9 ms·

Not to be intentionally contrarian, but I have thought a lot about this: I think good fiction is actually the antithesis of AI, fundamentally. LLMs are really

Not to be intentionally contrarian, but I have thought a lot about this: I think good fiction is actually the antithesis of AI, fundamentally. LLMs are really only capable of combining different things into output. This can give you some creative results, but it is ultimately kind of limited. I cannot imagine that prompting an AI a thousand times would give you something truly original in the way many high-quality fictional stories are. The magic and absurdity of life is a necessary thing to create such works.

brrrrrm 3mo ago
Models are increasingly showing their ability to extrapolate into the human unexplored (math proofs being the most apparent). What gives you confidence the absurdity of life is uniquely difficult for models to source?
- eddythompson80 3mo ago
  Mathematical proofs are hard to come to, but easy (or “cheap”) to verify. Also having a math proof processed through a transformer to derive an output that matches existing proof patterns kid of makes sense. The former allows you to generate hundreds or thousands of iteration and cheaply verifying its correctness until you hit the right randomness level. Generating thousands of fiction books then verify them doesn’t really work. Most good fiction authors are trying to communicate a story that’s forming in their minds. Even when they get stuck, they are usually not stuck because they just don’t know anyone to ask. It would’t be their voice anymore. Some do seek input and those might experiment with llms for ideas. Using llms for research, technical questions, grammar, synonym sentences, word selection, etc makes sense too. I’d agree with OP for people generating full stories through llms. While I say that, I know a very young person who told a while back (like early ChatGPT 4 time) they use it to write fan fiction for books or characters they like.
- keiferski 3mo ago
  Math seems entirely unrelated to the human experience to me, at least in the sense of “this thing happened to me and I will transmute it into a work of art.” Math is pure abstraction.
- Jtarii 3mo ago
  Being able to write a series of logically correct sentences down is not the same thing as intuiting human emotional experience. Or even related.
- sigbottle 3mo ago
  I will readily admit that I didn't read Dostoevsky, and I don't continue to read Dostoevsky, because I've compared him against a swath of other fiction writers and authoritatively determined with some objective reproducible standard why his writing has been impactful and changed my life. I heard about Dostoevsky from a lot of people talking about depression when I was depressed, he resonated with me. Then when I came back to him half a decade later, having resolved more of my issues, I was able to evoke similar feelings but through a more mature lens. Do I reflect on the objectively correct structure of the story? Do I "agree" with everything Dostoevsky is saying? Not really. I don't know if this offends literature people or not. But this sure as hell is incompatible with the AI bro paradigm in which all thought can be objectively reduced to some shared standard to benchmark on. My position will be read into as deep irrationality from many opposing positions, but it's fine. Now, none of this doesn't "preclude* the ability for AI to have the same kinds of network effects. Of course it can - that's what I've been saying for the longest time. But don't confuse, becoming integrated with society, with this ideal of superhuman X. Now of course, you could argue, "there is no such thing as anything else besides becoming integrated with society. There is no other standard that works." Very good! Darwinian-adjacnet positions are interesting. This is a position - but then don't claim it's equivalent, or god forbid, the exact same, as the "super AGI" ontology. These require fundamentally different assumptions about what justified what, and an attempt to try and pretend otherwise is sophistry.
slim 3mo ago
LLMs are really only capable of combining different things into output what makes believe humans can do more than this ? it's a real question. I've seen a lot of people stating that the human mind "is more than this" as if it was obvious
- gue-ni 3mo ago
  Well since human culture has developed from very limited stone age culture into what we have today, we must conclude that at least _some_ people are capable of generating something that is genuinely new.
- Jtarii 3mo ago
  I would say the inherently chaotic and continuous nature of the human brain can create novelty in a fundamentally different way than LLMs can. Like a human can reach into the chaos of their own emotions and pull something unique out. There is some layer of the human experience where ideas can ferment and change based on all your memories is weird ways, and LLMs completely lack this, which makes things LLMs create very blunt and obvious. Like there is no nuance to anything they do.
jackbrookes 3mo ago
> LLMs are really only capable of combining different things into output > The magic and absurdity of life is a necessary thing to create such works. These two points seem slightly conflicting. Why if a human is truly more creative than AI, must it experience "the magic and absurdity of life" if it can be creative without "combining things into output"? Is a creative human then just not splicing and recombining their experiences into their creative output? And therefore, if an AI had more data that mirrors that experience in some way would it be sufficiently creative to create something "truly original"? My view is that intelligence and creativity is all just purely recombination. AI can do that well just as humans can. The gap is that the data humans have access to is much more analogue, emotional, and grounded in the real world compared to the data that AI is currently trained on.
- snakeboy 3mo ago
  > And therefore, if an AI had more data that mirrors that experience in some way would it be sufficiently creative to create something "truly original"? An important distinction seems to lie in a human having original experiences to draw from, while an AI has only "data that mirrors" experiences.
  - exe34 3mo ago
    > while an AI has only "data that mirrors" experiences. True for a lot of current AI. With more robotic bodies, loads more access to cameras/audio/satellite/science measurements, an AI can have original experience on a level that can only be described as god-like compared to humans.
    - keiferski 3mo ago
      And at this point you’re far off into science fiction, and beyond reasonable discussion of this. Even then, it’s not really clear to me that an android with the exact appearance of a person will have the same experiences. They aren’t biological creatures with millions of years of evolution behind them.
    - kraai 3mo ago
sourcecodeplz 3mo ago
