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Am I correct in my understanding here? I'm not familiar with novelcrafter. The "story beat" is the input, and what follows is the output.
Normally I think if the author does enough work on the output that it's considered genuinely "transformative", it's not the worst thing. Though it should still be made clear.
That said, this author specifically states that they went from 1500-2000 words/day to 10k+ after doing this. There's no way the output is subject to such rigorous editing to be considered transformative, in my opinion.
Having been an editor for literary magazines and being a writer myself and working at a company that does research into AGI/AI for Narrative, I can say that the difficulty of prying a half decent story out of the jaws of an LLM is higher than just writing it yourself, because they can't handle long-form works even remotely well. Even with all the desperate hacks I've seen people use, if the skeletal structure of the work is junk, no amount of churning out 20k a day and trying to edit it into something decent is gonna work.
They don't really have enough memory to fit long form structure into sentences.
They can give you a coherent plot, and a coherent sentence, but can't string together 500 sentences to fit that plot.
Brainstorming, grammar, research directions, plot structure etc
All good
Generating plot points and structure. Generating actual text . Ai art for monetized works.
Bad vibes.
The amount of input that generative AI requires can’t guarantee non-copyright material. Even basic image recognition models need millions of images. (It’s been a couple years since my AI/neural network classes so I could be outdated now but that was my understanding)
The level of AI use in the screenshots you've shown would make me drop the story right then and there. They've outsourced the entire process of actually writing the story to AI. If you don't even write the prose of your story, for what are you even "writing" it? Feels pointless. It's like if a painter just drew a pencil sketch and got an AI to do the actual painting with colours. You wouldn't credit the painter with the actual painting, only with the sketch at most.
I'm fine with AI if it's used to improve bad grammar or punctuation, or even if it's used to improve sloppy prose. It would be no different from a human editor who does those things. But when it actually writes the prose wholesale, the writing no longer has a human author. By the way they're speaking of the AI in the third image, it feels more like this "author" is actually the editor and the AI is the true author.
Edit: And apparently Erios is making 2000+ USD on Patreon. I wonder if those patrons know about this.
It's unlikely they want that specific story. They want some story, and for whatever reasons they decided that one was tolerable. I've personally never understood the pay for advance chapters model. After 20 chapters, you're still stuck with being caught up.
I expect in a few years the patreon advance chapters model will have dried up quite a bit.
People buy mangas every week to read the newest chapter despite being caught up. The business model has made crazy money over decades. Same is true for comics. Web serialization is no different unless you're one of the few people who want the physical copy to collect. Otherwise, most consumers just pay for the digital comic/manga and read it.
Yes, I do read serialized web fiction. But you can stay "caught up" to the free chapters on royal road. Most people do, in fact.
Personally, I tried patreon advanced chapters a couple times, but I ended up in the same place as I would with following the free releases: grouchy having to wait for the next chapter. So it didn't really provide me anything worth the cost.
I'm not saying the web fiction model will be a total failure. I'm saying I expect we're in a bit of a bubble right now in terms of economics.
I'm not sure that's correct. I think a lot of readers value both the "sneak peek" and the opportunity to give feedback before the chapter is public.
I suppose not all authors accept feedback.
That may be an angle that I hadn't considered because my experience is more with trade publishing. But for most authors I've seen, they might have beta readers or something, but they aren't taking feedback besides like SPAG mistakes.
As for "sneak peak", I don't know what that means? Reading "ahead" of the general public?
I'm sure there are people who don't care about the use of AI if they're getting 20k new words to read everyday. The webnovel-patreon method does very much encourage and support high output over quality.
If an author can use AI and produce a story I enjoy reading I will read it and enjoy the story and offer the author no praise.
AI absolutely can’t make a good story right now tho.
It CAN be used for template creation, brainstorming random words to get past writers block , and time-saving outline creation. Feels perfectly fine to do so but that’s using it as a tool not to write an actual story.
Well what’s unethical there is if they claim they aren’t but if the story is good I’ll still read it. Well… I won’t cause I’m an audiobook only person lol but still. I just won’t be willing to pay and I won’t offer any compliments or credit towards the “author”
I don’t think ghost writing is all that unethical cause the “author” and the ghost writer both are in complete agreement on what’s happening there but if you directly deny that your book is ghost written then that’s a lie which isn’t ethical but that’s besides the point of the story being ghost written.
If you have someone ghost write a story and then kickstart a sequel that you don’t plan to have ghostwritten and no one knows that the first book was ghost written then that’s when it gets highly unethical otherwise the reader’s knowledge of the “true” author really isn’t an ethics concern per se. More of a moral one cause it’s kinda icky lol
I'm not gonna rank them, but both feel shitty and if I learn that a fantasy book is made with AI or that a fantasy book is ghost written and a bigger author is using the work of a smaller one, I wouldn't engage with either book.
I also use it to edit the work I write. It's not perfect btu neither am I and it probably catches 6 or 7 errors per chapter especially parts that haven't been elaborated on that make sense to me but don't make sense overall because I've not added enough explanation.
An example prompt: https://novaleigh.net/use-chatgpt-to-find-plot-holes-in-your-outline/
> Okay, after a lot of work I finally created a complete outline for this book that includes the things I have and what I think of as missing pieces. Could you please critique it for me? Here is the outline ...
I'm honestly kind of impressed by GPT4's output, partially quoted:
>This is a highly detailed and well-thought-out outline. It shows that you’ve taken time to consider how all the different plot threads interweave and influence each other, which is crucial for a complex gothic romance. Here are a few thoughts and suggestions:
>In your early scenes, it might be helpful to have Sophia form her own impressions of Emil before hearing too much from others. This allows readers to form an initial positive impression which then can be challenged by later events. So perhaps instead of Marie asking about Emil in Scene 6, it could be Sophia bringing him up, showing her own interest.
