From what I understand of the professional writing process, this is actually more the fault of the editor. As a writer’s magnum opus and readership grows, there is increasing pressure on him to just write. Get the creative vision down.
That is why it is essential for a writer to choose an editor he/she trusts implicitly and who can ‘wield the hatchet’ remorselessly. As the writer’s creative vision balloons, so too must the editor’s resolve to cut away the excess.
The problem with AI writing is that I’ve become so used to mediocre ‘creative’ works already which might as well be AI generated that I might very well not notice it.
That’s the saucy cynical blurb. Here’s the actual scoop:
So, as I understand things, the chat bots use massive sample sets and algorithmic magic to predict next words, right? And you can get whole sentences and paragraphs, etc., which sound pretty close to human.
Now…
With a book, you need to build upon the last paragraph, using it as your ‘seed’ instruction. So in the short term, a little deviation from real isn’t noticeable, but over time, you can drift off course by large degrees. Like predicting the weather, you can get great accuracy up to 48 hours into the future, with geometrically diminishing reliability as you move forward in time. Anything past 10 days is basically fiction, as information entropy principles overwhelm the model.
I’d imagine that a book would pose similar problems. -You’d have to sample lots of book and story structures to stay on course.
It would take a lot of attention from a writer to stay on top of an AI to make sure it produces something meaningful to a human audience. I bet you’d spend as much time to craft a genuinely good book, even with AI help, as it would take to write it from scratch.
Think about 3D animation: is it any less expensive or less labor intensive to make a Pixar movie than it does a classically animated one? -I went to watch Wall-e with a couple of the animators who worked on similar projects and knew people directly in the production. -The labor breakdown was roughly this: Each animator was given a 10 - 30 second chunk of movie for which they were responsible, and they had a year to complete it. That doesn’t include the props department. What do they call it? The ‘assets’ people. And the background artists. And then there’s sound and story boarding, etc. A TON of work.
Was it any easier because a computer was doing the heavy lifting?
Nope. I’d say it was even MORE labor intensive than simple painted frame animation.
I think the AI fiction revolution is going to result in acres of mediocre, and people will naturally gravitate toward greatness, and there you will find people working just as hard as before, with human skills in demand. But those humans will likely need to be trained in working with AIs.
Whatever. It’s not our problem. It’ll be the kids who grow up with this stuff not knowing any differently who will paint the new world.
Just some thoughts.
Haha, you are so right.
It’s probably helpful at this point to link to someone who has actually used ChatGPT to write a full novel and who explains the process step-by-step with the output shown at each step. It’s eye-opening. No, the AI doesn’t just take a prompt and write a novel for you; yes, it will cut the work substantially, pretty much getting you past all the early phases, step by step with tweaking after each stage, and leaving a rough draft for rewrite and final edit. I think a first draft could be produced in a day or two, for someone who already knows the writing craft.
We shall certainly see novels churned out without any final polish, just as we see lots of ebooks churned through Calibre without awareness of how the end result should look, no editing, resulting in awful formatting.
It can be just a tool, as the author concludes:
As you can tell, it will still take time to completely flesh out those outlines, not to mention actually go through the writing itself.
But like I said, ChatGPT is a productivity tool. It will get you 50% of the way there, much faster than you could have done on your own.
It’s just up to you to do your part with the remaining 50%.
Of course, these are early days. It’s only going to get more capable as time passes. Sooner or later you’ll be able to prompt, “write a horror novel in the style of Stephen King with a female protagonist” and it’ll make one at least as good as most midlist fiction writers can produce, randomized to be fairly unique (as much as any story can be), with everyone dying horribly or wishing they were dead, like a King novel.
But such a thing would never be my novel. It would be a novel writen by Chappy for me. At best I would be the editor.
Isn’t that Carrie?
First, that’s why I think (much to my chagrin) that traditional publishing houses will reassert their role as gatekeeper of “quality” for the reader. The reader won’t have time to sort through all the AI-generated crap to get to the good stuff.
Second, I do think AI will help with the backend or with specific scenarios–kind of like a writing assistant. It will still be up to a person to fix and create the final product. Even if AI could do the job, if you don’t substantially rewrite to the point where the AI doesn’t really have anything in the manuscript, you won’t be able to claim a copyright. And that is the key issue. What good is creating a decent midlist novel if everyone could take the book and sell it under their name?
We are tinkering with Chat GPT ourselves and have already found two practical uses for it.
First is that it does a serviceable job as a level one tech support bot for common user inquiries. We have to monitor it and actively control the data sources it pulls from, but we are seeing net gains in efficiency/costs though not huge ones yet.