that is how humans do it too! they combine things, ideas. you can make LLMs do that to
awongh 3mo ago
> LLMs are really only capable of combining different things into output In terms of how writers think about creativity this doesn’t reflect reality- there’s the old writer’s saying that there are only 7 stories (and other variations of this idea) and that writing is about creatively remixing these well-worn ideas. The LLM’s capability to write acceptable fiction and nonfiction is coming soon if it’s not already here. (I think right now it still needs some high level input from humans, depending on length and topic) It’s clear to me that, especially as LLMs get better and better, there’s only one real difference- it’s that I don’t want to hear what an LLM has to say. I’m only interested in what other humans have to say. I feel the same way about AI music- even if it sounds ok, even as good as the kind of unoriginal pop music that’s not AI made (but is a kind of it’s own slop) or a bad committee made hollywood movie, it’s still fundamentally more interesting than something that’s been generated. Even if it’s 100% fiction it’s still based on a real human’s life experiences.
- keiferski 3mo ago
  This is a bit like saying “there are only five fundamental flavors” and everything is some combination of them. Maybe, but that has basically zero effect on the experience of actually eating food. Just because the form may be the same doesn’t mean an LLM will be able to supply original content.
  - awongh 3mo ago
    I’m not sure I understand the analogy. You could say that the reason why artificial flavors work in food is because we know how to recreate flavors from first principle chemistry. The dislike of the artificialness of cheetos also doesn’t stop many many people from eating them. I would say human made slop writing isn’t any better or worse quality than LLM writing. Knowing if it was made by a real person makes a difference to me, but I also know it won’t to everyone.
    - keiferski 3mo ago
      Just because the form of a story is the same as another story does not imply that the content is interchangeable. I could write you a story right now about being an expat living in Poland in 2026. It’s unclear to me how an LLM would have the cultural knowledge or experience to write such a story that is actually accurate and up to date, without already having something like my story already in its dataset.
lordnacho 3mo ago
So now we'll have to investigate what "original" means? From what I can see, AI is absolutely able to create new work. Things that are not in the dataset, but look like they could be. This is pretty much what generalising means, they can make a wide variety of things that aren't actually in the original set but can hide in that set pretty well. When you are an original piece of culture, what do you mean by it?
- keiferski 3mo ago
  Can an AI write a story about living as an artist in NYC in 2026, the cultural environment, etc. without that information being added to the dataset immediately as it happens? It seems pretty obvious to me that there are cultural trends which are happening instantaneously and aren’t merely some sort of consequence of past historical data.
  - seanmcdirmid 3mo ago
    Ideally the AI would get none of its world knowledge from its model weights and would rely entirely on context. This is just an ideal though, we haven’t figured out how to completely separate world knowledge from the model.
  - lordnacho 3mo ago
    But how could something be a cultural trend without some sort of anchoring in history? I don't see why a computer (or a person) couldn't make up a plausible sounding story about a NYC artist of the present day? You would just reference things that don't change that much (artists having a boheme type existence, wild inequality in who can live off their art, NYC being a sort of place where people go to become successful).
d1l 3mo ago
Exactly. Shows us what is true in the sense of the experience of being a human. It is resilient against slop because good literature has experiential depth. Maybe LLMs learn to emulate this some day, but I doubt it. Not enough money in getting it right.
JKCalhoun 3mo ago
"…truly original in the way many high-quality fictional stories are." The older I get, the more "nothing new under the sun" returns again and again.
- Yousef9 3mo ago
  [dead]
- dimitrios1 3mo ago
  "I will say nothing new!" - St John of Damascus
amarant 3mo ago
Agreed! I find AI to be pretty decent at documenting and explaining technical stuff, which is a subgenre of non-fiction. I once tried telling it to write a fantasy novel for me because I didn't know what to read next. Gave it some examples of books I have enjoyed in the past so it would have an idea of my taste...God was that awful. Absolutely terrible idea. AI is not coming for fantasy authors jobs any time soon!
deadbabe 3mo ago
While you are right that humans can probably find some original ideas that are not just combinations of inputs, the universe of things that humans will find interesting to read is not that vast, and that’s why there are only really like 7 types of stories, and those are the ones that survive through a process of natural selection. Everything else is just not that interesting to a human.
oh_no 3mo ago
I have also thought about this a lot but have less developed views on fiction (short version: I don't currently want to read an LLM-written novel, but I expect that will change in the future and there will be some I enjoy) But I want to say that non-fiction books are a lot more resistant to LLMs than you might think. I'm reading two non-fiction books currently. And both (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17801.Underground https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17801.Underground, https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44824581-a-k-pop-live https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44824581-a-k-pop-live) could not have been written by an LLM. One is based on in-person interviews that were hard to set up, and the is based on a log of sources a number of which are going to live events. Not every book fits this pattern of course. But even a more straight forward book (https://www.goodreads.com/series/139929-designers-dragons https://www.goodreads.com/series/139929-designers-dragons) will often rely on sources that are not easily accessed by an LLM, they may not be digitized, or they may not be accessible in your common digital collections. I 100% think LLMs can do good synthesis work, don't really think we have the tooling/checking in place for them to write a competent non-fiction book yet, but that will certainly happen, but I still think the best and most interesting non-fiction remains firmly in the realm of humans. (Also, a lot of non-fiction is memoirs, travelogues, etc. which LLM can't really replace unless you're dictating to it.)
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
newguy1000 3mo ago
you have a bad imagination then