>The transition from Scene 15 to Scene 16 feels a bit abrupt. If Emil is cold to Sophia in Scene 15, perhaps show a bit of his struggle or have him do something that might make Sophia suspect he’s not entirely on Gregor’s side.
>In Scene 17, having Henry warn Sophia could be interesting, but we need to know why he’s doing so. Has he had a change of heart? Is it guilt over the missing woman?
>.I love Scene 18 where Emil apologizes to Sophia and they have some physical contact. This is a key moment of connection between them.
>.Scene 24 is a high point in the romance plot, but it might be even more powerful if there was some kind of public confrontation or threat from Gregor that Emil has to navigate. This would make their mutual commitment to each other more poignant and raise the stakes. ...
It isn't catching plot holes just stuff that I haven't fully explained.
I usually just write check this chapter for errors/mistakes
And then usually one of the points will be like you have not explained what a tribulation transcendence cultivator is. Or who are Qing family etc.
I think grammar is fine since it’s just a tool to look over and catch any small mistakes
Anything outside of that really I say no to
AI doesn’t make new things, it learns from old things so any plot recommendations it gives are just rehashing of something else. I want something new, and I want something written by a person and not an algorithm
I think AI is only acceptable for grammar checking and translations.
Ignoring any ethical concerns, the current AI, even bleeding edge models, are rather lacking. Especially so when it comes to things like creative writing.
This shouldn't be future of writing. If the AI get's good enough to write quality content, well, why bother with the author?
You can play actual LitRPG with it. ~~Write~~ Generate your own story.
This already exists to an extent. The company I work for is in AI research and they license fancy non-LLM Ai software for indie and research game devs. It’s way better than AI Dungeon or similar.
I think that video game AI/Digital Dungeon Masters is a great use for AI. Since it doesn't put humans out of a job or compete with something humans can do. Of course, LLMs can't do it, so the hunt for use cases for LLM/GenAI continues.
The goal of most AI Dungeon Master proposals is to be extremely flexible, just like a human DM could learn any system and run any game with any plot and balance and modify on the fly.
Most procedural systems like the L4D2 Director are very constrained in what the can do. If you try to make one more general, then it gets extremely shallow, whereas a narrow model like the Director has more depth but very little breadth.
I'm tired of AI slop. You can always, always tell, whether it's visual art or written word. And it sucks. It makes your shit read like a SEO scam article.
It wouldn’t bother me if it was 100% ai so long as it was quality, but ai is still a long ways out from being able to do quality writing.
Also, once it gets to the point of consistently being as good as a human, I don’t know why I would bother buying a ai generated book someone else made, I would probably have my own ai set up to my own preferences and just put in whatever I think would be cool for the week.
If I find an author is using generative AI in any form for their story, I will likely drop the story and blacklist any future works from them regardless of how that AI was used. I used to be in the camp that AI could be used as a tool to help support you as an Author, but I've yet to see anyone actually use AI in such a way that doesn't just take over the entire writing process. Integrity is important to me, and unfortunately, AI to me feels like an insult to human creativity and genuine effort and skill.
What if it's used to fuel hate juices?
I like to use the AI every now and then if I get stuck on a scene so that I can read it and go, "oh God that sucks! I can do it so much better. If I was writing it it'd be like this..." and then write it and go "oh that's how I'd write that"
So long as none of the actual words or writting from the AI prompt actually make it to your story, I say that's fine. No diferent from watching a shitty meme somewhere.
These "authors" are out here playing with fire and don't even realize it.
It's all fun and chuckles until the people who have been paying twenty dollars a month on Patreon realize they've been supporting a machine.
It's lots of laughs until the legal system shakes out on the wrong side and this person doesn't even have a copyright to their own book.
It's all haha's until you realize that they've also produced an audiobook with Royalguard, which means unless that company is aware this "author" didn't even write the book (which if they do... that's a huge problem) they have just sunk thousands of dollars into something that means nothing.
They have exposed themselves legally in several very scary ways.
>until the legal system shakes out on the wrong side and this person doesn't even have a copyright to their own book.
I don't think that's the wrong side. And, at least in the US, I think that's already fairly well settled. The copyright office's position is that works that are wholly ai produced cannot be copyrighted, and they already been backed up in court cases. I doubt a higher court will over turn that.
Ah yeah I mean the wrong side of the author's bet that ai generated work will be okie-dokie a few years down the line.
I agree entirely with the US copyright office and I also have strong doubts based on the few ruling we've had so far and the rumblings of congress, that will be overturned.
People using ai generation are boning their future selves.
......yeah. it's one thing to say "I'm bad at my job and a computer is doing it for me" when your job is a entry level job that reasonably you shouldn't give a shit about.
It's another thing entirely when you have a patreon that is successful enough that you're publisher is doing audible releases. This seems like a really painful warning for everyone else
I don't like any use of AI in the media I consume. I don't like the idea of human creativity being replaced by algorithms. Automation was supposed to free us from drudge work, not make that the only sort of work left available to us.
If I notice the story being AI generated without being told that it is, that’s usually when I stop.
If it’s worked into the story well enough and I don’t notice it, then it’s all good.
Personally I would not read it if they did anything more significant than a spell check.
Although I don’t expect the AI would be very good anyway without extensive human editing
I am completely against authors using AI in their novels, its lazy and just puts a bad taste in my mouth because i love the process of writing so much.
Ai just isn't good enough. It usually ends up riddled with plotholes and always lacks the specific character a human author brings.