The surprising to me anyway additional use is writing initial drafts of user manuals and documents. It still requires a knowledgeable human to fact check and fix the occasional odd grammar structures, but it can even insert open source illustrations and common regulatory notices/info such as FCC emissions stuff.
OTOH speaking more broadly, one thing that worries me is that despite the alleged efforts to reduce them, the number of “hallucinations” seem to be increasing.
eg. recently we tasked it with creating some documentation that involved fiber optic cabling specs etc. and it asserted that “under optimum conditions” the data transmission was faster than the speed of light. 
The only reason for that hallucination I can think of is that there are some papers out there that have proposed that is theoretically possible under very specific circumstances , though they have yet to be seen/proven in the real world.
PS: One area where it seems to hallucinate a lot is with broad demographic data on something innocuous like the number of left handed people in the US where it vastly overstated (1 in 4) where the generally accepted data we’ve seen is between 1:6 to 1:8 in the general population
I think we’re going to start valuing a “Confirmed Human Vetted” tag on pages at some point. (I don’t know how you enforce that).
Why do we need that?
Well…, how do you check to see, to take the example you brought up, what the actual ratio of Left-handed to Right-handed people is? Well…, you check the internet, but as the number of articles written by AI increases, at some point the AI is going to slip into self-confirmation bias as it starts referencing itself.
Right now, we’re still rooted in human collected knowledge sets, but 20 years from now, there will be people in the professional world whose memories of reality will perforce be disconnected from old hard data, and be working more and more within the realm of AI hallucinations.
Old people, man! We have value. We can’t afford to die off just yet. Who is going to keep the ship righted?
Can we get a t-shirt with this saying? 
:vb-agree:
As I continued playing around with the ChatGPT app on my iPad mini, I discovered a valid use for it: generating characters for RPG games. Here’s one I got for Skyrim.
Prompt:
Give me background and motivation for a young Nord girl who grew up in Cyrodiil and recently lost her parents to a Dark Brotherhood assassination from Skyrim. Among the assassins was a little girl vampire. Give her a unique Nord name and start the story in the Bruma jail. Dragons have reappeared in Skyrim but she is not the Dragonborn.
Chappy:
In the frozen town of Bruma, amidst the towering mountains of Cyrodiil, lived a spirited young Nord girl named Astrid Skjoldr. From a young age, she grew up hearing enchanting stories of Skyrim, her ancestral homeland, from her parents who had migrated to Cyrodiil in pursuit of a better life. These tales instilled in Astrid a sense of longing to one day venture to Skyrim herself.
However, tragedy struck when her parents fell victim to a ruthless assassination orchestrated by the infamous Dark Brotherhood from Skyrim. Among the shadows of her parents’ demise lurked a haunting presence—an enigmatic little girl vampire, whose chilling gaze haunted Astrid’s dreams.
Left orphaned and grief-stricken, Astrid found herself imprisoned in Bruma’s jail under suspicious circumstances. The local authorities, unfamiliar with her Nord heritage, mistakenly connected her to the assailants. But within the confines of her cell, Astrid harbored a burning desire for justice and vengeance.
Meanwhile, rumors of the dragons’ resurgence in Skyrim spread like wildfire throughout Tamriel. Although she knew she was not the Dragonborn destined to thwart these mythical beasts, Astrid’s heart couldn’t ignore the plight of her homeland. Determined to unravel the truth behind her parents’ assassination and seeking answers about the little vampire girl, Astrid knew her journey had to lead her to Skyrim.
After a daring escape from Bruma’s jail, she set forth on a treacherous quest, her heart torn between finding closure for her past and the responsibility of protecting Skyrim from the dragon threat. Along the way, Astrid would encounter a diverse cast of characters, forge unexpected alliances, and uncover dark secrets that would challenge her beliefs about the world she thought she knew.
In the land of Skyrim, amidst the renewed chaos of dragons, Astrid Skjoldr’s tale of resilience, revenge, and redemption would unfold—a young Nord girl who, though not the Dragonborn, carried the flame of determination in her heart, striving to bring justice to those who wronged her and find solace in the cold embrace of her ancestral home.
Pretty generic but not bad. It clearly “understood” Skyrim’s setting. Because of that, I wonder if naming the protagonist the same as the leader of the Dark Brotherhood was “intentional” irony. Regardless, I could roll with this. I had the Penitus Oculatus mod in mind, thus the assassination and vampire child in the prompt. The mod has your character eventually hunt down Babette as a member of that organization. The Skyrim Unbound mod has a Bruma jail start and has a non-dragonborn option.
This can be fun. 