brrrrrm 3mo ago

Models are increasingly showing their ability to extrapolate into the human unexplored (math proofs being the most apparent). What gives you confidence the absurdity of life is uniquely difficult for models to source?

eddythompson80 3mo ago
Mathematical proofs are hard to come to, but easy (or “cheap”) to verify. Also having a math proof processed through a transformer to derive an output that matches existing proof patterns kid of makes sense. The former allows you to generate hundreds or thousands of iteration and cheaply verifying its correctness until you hit the right randomness level. Generating thousands of fiction books then verify them doesn’t really work. Most good fiction authors are trying to communicate a story that’s forming in their minds. Even when they get stuck, they are usually not stuck because they just don’t know anyone to ask. It would’t be their voice anymore. Some do seek input and those might experiment with llms for ideas. Using llms for research, technical questions, grammar, synonym sentences, word selection, etc makes sense too. I’d agree with OP for people generating full stories through llms. While I say that, I know a very young person who told a while back (like early ChatGPT 4 time) they use it to write fan fiction for books or characters they like.
keiferski 3mo ago
Math seems entirely unrelated to the human experience to me, at least in the sense of “this thing happened to me and I will transmute it into a work of art.” Math is pure abstraction.
Jtarii 3mo ago
Being able to write a series of logically correct sentences down is not the same thing as intuiting human emotional experience. Or even related.
sigbottle 3mo ago
I will readily admit that I didn't read Dostoevsky, and I don't continue to read Dostoevsky, because I've compared him against a swath of other fiction writers and authoritatively determined with some objective reproducible standard why his writing has been impactful and changed my life. I heard about Dostoevsky from a lot of people talking about depression when I was depressed, he resonated with me. Then when I came back to him half a decade later, having resolved more of my issues, I was able to evoke similar feelings but through a more mature lens. Do I reflect on the objectively correct structure of the story? Do I "agree" with everything Dostoevsky is saying? Not really. I don't know if this offends literature people or not. But this sure as hell is incompatible with the AI bro paradigm in which all thought can be objectively reduced to some shared standard to benchmark on. My position will be read into as deep irrationality from many opposing positions, but it's fine. Now, none of this doesn't "preclude* the ability for AI to have the same kinds of network effects. Of course it can - that's what I've been saying for the longest time. But don't confuse, becoming integrated with society, with this ideal of superhuman X. Now of course, you could argue, "there is no such thing as anything else besides becoming integrated with society. There is no other standard that works." Very good! Darwinian-adjacnet positions are interesting. This is a position - but then don't claim it's equivalent, or god forbid, the exact same, as the "super AGI" ontology. These require fundamentally different assumptions about what justified what, and an attempt to try and pretend otherwise is sophistry.