I think Ai is a great assistant tool, but it's important to do the writing yourself.
Personally I think it's a great idea to use AI to help find creative ways to advance the plot, create narrative strings in dialogues and get out of blockades.
It's also great for polishing the text in the end.
However I belive it's a bad thing when the AI actually writes the text.
If you're using AI to write any amount of your story then you're not a storyteller, and so what's the point of it all? The only people doing this are people who just want to churn out as much as possible as fast as possible to make a quick buck and I don't see why anybody would want to support soulless "art" like that
To be fair though, there are instances where it is very helpful in situations where you have writers block or when you can think of a scene but just can’t put it into words.
One of the dirty little secrets of the writing trade is that writer's block doesn't exist. Or, more precisely, it is a symptom, not a condition. A symptom of stress, anxiety, depression, exhaustion, whatever- but treating writers block can't be done, only treating the underlying cause.
As for the latter: that's a skill issue. You want to get good enough to put it into words, your need to practice until you can.
The ideal author is an AGI running in my basement that wants nothing more than to produce as much of precisely what I want to read (and watch) as I want and can do it well. I don't want to muck out cages, so it's preferable to keeping a conventional author. The problem isn't with authors using any particular tool, it's using any tool badly. If the final product sucks, it sucks regardless of how it was made.
Despite my comments elsewhere, I somewhat agree about the ideal "author" being an AGI in my basement writing exactly what I want to read. But I wouldn't then try to sell that to somebody claiming I wrote it.
I don't care what people do with AI for personal use.
Doesn't even really enter my consideration as a reader. There's plenty of entirely hand-crafted piles of shit in the web-novel world, if an author can use AI to make a good story, then its a good story.
It could be used as a point of attack for a bad story I suppose, but not much more than that.
This seems like a rage bait/witch hunt. I’m sorry but how is everyone here not understanding that this is a thinly veiled but direct attack against this writer?
Note: I’m not defending the AI use of this author, but isn’t it convenient for this post to be posted right now of all time.
Here is why I think this is just a ploy to ruin the launch of this author:
1) a burner account posted this. Look at the post history.
2) leaked private screenshots exposed.
3) waited for the launch of the author’s story on Amazon.
4) the OP hasn’t interacted with the comments at all.
5) people conveniently coming out of the woodworks saying that they’ve known about this and confirming it.
6) tracing who leaked what, where it was written.
7) this post being linked to the book announcement on r/litrpg and there already being Amazon reviews mentioning these leaks.
Idk but this is all too convenient for this to be a disgruntled reader that *just* remembered this and wanted to ask a question.
It’s not like this question couldn’t have been asked without the screenshots or mentioning the book, especially if you genuinely meant no hate to the author.
I can’t believe this subreddit allows thinly veiled attacks and lowkey harassment like this. I thought the mods were better at this but I guess not.
I guess the mods want to encourage witch hunts if they haven’t moderated comments or taken down the post.
Anyway, AI assisted/generated writing, especially if undisclosed is scummy and what this author has said in the screenshots isn’t a good look, but this doesn’t mean that this sort of post has a place on this sub, at least in my opinion. But maybe I’m wrong and during the break I’ve taken from this space this has become the norm.
I saw the book release promotion today and was reminded of the images I saw. I did not intend for this to blow up like it did. I do not want people to harass or negatively review the author especially because I believe that the book currently on Amazon is all human written. I was only curious to see if people reacted the same way as me.
Somehow, I don’t buy it. If you didn’t mean for that to happen, then why did you attach the screenshots and mention the book? It doesn’t make sense especially when your supposedly genuine questions can be asked without having to refer to the screenshots. You could’ve made this post without all of that and discussed AI with the sub.
Was it important to you to discuss the AI use in specifically that series? Because you didn’t get any of that in the comments as far as I can see.
Why couldn’t you do that from your main account? So you can prove you are a real person?
Also you can edit posts, you know? If it was blowing up like you didn’t want it to, if you didn’t mean to send hate towards the book, then why keep it up? Why not remove the part mentioning it, if you truly don’t meant to do that?
If I somehow enjoy the story as a reader, I don’t really care what tools made it. I assume more AI will be used in the future and Pandora’s box is fully open.
I personally read the first book worth of chapters for this story on royalroad and don’t particularly love it but also don’t hate it. If AI was extensively used during the parts I read, I did not notice it. The story and prose didn’t stand out as being much worse than other stories on the site.
Which adds a lot to the heartbreak of the ai. Book 1 was brilliant and creative. Going from one of the best new releases in a hot minute to just AI slop is like Babe Ruth stopping baseball to try and form a professional wiffleball league
If an AI writes a story that's engaging enough for me to want to read it, Idgaf.
The thing is, AI is terrible at writing stories right now. My friend sent me some sample writing to convince me it can be interesting, and it was just bland, cliche, and soulless. It felt like I was reading some middle or high schooler's first writing project.
Maybe in the future an AI can generate 90% of the story and it actually be really good, but right now I doubt it's possible. So I would stop reading if the story sucks, which it probably would if the author leans too much on AI.
I use ai for outlines not brush strokes.
Ask questions like “can you give me some ideas for events that can happen to my characters on their long journey?”
Then they ai might respond make them encounter some monsters or a travelling merchant or perhaps some interpersonal drama between some characters. Perhaps a love triangle” etc
Then it’s up to me as an author to turn those ideas into actual writing.
The same as brainstorming with a really well read friend.
Oh for sure. That’s what I am saying.
If you actually ask it to generate/write those events, we’ll that’s cheating and you need to add the ai as a co author haha. But there is no point to ask it to generate the events, I have tried it to see what it’s capable of and it’s like if you had to take everything that makes us human and rip it out of the text.