I have NO IDEA what that is all about, but sounds a bit like a female version of Conan the Barbarian meets Terminator…
What immediately came to mind was whether it will write, direct, and produce Mission Impossible 35 entirely from AI components - no wonder the writers and actors are on strike…
The thing which kills me is why can’t it do anything actually useful?
Prompt:
I found this while reading through the Ars comments on the USCO topic.
Here’s a very recent project where you’re creating the semantic composition and describing each region:
There’s also LoRAs that let you extend the network with custom concepts like if you want to have AI-generated pictures of your dog instead of generic dogs. There’s control nets that lets you manipulate human poses almost like string puppets. There’s dragnets to let you stretch, shrink and move objects with your mouse.
Long story short, if you’re really into fine tuning your work the generative AI is getting closer and closer to being “smart Photoshop”
It’s interesting how the notion of a “prompt” has evolved from a simple text description into a more hand-on visual approach, that blurs the line of human-machine creativity.
I can imagine that there will be courses taught in colleges specifically on using these types of “painting tools” and there will be experts who will be hired based on there proficiency at generating precise, stylistic compositions.
And as an appreciator of fine art, I’d say “Just learn to paint da*n it!”
Actually, there is quite a difference in worlds between fine art and commercial art. A lot of finer aesthetic considerations take back seat when you are doing work for a business, who is generally more interested in look & feel, branding, and visual impact.
I’ve worked with several clients who would give me directions very similar to the “yellow umbrella, woman in the white dress” rough sketch, and my job would be essentially identical to what the AI is doing: generating concepts and iterating the tonal scheme and details until the client is happy.
What’s more is some clients get so caught up in the process, they feel they are actually “co-artists”; they genuine feel had substantive input into the creation of the piece.
So at least in the business world, we are very far down the line of this kind directed visual composition as the basis for most artwork, as opposed the truly inspired works in the tradition of old masters.
I know you are right, but that doesn’t make it any more palatable.
In some ways this could be along the lines of what happened in music with the arrival of sampling. When it first arrived it was derided only as a rip off or other artists original work (and in some cases it actually was just that), but it fairly quickly was used to create genuine art.
The groups De La Soul and Big Audio Dynamite come to mind.
And when you break it down to it’s very core, visual art is just shapes and colors put together in a unique and pleasing way.
Just as music is just tones and rhythms at it’s very core.
I do think steps need to be taken to prevent wholesale rip offs of artists work versus using one work as inspiration or expansion of ideas in to a new one.
My $.02 anyway
There’s a quote by Debussy, “Music is the space between the notes.”
which is echoed by many classical composers:
“It’s the space you put between the notes that make the music.” — Massimo Vignelli
“The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.” — Mozart
“The most important thing in music is what is not in the notes.” — Pablo Casals
So I think at a certain stage of the creative experience, the art form actually transcends the medium. It’s this quality of gestalt that I think will be the final frontier for AI.
Yeah exactly, it’s the human element of truly creating that will never be replicated. I see this as just another tool, crutch, or kludge all dependent of the user deploying it.
And to your point about the space between the notes…
My daughter’s art and music teacher in high school as part of her curriculum took the same song, recorded by the original writer, but also much more famously by a renowned singer, though now passed away.
The song is " I will always love you" originally written and sung by Dolly Parton, but also recorded by Whitney Houston for the movie “The Bodyguard”
Even though they are the same song with the same lyrics and roughly the same tempo, they could not be more different in delivery and feel.
IMHO Dolly’s version is the essence of subtlety and feeling while Whitney’s is all bombast and I greatly prefer Dolly’s version.
BTW: Please don’t take this as a knock on Whitney Houston who was to my mind an otherwise incredibly gifted singer and performer. I just think this song was a rare, but major miss on her part. OTOH my wife loves her version.
I agree with you on this one, and I’m neither a Dolly Parton nor country music fan. It’s almost like the difference between a ballad and a “power ballad” in lay terms - especially when Houston cranks it up with “AND IIIIIIEYIIIIII WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU>>>” but that’s also a function of her better range and vocal power over Parton.
I’ve had a conversation with (hopelessly optimistic) art friends before, and the conclusion he came to was that, now that AI exists, art skills and knowledge is MORE important than ever before.
My thought is the complete opposite. You need to have enough art skills and knowledge to surpass and then continuously outpace the drudgery art of the AI. Once that happens, then it’s more important than ever. But getting to that point becomes an increasingly unpleasant experience.
While we can laugh at the comically bad AI produced creative works, there are a bunch of techbros (and scarier, dedicated hobbyests) who are pushing the boundaries. While constantly being angry at the ai onslaught is probably very bad for one’s mental health, mocking the concept is a sure fire way to have it overtake your job overnight.
My 2 cents