slim 3mo ago

LLMs are really only capable of combining different things into output what makes believe humans can do more than this ? it's a real question. I've seen a lot of people stating that the human mind "is more than this" as if it was obvious

gue-ni 3mo ago
Well since human culture has developed from very limited stone age culture into what we have today, we must conclude that at least _some_ people are capable of generating something that is genuinely new.
Jtarii 3mo ago
I would say the inherently chaotic and continuous nature of the human brain can create novelty in a fundamentally different way than LLMs can. Like a human can reach into the chaos of their own emotions and pull something unique out. There is some layer of the human experience where ideas can ferment and change based on all your memories is weird ways, and LLMs completely lack this, which makes things LLMs create very blunt and obvious. Like there is no nuance to anything they do.

jackbrookes 3mo ago

> LLMs are really only capable of combining different things into output > The magic and absurdity of life is a necessary thing to create such works. These two points seem slightly conflicting. Why if a human is truly more creative than AI, must it experience "the magic and absurdity of life" if it can be creative without "combining things into output"? Is a creative human then just not splicing and recombining their experiences into their creative output? And therefore, if an AI had more data that mirrors that experience in some way would it be sufficiently creative to create something "truly original"? My view is that intelligence and creativity is all just purely recombination. AI can do that well just as humans can. The gap is that the data humans have access to is much more analogue, emotional, and grounded in the real world compared to the data that AI is currently trained on.

snakeboy 3mo ago
> And therefore, if an AI had more data that mirrors that experience in some way would it be sufficiently creative to create something "truly original"? An important distinction seems to lie in a human having original experiences to draw from, while an AI has only "data that mirrors" experiences.
- exe34 3mo ago
  > while an AI has only "data that mirrors" experiences. True for a lot of current AI. With more robotic bodies, loads more access to cameras/audio/satellite/science measurements, an AI can have original experience on a level that can only be described as god-like compared to humans.
  - keiferski 3mo ago
    And at this point you’re far off into science fiction, and beyond reasonable discussion of this. Even then, it’s not really clear to me that an android with the exact appearance of a person will have the same experiences. They aren’t biological creatures with millions of years of evolution behind them.
  - kraai 3mo ago

sourcecodeplz 3mo ago

that is how humans do it too! they combine things, ideas. you can make LLMs do that to

awongh 3mo ago

> LLMs are really only capable of combining different things into output In terms of how writers think about creativity this doesn’t reflect reality- there’s the old writer’s saying that there are only 7 stories (and other variations of this idea) and that writing is about creatively remixing these well-worn ideas. The LLM’s capability to write acceptable fiction and nonfiction is coming soon if it’s not already here. (I think right now it still needs some high level input from humans, depending on length and topic) It’s clear to me that, especially as LLMs get better and better, there’s only one real difference- it’s that I don’t want to hear what an LLM has to say. I’m only interested in what other humans have to say. I feel the same way about AI music- even if it sounds ok, even as good as the kind of unoriginal pop music that’s not AI made (but is a kind of it’s own slop) or a bad committee made hollywood movie, it’s still fundamentally more interesting than something that’s been generated. Even if it’s 100% fiction it’s still based on a real human’s life experiences.