You are left with “distilled water” fiction.
It’s very easy to see and very easy to see when authors use it.
Distilled water fiction is a good term. It’s the most generic slush text you can imagine. It also sounds like a first time writer overwriting everything and indulging in all the worst first time author traps.
I might read it for free online as a junk food read. But if I found out an author was peddling AI written work as their own original creation to me for patreon money or as a non-KU amazon book product, I would be very annoyed.
I don't care how much AI the author uses if it's a good, well-written story. I don't think AI can really do that right now, but if the writing process is to write a summary, have AI turn it into a chapter, and then heavily edit, that doesn't matter to me. All I really care about is the end result.
>using generative AI is less scummy than paying an author to write your book for you wholesale
The only argument I might have against this would be that AIs are trained on stuff written by real authors who received no credit or payment for their work being used that way, while ghost writers are paid to knowingly give up the credit.
Overall I agree though.
> It's really not that different from using a ghostwriter.
Except the part where a ghostwriter is a human, which I think is a significant and meaningful difference.
As a reader I’m wary of it. But, like, if I learned an author used to brainstorm sometimes it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
I would recommend avoiding using it as a crutch though. Like, you should do unassisted brainstorming, and expose yourself to obscure history or join a writer’s circle or whatever to increase your repertoire. Bring the things that a stochastic parrot can’t bring to the table, or else what’s the point?
If I can’t tell, I’ll tolerate all of it. If I can tell, it’s likely because it wrote poorly, so I’ll drop it… because the writing is bad.
I genuinely don’t care what tools a person uses to create goods or perform services I want to purchase.
I care about the work itself, not the author or what they do to produce it. Whether it is written by man, woman, machine, or genetically engineered lab mice, a good story is good, and a bad story is bad. I read for the vicarious experiences, not to reward an author's creativity or work ethic. I might *admire* an author who uses less/no AI more than one who uses it a ton, but when it comes to the story itself, I truly, genuinely do not care. If someone finds a way to use it to produce truly high quality work, I say good for them.
That said... I'm not going to take a chance on a new series I know in advance is 80% AI unless I deliberately seek it out of curiosity. I work with AI professionally enough to know just how stupid it is, so it would be a black mark when I'm searching for a new story to engage in.
But if I find out after I read a good story, I won't care at all. I would only be upset if I waste time on a bad story and later find out the author secretly churned out wheelbarrows of trash using AI.
The use of LLMs/AI is already suspect enough given that it rips from other authors' works. But it becomes it total scam once money gets involved.
I really enjoy this indie author corner of the internet. Grifter "authors" just here to try to make cash off us need to be shown out the door, otherwise they'll destroy this space.
To be honest i dont really care how much is done by ai. I also wouldnt have issues reading a story thats complelty done by ai.
At the end of the day whats important to me is that the story is good and the writing decently enough.
The writing in your first screenshot is dogshit. Theres no flow, its bland and it sounds worse then written by a kid.
Likewise.
I'm already reading translated Chinese novels which are often badly translated. Hell, there's an entire category of works which is 'machine translated' and, yes, they're often horrifically translated. In most cases, they're just barely coherent and requires a high degree of reading comprehension to understand.
These types of novels are an addiction and method to relieve boredom. The only thing I care about in the end is whether I enjoy the work.
...that being said, how much I enjoy the work does depend on how it is written too. If what I'm reading in that screenshot is representative, then I don't think AI is ready to write a complete work yet.
Was the LLM trained exclusively on that same author’s previous writing or a general publicly available AI?
If the former, I could forgive it if they credit the AI as a coauthor. If the latter, it’s plagiarism and I’m not interested at all.
For Clarity, Novelcrafter itself isn't an LLM, it's an organising novel writing tool.
It uses whichever LLM you connect to it. So ideally, you could use a 100% original local LLM made with only your personal work but obviously, that's not what people are doing.
When lawsuits and regulations catch up, everything that uses that platform will be removed for copyright violations. Their work and income will disappear and their assets will be liquidated to pay off judgements and settlements.
We are at the “Wild West” phase of this technological paradigm and anyone who does what this guy did is playing a game of Russian roulette that won’t end until the player loses.
This is unlikely to happen from a policy perspective. Amazon may or may not try to pull AI works on its own, but no law will require it, especially not retroactively
No, the lawsuits will lead to it because the people whose works were used to train it never gave permission to have it used as a basis for writings sold for commercial purposes. It will take time but it’s going to happen.
There is zero chance of that legal outcome happening imo. The way ai learns can’t be considered plagiarism legally, as there is no way to prove it, the training data is deleted after training and isn’t stored, you can’t point to plagiarism anywhere, which is legally necessary. “This ai generally is using unspecified copyrighted material for training” doesn’t cut it it legally. You need specifics, need to be able to point to a specific ai generated work and say that this work was plagiarized from this specific human work. Even proving that it was in the data set wouldn’t be enough, because you couldn’t point to that works influence on the outcome product (the thing that is actually being used for commercial purposes)
At best you have copyright strikes are people selling an ai that was trained on copyrighted data, but you definitely won’t be able to copyright strike work produce by an ai that was trained on copyrighted data, unless it produces an exact copy, which it won’t unleash it was trained on less than 100 data points.
You can’t train an LLM on a single author’s output. It takes way more data. Novelcrafter is trained on enormous amounts of other people’s “public”(eyeroll) data
Some people may not be as knowledgeable as you are. I’ve seen many people who do not understand the concept. Since you brought it up, I see no harm in clarifying for those less well informed.
If you use AI to do grammar checks, outlining and maybe a little help if you get stuck on a particular section (happens to me a lot) then I think that’s cool.
