It's a form of low tech holodeck. You write the stories you want to read. I love these vintage pulp detective novels but no one writes them anymore so I write them myself for myself, and a few of my fellow weirdos on weird discords.
I suppose I am sympathetic to the feeling of having weird tastes uncatered to by the market. But in that instance, why not actually try and write such stories yourself? And as a reader, what is the appeal of reading stories regurgitated by a stochastic algorithm when the possibility is there instead of connecting to another human soul?
And, anyway, so what if they are bad? They are authentically the product of a single human soul rather than some grey-gruel average of millions. There is an awful lot of value in that.
What's the point of that? I mean, as you invent the story, you already know what happens next, even with your tree system, you're choosing what happens before the AI writes it. So what exactly do you get out of the AI writing it? The handful of sloppy details and stereotypical character traits the AI synthesizes without your explicit input? Sounds horrible. It seems like you're pivoting to "this tool is just a twist on roleplaying by yourself haha" due to the backlash in the comments and the intent has always been to write slop for others, not just yourself. The whole idea behind this makes no sense otherwise. And you know, it could have been a decent tool without the AI crap because story crafting surely can be tedious, because yes, multiple branches naturally grow from developing any creative idea really.
You might be interested in language models the same way lots of great artists in the past have been interested in generative art. Burroughs would be an example.
More broadly, you might be interested in language models because they are new, and you don't want to discount the value of new, constantly-evolving tools for your art form until you have explored them and understood their strengths and limitations.
I personally have not found language models very useful at all for serious work thus far. I am curious, though, about why many people are openly dismissive of the potential artistic value of what is an extremely new tool, and - maybe more importantly - those who choose to use it.
How other writers write doesn't strike me as any of my business, beyond what I can learn from their methods.
My friend was absolutely obsessed with writing character backgrounds and world setting stories using ChatGPT for a while. It took almost a year for him to come up for air and realize all the stories were effectively the same, and the hooks/tricks/twists were all very generic.
it can be addictive to tell stories with friends or world-build, so why not a 'friend'?
Comments
Why would you want to write fiction with language models? Serious question.
What you would become, in effect, is the fictional Soviet 'writer' from Sam Kriss' 2011 short story 'The Machine'.
https://samkriss.com/2011/10/01/the-machine/
I do not think there is anything to aspire to in that.
It's a form of low tech holodeck. You write the stories you want to read. I love these vintage pulp detective novels but no one writes them anymore so I write them myself for myself, and a few of my fellow weirdos on weird discords.
I suppose I am sympathetic to the feeling of having weird tastes uncatered to by the market. But in that instance, why not actually try and write such stories yourself? And as a reader, what is the appeal of reading stories regurgitated by a stochastic algorithm when the possibility is there instead of connecting to another human soul?
Oh I do. They are just utter garbage but that's beside the point.
This caters to a different lets say need.
Like I said in another post it's more like low tech holodeck or maybe create your own adventure. Where the story evolves based on simple directives
As someone once said, "Fail again. Fail better."
And, anyway, so what if they are bad? They are authentically the product of a single human soul rather than some grey-gruel average of millions. There is an awful lot of value in that.
Yeah not wrong. But as I said this is not a replacement tool for my writing but another hobby, akin to roleplaying maybe
What's the point of that? I mean, as you invent the story, you already know what happens next, even with your tree system, you're choosing what happens before the AI writes it. So what exactly do you get out of the AI writing it? The handful of sloppy details and stereotypical character traits the AI synthesizes without your explicit input? Sounds horrible. It seems like you're pivoting to "this tool is just a twist on roleplaying by yourself haha" due to the backlash in the comments and the intent has always been to write slop for others, not just yourself. The whole idea behind this makes no sense otherwise. And you know, it could have been a decent tool without the AI crap because story crafting surely can be tedious, because yes, multiple branches naturally grow from developing any creative idea really.
I'd love to hear some ideas about non ai tooling. I do write myself (terribly).
Maybe the tree system and branch switching would still work without attaching it to an LLM backend.
But the editor would have to be more advanced I think.
Would be cool to try and build something like that.
You might be interested in language models the same way lots of great artists in the past have been interested in generative art. Burroughs would be an example.
More broadly, you might be interested in language models because they are new, and you don't want to discount the value of new, constantly-evolving tools for your art form until you have explored them and understood their strengths and limitations.
I personally have not found language models very useful at all for serious work thus far. I am curious, though, about why many people are openly dismissive of the potential artistic value of what is an extremely new tool, and - maybe more importantly - those who choose to use it.
How other writers write doesn't strike me as any of my business, beyond what I can learn from their methods.
My friend was absolutely obsessed with writing character backgrounds and world setting stories using ChatGPT for a while. It took almost a year for him to come up for air and realize all the stories were effectively the same, and the hooks/tricks/twists were all very generic.
it can be addictive to tell stories with friends or world-build, so why not a 'friend'?
Yeah that's why I spend time on discords to share. You can very quickly fall into this llm psychosis adjacent place where you just go round and round
World building, story boarding/ story arc building, etc are great uses for an LLM in fiction.
Sure, if you don't actually want to do the work of, you know, making something