keiferski 3mo ago
This is a bit like saying “there are only five fundamental flavors” and everything is some combination of them. Maybe, but that has basically zero effect on the experience of actually eating food. Just because the form may be the same doesn’t mean an LLM will be able to supply original content.
- awongh 3mo ago
  I’m not sure I understand the analogy. You could say that the reason why artificial flavors work in food is because we know how to recreate flavors from first principle chemistry. The dislike of the artificialness of cheetos also doesn’t stop many many people from eating them. I would say human made slop writing isn’t any better or worse quality than LLM writing. Knowing if it was made by a real person makes a difference to me, but I also know it won’t to everyone.
  - keiferski 3mo ago
    Just because the form of a story is the same as another story does not imply that the content is interchangeable. I could write you a story right now about being an expat living in Poland in 2026. It’s unclear to me how an LLM would have the cultural knowledge or experience to write such a story that is actually accurate and up to date, without already having something like my story already in its dataset.

lordnacho 3mo ago

So now we'll have to investigate what "original" means? From what I can see, AI is absolutely able to create new work. Things that are not in the dataset, but look like they could be. This is pretty much what generalising means, they can make a wide variety of things that aren't actually in the original set but can hide in that set pretty well. When you are an original piece of culture, what do you mean by it?

keiferski 3mo ago
Can an AI write a story about living as an artist in NYC in 2026, the cultural environment, etc. without that information being added to the dataset immediately as it happens? It seems pretty obvious to me that there are cultural trends which are happening instantaneously and aren’t merely some sort of consequence of past historical data.
- seanmcdirmid 3mo ago
  Ideally the AI would get none of its world knowledge from its model weights and would rely entirely on context. This is just an ideal though, we haven’t figured out how to completely separate world knowledge from the model.
- lordnacho 3mo ago
  But how could something be a cultural trend without some sort of anchoring in history? I don't see why a computer (or a person) couldn't make up a plausible sounding story about a NYC artist of the present day? You would just reference things that don't change that much (artists having a boheme type existence, wild inequality in who can live off their art, NYC being a sort of place where people go to become successful).

d1l 3mo ago

Exactly. Shows us what is true in the sense of the experience of being a human. It is resilient against slop because good literature has experiential depth. Maybe LLMs learn to emulate this some day, but I doubt it. Not enough money in getting it right.

JKCalhoun 3mo ago

"…truly original in the way many high-quality fictional stories are." The older I get, the more "nothing new under the sun" returns again and again.

Yousef9 3mo ago
[dead]
dimitrios1 3mo ago
"I will say nothing new!" - St John of Damascus

amarant 3mo ago

Agreed! I find AI to be pretty decent at documenting and explaining technical stuff, which is a subgenre of non-fiction. I once tried telling it to write a fantasy novel for me because I didn't know what to read next. Gave it some examples of books I have enjoyed in the past so it would have an idea of my taste...God was that awful. Absolutely terrible idea. AI is not coming for fantasy authors jobs any time soon!

deadbabe 3mo ago

While you are right that humans can probably find some original ideas that are not just combinations of inputs, the universe of things that humans will find interesting to read is not that vast, and that’s why there are only really like 7 types of stories, and those are the ones that survive through a process of natural selection. Everything else is just not that interesting to a human.

oh_no 3mo ago

I have also thought about this a lot but have less developed views on fiction (short version: I don't currently want to read an LLM-written novel, but I expect that will change in the future and there will be some I enjoy) But I want to say that non-fiction books are a lot more resistant to LLMs than you might think. I'm reading two non-fiction books currently. And both (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17801.Underground https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17801.Underground, https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44824581-a-k-pop-live https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44824581-a-k-pop-live) could not have been written by an LLM. One is based on in-person interviews that were hard to set up, and the is based on a log of sources a number of which are going to live events. Not every book fits this pattern of course. But even a more straight forward book (https://www.goodreads.com/series/139929-designers-dragons https://www.goodreads.com/series/139929-designers-dragons) will often rely on sources that are not easily accessed by an LLM, they may not be digitized, or they may not be accessible in your common digital collections. I 100% think LLMs can do good synthesis work, don't really think we have the tooling/checking in place for them to write a competent non-fiction book yet, but that will certainly happen, but I still think the best and most interesting non-fiction remains firmly in the realm of humans. (Also, a lot of non-fiction is memoirs, travelogues, etc. which LLM can't really replace unless you're dictating to it.)

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

newguy1000 3mo ago

you have a bad imagination then