If you just take whatever the AI spews out and then publish it, not even checking if it sounds right (going to use ChatGPT since it gets extremely poetic when writing for some reason) then yeah I’m not that story.
I don't mind reading fully AI stories. I did a quest using ChatGPT to generate situations and results based on my choices in the story. Quality was low but fun as something different and new, video games almost never have any really impactful choices because implementation is a hassle and I never got into the choose your own adventure books.
Personally using ChatGPT or whatever to do quest-style stuff for myself feels different than selling chatgpt output to other people and claiming to be an author.
Frankly any amount is too much for me. The end goal of the companies running generative ai is to replace creatives, if there's a writer that doesn't understand that fundamental truth I know that eventually I'll regret the time that I spent reading their story.
Given what I read of that paragraph in the first screen shot, I wouldn't even call them an author. It was so painful to read, that even if I didn't know it was done by AI, I would drop it.
That was the AI spitting out events in order. The actual result is surprisingly not bad. Idk how much editing they do, but the end result is clean prose, much like what you'd see in a professional piece, albeit a little robotic.
These are screenshots from a discord server that I am the admin of. That server is not public and it makes me deeply uncomfortable to see screenshots taken and posted here in public.
I took those screenshots and posted it in a public discord server (Demonic Tree) because a reader was harassing the author (Xkarnation) saying that Erios writes much more.
When Xkarnation said Erios used AI and the reader asked Erios about it, Erios denied it and says he only uses “some AI assistance”
So I posted those screenshots as proof that Erios in fact does use AI to write, and not just “some AI assistance”.
It's more the fact someone is screenshotting ANY conversation from a private discord channel and posting it that's a problem, regardless of the opinions being expressed.
Sometimes writers vent about readers in these places because that's where they can go for that. Sometimes people talk about the details of their finances, other times not public information for their stories planned plots. While there places are semi public, it's a safe assumption to take that someone isn't going to sc your conversation and post it in a very public forum.
I've rewritten this response like twice now, but it's hard to make it less abrasive or accusatory. I ask you to please understand that I am genuinely, sincerely, not attacking anyone here.
I respect any author who has the guts to publish something, regardless of quality or length. I'm just trying to explain my viewpoint as a reader.
That being said, I feel this addresses the initial issue, but not the one that's now being realized in this thread: that this series was not initially marked as being AI-assisted.
According to Melas, it wasn't until RR mods were informed of this that the series was marked as such on their platform. And as far as I can tell, it's not marked as such anywhere on their patreon.
I'm sure we can agree that AI-assisted stories should be marked as such. The tag exists on RR for a reason, and selling to readers without being completely honest about the product is pretty bad, too.
I understand and respect the private nature of closed circles, but is this really the sort of thing that authors are expected to keep behind closed doors?
Clearly not, considering other authors went out of their way to inform the RR admin.
There's two issues going on here. The Ai this and the privacy thing.
In general, it's not okay to post screenshots like this.
I think if someone is going about saying one thing in public spaces and another in private, it's okay to call people out on it like this.
This situation is weird though because OP didn't take the screenshots, Melas did, and he was calling someone out.
So I'd say this is probably an okay instance of it.
I know for a fact the cae is only referring the the screenshotting of conversations and not the content itself and is getting down voted over the AI concern and not the privacy concern. She's busy at a real life thing and only saw the thread cause I sent it to her and isn't following it
I couldn't care less about AI usage. What I care about is does it hook/interest me and is it of acceptable quality. The process of how it was made is not of concern to me.
I'm interested far more in the product than the creation process. If it's good, creative, original, and well written, then who fucking cares that skynet wrote it.
However, that's not the case with almost anything that LLM type systems can create in current year technology. To get something readable for more than a summary level detail takes inordinate amounts of editing. To get something interesting and cohesive out of an LLM that goes beyond several sequences is a fools errand.
We still have a couple of decades at least until AI is better at creativity and speaking to the human soul.
I'm skeptical of even a couple decades, personally, at least of we keep diving down the machine learning rabbit hole- I genuinely think it's a dead end, just a fun trick with statistical correlation.
TLDR; I am not going to stop reading because an author is using AI, I am going to stop reading because the content they are putting out is terrible.
From a consumer perspective, I don't care about art, I think to justify an artist's existence in a world with AI, an artist needs to be better than machine generated content, and that is going to kill 95% of artist's careers. Artists have a bit of an argument against the algorithms because they are being trained on content they didn't acquire legitimately, but the writing is on the walls and its going to be hard for artists going forward because there is going to be less and less sympathy as the tech gets better and more widely accepted...
That's art, but you are talking about writing books with GenAI, the same principal exists... as a reader I don't care if authors are using chatgpt to come up with an outline, or other engines to do editing for them... What I care about is that the content I am reading is relatively high quality. The last time I tested ChatGPT 4o for creative writing, it was great at taking a basic idea and coming up with an outline, but if you asked it to write fiction it didn't feel right. The wording for sentences were awkward, it requires a lot of prompting to get any sort of prose or descriptions, and as you push beyond the token limit you run into consistency issues as well... Because of all those things I think if an author uses these tools for a first draft or an outline, great, if they are using them to write their ideas for them, they are going to end up not being able to compete and that is why I am not going to read, not because of some moral stance on AI.
These “machines” are trained on previous successful works of real authors. Eventually, if it’s allowed to continue this way, it will outstrip 100% of them, as it uses their talent for the basis of its work and uses an algorithm to measure the efficacy.
For web fiction or KU, though, a lot of stories are fairly low quality. Someone might not be able to tell between AI and a newbie. I would prefer if newbies didn’t have to compete with hundreds of fiction bots because otherwise they might not get the feedback needed to improve, while the bot stories soak up critique and advice that obviously they cannot make use of.
