably would be good to write up a TTRPG adventure, though!
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
GoodJokes 3mo ago
Don’t outsource your brain. Give your brain a whack at it.
jdkdkeidj 3mo ago
[dead]
fragmede 3mo ago
It's a very fun to go on an exploration of a theme! I had one where the technology was that people could go to sleep for free, but they had to pay to wake up, and when, and the economics and how society got rebuilt around that, and of course the hero trying to break the system.
jagged-chisel 3mo ago
But now you have a starting point to edit from. Just find a bit more motivation to continue writing...
- zem 3mo ago
  my speculation is that not having written the original text means you don't have a mental history of all the decisions that went into writing it, and the context from being immersed in the work, making it a lot harder and less motivating to go write the next draft.

lubujackson 3mo ago

So fans have fan fiction because they love certain worlds and characters and want more of it, or to riff on the base to take stories in new directions. We have things like TV tropes so it is no small stretch to, say, generate sitcom-type stories from Harry Potter or GoT that can continue forever. But where does all of this lead? Music has sinilar issues, but I think of this like the compression/loudness issue in music production. Everything gets amplified so the range of everything is compressed. And then it gets boring and people slowly jump ship for something else. I think there will be a wave of AI slop that improves and might actually be exciting on some vector, but we will get bored eventually. Humans crave newness, even if that new thing is worse in exactly the ways that defined good previously, like punk in response to complex rock albums. AI can combine ideas in interesting ways, but it is by design a predictor of what is most likely. This is directly odds with the concept of newness (and arguably, human-ness) which is baked in to what we consider interesting and relevant.

fluoridation 3mo ago
I don't get your point. Do people not get bored and move on to something else one way or the other? What exactly is different?
- lubujackson 3mo ago
  The point is, what people are interested in is more social than inherent in the thing itself. Art is communicative and socially-bound.
yorwba 3mo ago
Humans may crave newness, but it only needs to be new to them and also still mostly recognizably familiar. So artists who spent too much time steeped in the output of prior artists ended up with Dadaist literature and abstract paintings, while the average person still enjoys conventional novels and paintings that look like something. I'm not sure whether Harry Potter pioneered the "school + wizards" mashup, but the school has many aspects you would expect of a school (save for the wizards) and the wizards have many aspects familiar from previous fictional wizards (save for the school part.) The novelty comes from combining the concepts in more or less straightforward ways. Even a writing AI that is only capable of taking an existing plot and adapting it for a different setting could produce enough reading material to last a lifetime by taking all existing novels in the public domain and putting each in a different random mashup for modern audiences. And I think many people wouldn't tire of this at all.

Sebguer 3mo ago

SillyTavern and the size of like Character.ai at its peak shows pretty obviously that people are doing exactly this!

bawolff 3mo ago

> We show that users especially gravitate toward fanfiction and erotica Why am i not surprised its primarily porn

lonely_wanderer 3mo ago
Erotica is a whole separate class of smut than porn (in the cultural sense, that we understand the term “porn”). It’s literally like calling a book a movie. It’s also, on the whole, a much more ethical and engaging form of smut. I don’t really have an issue with the choices of consenting adults, but the (video and image) pornography industry is so seldom that.
- tbrownaw 3mo ago
  I've heard that word used to refer to (still) pictures, and in more casual/offhand use to refer to text. I don't understand it as being quite so restricted by media-type as you seem to.
LoganDark 3mo ago
- If you can generate something you're happy with, that's typically enough. External validation usually isn't a requirement for getting off to yourself, as opposed to other content where many of the primary benefits often are sharing - Plenty of people are into very niche things. Sometimes almost nothing exists (or is discoverable) that exactly hits the spot. Generative AI lets you hit the spot that nothing else has - AI is less complex than managing a real friendship. Even if people exist who can help you out with this, it can be difficult to arrange, or you lose access to them etc. AI doesn't lose interest in you, get busy with life stuff or decide you don't deserve a second chance. Also sharing is still a huge benefit if you can manage it. Sometimes you will only find other people share your spot once you start posting the type of content they've been looking for. (Woe is me that FurAffinity unconditionally bans any LLM assistance now)
- jadbox 3mo ago
  Fwiw, the unconditionally bans can almost be viewed as 'proof of human' when so many bots are running on autopilot on places like DA. UwU

saltwatercowboy 3mo ago

Language game solipsism

m_m_carvalho 3mo ago

[flagged]

isoprophlex 3mo ago

For fun I wrote three chapters, and let opus write the 4th. It was god fucking awful. No amount of prompting could fix it.

technopastor_77 3mo ago

[flagged]

0gs 3mo ago

I think I probably did 12 whole books before I realized no one else would read them, or that if they did, I would feel guilty. some of them are really good though even knowing they are purely plan-based expression!

SilentM68 3mo ago

Yes, they are. People have to find ways to make money to pay rent, bills and eat, particularly when their resumes are not as densely packed as others. This is one way to do it. Wish I could do it, too :)

vlian2088 3mo ago

LLMs suck at creative writing, all their edges get smoothed the fuck out of with RLHF for (brand) safety, so they write like they have a HR lady in the room with them, scrutinizing every sentence for adherence to the set of values very few people honestly hold. if you feed Claude/GPT/Gemini 100 chapters of ASOIAF and prompt it to continue, the story and the prose will degenerate into sterile purple slop within a few pages.

miki_tyler 3mo ago

I did: https://thelydianstone.com/ https://thelydianstone.com/