5 ms·
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'
by jdw64 2mo ago
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 2mo agoGet 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.
- swat535 2mo agoIronically, I wonder if all these AI stuff is going to spin up a new industry for "organic content" that is verified to be human produced. Then they would be selling at a higher price due to this, increasing the profits for digital authors.
- _diyar 2mo agoEven 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 2mo agoSome people may continue using AI and publish books but the amount of AI slop would be dramatically lower without extrinsic motivations.
- sieve 2mo agoI 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.
- epolanski 2mo agoBut why would I want to read that? Just give me the prompt at this point.
- sieve 2mo agoYou 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 2mo agoI 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 2mo ago'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 2mo agoYes, 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.
- grey-area 2mo agoIt’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.
- ajsnigrutin 2mo ago"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 2mo agoI 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 2mo agoSpamming online marketplaces with massive amounts of slop. Even if you only get a few sales per book, you win in volume.
- photios 2mo agoI'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 2mo agoI 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.