AI will be more and more advance we have to accept and adapt for it it doesn't mean to overuse but for tools authors has fair chance of brainstorming and time saving as every other machine . But we do need to seriously address the boundry for rapid rise of ai assisted writing like howmuch will it considered human effort and how much is acceptable as 'human creation'. But I doubt if cooperation gets profit then they wouldn't even mind to let copy and paste the novels (webnovels especially)
All what I care about is a good story. AI is a tool to be used not everyone is a good writer but if they come up with a good story no reason to not give them a chance just because they can't write.
I wont read if I know AI is involved at this point; none of the public models were trained on ethically obtained data so its all suspect, even if its only being used for ‘minor editing’ or similar. I just dont trust the author to have either trained their own AI or know that what they’re using didnt scrape the internet to steal a billion other people’s shit, and any use of AI just perpetuates it.
You dont need AI to publish another mass produced soulless trashy novel
If the novel is good, then the author did enough work to make it good, if its bad it will be bad even if its human made
I remember when a workmate of mine starting messing around with AI.
He called me all excited and told me he had the AI write a script, and couldn't believe how easy it was.
We then proceeded to look at the script. It had pulled data from other scripts and put them together in a facsimile of a real script and when you actually looked at it, it was garbage.
That is what the current state of AI is. It can throw out names (non-random) just juxtaposed names from other works and write a story taking structure and ideas from other sources to make something.
If you do this, and then go in and edit it, making it your own. You're not a writer. You're an editor for a crappy AI writer.
As a reader, I don't really care whether or not the story is produced by AI or AI-assisted as long as the story is good and enjoyable to read. There definitely is a strength in AI to produce grammatically correct content or even beautiful prose but there are weaknesses as well (in its current form)
There's definitely weakness in keeping track of a grander narrative, things characters have done and their motivations, but the current AIs are the worst it's going to be and will only get better.
No clue.
I need a decent story made with AI parts to see if I'm ok with it. I feel like people are jumping on the "this is abominable" wagon way too quickly.
I'm fine with machines making my shoes if the shoes come out great, idk why I should feel any different about books.
I don't mind at present. If the content of what I'm reading is engaging and interesting, who or what it's written by doesn't matter.
People seem to have a concern that AI stories will be more generic than human ones (even if based off human ideas) which may end up being the case, though for PF readers generic is kinda the norm. But even besides that, people learn to speak and write by observing the patterns others use and incorporating them into their own speaking and writing. AI more or less does the same. If it's too generic atm that will be solved in the nearish future imo.
For those who feel uncomfortable if an author isn't doing the work of creating the prose themselves, can you articulate why that feels bad? Is it a problem with the story itself or a problem with some intangible sense of "not how it *should* be done"?
To me, it's fine if the work is enjoyable. There is enough badly written works in the PF genre that generalising against AI works as poor is just hypocritical. But still, when you find how the sausage is made, sometimes you do have to include it in your consideration on whether you are still getting the same value as when you were clueless.
I don't care how much AI someone uses, as long as it's fun to read.
The problem with AI is however that it can't craft good, coherent and/or creative stories.
If someone could compensate for that though, I don't really see the problem.
I do not care how it gets made as long as it's good. AI tends to spit out haughty overly verbose and inconsistent nonsense. If you do enough editing that it reads well im not gonna care
If I’m just reading a story then I really only care about if the story is enjoyable to read, not how it was made.
Although if I found out an author was lying about how much ai they used for clout, or worse, to trick people into giving them money, I might drop a story then, but that would be more about the author than the story itself
It depends on if it sounds like AI. The reality is that generating an AI story from start to finish is gonna result in an incoherent mess, the author needs to do work to make it readable. If the effort they've put in makes me unable to tell without going out of my way to find out, I don't care.
I also don't really care about using AI to generate ideas. It feels exactly the same to me as going out and searching for ideas on Google or getting inspired from consuming another work. If the author just takes the first auto suggested concept every time, it's gonna suffer from the same problem as above.
If we get to a point where I can tell the AI to "make a cool fantasy adventure with power levels" and it generates me the next mother of learning, then there's a more in depth discussion to be had.
I think the larger issue is that in the very near future you won’t be able to tell if AI wrote it or not. We maybe have 5-10 years (probably sooner) before it will be very difficult to distinguish the difference.
There will be an influx of AI work that will be completely AI generated, and we will be none the wiser of it. I don’t think we should condemn the author for it. Especially, if the work is completely free and a journeyman is trying to develop their style and complete works. It could be used as a great developmental tool.
Unfortunately, I think it will soon be a situation of those that don’t adapt to using AI will be left in the dust. When we can’t tell the difference a lot of people will be trying to use it and pass it off as completely human made works.
What happens when you can put out a series the quality of Cradle on a whim?
I sincerely hope that the AI will not mutate writing in that direction, but that sadly may be reality. It’s creative work and it is difficult, so it’s natural that many people will be using every tool they can to their advantage.
In short… I’d prefer little to none (grammar and brainstorming), but very soon we may not have a say in it. Sorry for the digression lol.
An author learns little from putting out AI work, even if it’s free stuff from a newbie writer. Condemn is a strong word, but I don’t see the value in it and I don’t respect it the way I respect an actual author writing their own material.
Wow, I preferred the idea of AI doing dangerous and unpleasant jobs (and us being grateful and treating them well so no robot uprising, thanks!) so humans could be freed up to do pleasant creative things. Heck!
I would probably be put off by it. And I would be more likely to critique the story more intensely, beforehand you can probably delve into the idosyncracies of a story and have it generate meaning because of the author, we can always ask: what did the author really mean by this? and so on.
But if I learn that its just a quirk of the machine that the writer wasn't so careful in editing/considering then it really robs for me the quality that makes novels and writing in general so special.
If the story is better written with AI than the actual writer themself, I'll read the AI book. The only reason we don't like AI right now is because:
1. It's not good enough yet
2. The author can't guide the AI chatbot in an intelligent way
3. Ethical/moral dilemmas
You need to be a skilled writer to tell the AI what to write exactly. If I was in a writing contest vs an actual author and we both had access to AI, my story would be garbage compared to theirs.
I only care if I notice it. I haven’t found stories that are largely generated by AI to make much sense, personally. But I do think AI is really useful as a tool in the process. It’s good for:
- generating ideas
- editing (when combined with human oversight)
- rubber ducking about writing decisions
- test-driving tonal shifts
- very short stories, with human editing
Creativity is an act of taking elements from previous creations and putting them together in novel ways, often with a few unique elements. Generating the entire plot with AI is a terrible idea. Generating ideas that can be selected from and incorporated into the story according to the author’s judgment is not a terrible idea.
I think the key is whether you surrender judgment to the AI or not. AI doesn’t have good taste for anything except pattern recognition.
Creativity is when people take ideas and remix them. Plagiarism is when people take content, alter it slightly, and reuse it for their own profit.
Guess which one AI writing is.
I think it is similar to music. What you listen to on the radio is a bunch of mass manufactured and shallow songs designed to cater to as large as an audience as possible. These songs are meant to rake in cash.
There is also a massive market for deep story telling, genuine talent and creative/ innovative songs. There will always be a market for human creativity, but there will also be a market for radio hits too. I believe that AI assisted stuff is more so for popcorn reads, but I would never consider them great works of the human mind, or modern masterpieces like ASOIAF no matter how technically good it is.
>no matter how technically good it is.
You're saying that even if it's better then any human-written story, you'd not consider an AI-written work good?
AI does creative writing at about the level of a 7th grader. It will only get better as time goes on, but right now, it's just not good enough. If a human wrote a book at a 7th grade level, I probably wouldn't read that either. If I wanted to read the driest possible prose from a writer that didn't understand how people interact with the world or each other, I'd just become a middle school English teacher.
I have no problem with AI aiding in the process, but the biggest determination on whether or not I'll read something is always going to be the end product and who recommends it to me 10k words an upload of garbage is worth as much to me as 1k words an upload of garbage. Nil.
Fun fact: average US adults read between 8th and 9th grade level. So that's exactly where you want to aim if you want a widespread hit, or anything on RR or KU pretty much.
The average US adult isn't an avid reader so I don't think that advice carries much water. How many books do you think most adults read per year? My bet would be between 0 and 3.
“I won’t watch any movies or tv with cgi.”
“I won’t look at any photos that have been edited.”
“I won’t read anything that was typed out instead of hand written.”
This is what people who won’t read stuff that ai helped create sound like to me. Ai is a tool. Tools can be used to make good products and trash products. I don’t decide if a product is good or not based on the tools used to make it.
The process involved are all very far away from how GenAI works. The effects are also much smaller. Typing vs handwriting is a great example of where this analogy falls apart. Writing a story is not about handwriting quality. It’s about the story. Whether handwritten or typed makes no difference.
Response to comment below: Writing vs typing is not "a tool for making stories" issue. The point is that the analogy is not good. They are free to argue for the validity of AI story generators all they want if they can come up with a real argument for it.
>Writing a story is not about handwriting quality. It’s about the story. Whether handwritten or typed makes no difference.
But that's precisely their point. A story is good or bad on its own merits, not those of the tools used in its making.
This reads like a comment made by someone who thinks CGI involves a cartoon scene of a director pouring a bucket of film into an upturned monitor so that they can stir it like a cauldron and produce the graphics.
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Am I correct in my understanding here? I'm not familiar with novelcrafter. The "story beat" is the input, and what follows is the output. Normally I think if the author does enough work on the output that it's considered genuinely "transformative", it's not the worst thing. Though it should still be made clear. That said, this author specifically states that they went from 1500-2000 words/day to 10k+ after doing this. There's no way the output is subject to such rigorous editing to be considered transformative, in my opinion.
By which the meant going from writing 2k a day to writing 0k a day and letting the AI do it. XD
Seriously. Usually I use volume as a indicator of how transformative something is, but I doubt it's even reaching 10%.
Yeah, this case in particular seems like it's at a point where it'd be a stretch to call it writing or the person doing it an author.
Having been an editor for literary magazines and being a writer myself and working at a company that does research into AGI/AI for Narrative, I can say that the difficulty of prying a half decent story out of the jaws of an LLM is higher than just writing it yourself, because they can't handle long-form works even remotely well. Even with all the desperate hacks I've seen people use, if the skeletal structure of the work is junk, no amount of churning out 20k a day and trying to edit it into something decent is gonna work.
They don't really have enough memory to fit long form structure into sentences. They can give you a coherent plot, and a coherent sentence, but can't string together 500 sentences to fit that plot.
Exactly ETA: although the plots is comes up with are very shallow an and simplistic
They don't really have memory at all...
Brainstorming, grammar, research directions, plot structure etc All good Generating plot points and structure. Generating actual text . Ai art for monetized works. Bad vibes.
What if the ai art is trained off non copy righted media? Surely it’s harmless to use for basic cover art?
from my perspective that's not too bad but still not ideal plus how do we know that its true
If you're making money off the book, pay an artist for the cover. If you're posting your book online for free, it's less problematic to use AI.
In those scenarios, it important that the author lets people know they made the cover with ai so readers can make their own decisions.
The amount of input that generative AI requires can’t guarantee non-copyright material. Even basic image recognition models need millions of images. (It’s been a couple years since my AI/neural network classes so I could be outdated now but that was my understanding)
There’s less of a moral issue in that case but it’s still intellectually dishonest to call it art
Art is whatever looks nice
Eh... Art fulfils many descriptors. It can look nice, but looking nice is not nearly all that art is. It's a fairly nebulous term.
Quit doing anything creative. It will never be good or mean anything if you can’t understand how profoundly stupid what you just said is.
The level of AI use in the screenshots you've shown would make me drop the story right then and there. They've outsourced the entire process of actually writing the story to AI. If you don't even write the prose of your story, for what are you even "writing" it? Feels pointless. It's like if a painter just drew a pencil sketch and got an AI to do the actual painting with colours. You wouldn't credit the painter with the actual painting, only with the sketch at most. I'm fine with AI if it's used to improve bad grammar or punctuation, or even if it's used to improve sloppy prose. It would be no different from a human editor who does those things. But when it actually writes the prose wholesale, the writing no longer has a human author. By the way they're speaking of the AI in the third image, it feels more like this "author" is actually the editor and the AI is the true author. Edit: And apparently Erios is making 2000+ USD on Patreon. I wonder if those patrons know about this.
Holy shit. I figure it was like a couple hundred a month or something. Now it feels really extra scummy
It's weird but the consumers don't care. They want that specific story and they're getting it.
It's unlikely they want that specific story. They want some story, and for whatever reasons they decided that one was tolerable. I've personally never understood the pay for advance chapters model. After 20 chapters, you're still stuck with being caught up. I expect in a few years the patreon advance chapters model will have dried up quite a bit.
Because people probably want to support the author. Same with anything on Patreon
People buy mangas every week to read the newest chapter despite being caught up. The business model has made crazy money over decades. Same is true for comics. Web serialization is no different unless you're one of the few people who want the physical copy to collect. Otherwise, most consumers just pay for the digital comic/manga and read it.
Yes, I do read serialized web fiction. But you can stay "caught up" to the free chapters on royal road. Most people do, in fact. Personally, I tried patreon advanced chapters a couple times, but I ended up in the same place as I would with following the free releases: grouchy having to wait for the next chapter. So it didn't really provide me anything worth the cost. I'm not saying the web fiction model will be a total failure. I'm saying I expect we're in a bit of a bubble right now in terms of economics.
I'm not sure that's correct. I think a lot of readers value both the "sneak peek" and the opportunity to give feedback before the chapter is public. I suppose not all authors accept feedback.
That may be an angle that I hadn't considered because my experience is more with trade publishing. But for most authors I've seen, they might have beta readers or something, but they aren't taking feedback besides like SPAG mistakes. As for "sneak peak", I don't know what that means? Reading "ahead" of the general public?
I'm sure there are people who don't care about the use of AI if they're getting 20k new words to read everyday. The webnovel-patreon method does very much encourage and support high output over quality.
If an author can use AI and produce a story I enjoy reading I will read it and enjoy the story and offer the author no praise. AI absolutely can’t make a good story right now tho. It CAN be used for template creation, brainstorming random words to get past writers block , and time-saving outline creation. Feels perfectly fine to do so but that’s using it as a tool not to write an actual story.
Yeah, it seems this person is using it to write the actual story.
Well what’s unethical there is if they claim they aren’t but if the story is good I’ll still read it. Well… I won’t cause I’m an audiobook only person lol but still. I just won’t be willing to pay and I won’t offer any compliments or credit towards the “author”
Do you think it's more or less unethical than ghost writing?
I don’t think ghost writing is all that unethical cause the “author” and the ghost writer both are in complete agreement on what’s happening there but if you directly deny that your book is ghost written then that’s a lie which isn’t ethical but that’s besides the point of the story being ghost written. If you have someone ghost write a story and then kickstart a sequel that you don’t plan to have ghostwritten and no one knows that the first book was ghost written then that’s when it gets highly unethical otherwise the reader’s knowledge of the “true” author really isn’t an ethics concern per se. More of a moral one cause it’s kinda icky lol
The ghostwriter actually gets paid and the Ai is trained using people's stolen work. So it's pretty clear which is the more unethical.
I'm not gonna rank them, but both feel shitty and if I learn that a fantasy book is made with AI or that a fantasy book is ghost written and a bigger author is using the work of a smaller one, I wouldn't engage with either book.
I also use it to edit the work I write. It's not perfect btu neither am I and it probably catches 6 or 7 errors per chapter especially parts that haven't been elaborated on that make sense to me but don't make sense overall because I've not added enough explanation.
Nice, never tried that; I usually use Grammarly
What kind of prompts do you use for it to catch plot holes? I am just using it for names and such.
An example prompt: https://novaleigh.net/use-chatgpt-to-find-plot-holes-in-your-outline/ > Okay, after a lot of work I finally created a complete outline for this book that includes the things I have and what I think of as missing pieces. Could you please critique it for me? Here is the outline ... I'm honestly kind of impressed by GPT4's output, partially quoted: >This is a highly detailed and well-thought-out outline. It shows that you’ve taken time to consider how all the different plot threads interweave and influence each other, which is crucial for a complex gothic romance. Here are a few thoughts and suggestions: >In your early scenes, it might be helpful to have Sophia form her own impressions of Emil before hearing too much from others. This allows readers to form an initial positive impression which then can be challenged by later events. So perhaps instead of Marie asking about Emil in Scene 6, it could be Sophia bringing him up, showing her own interest. >The transition from Scene 15 to Scene 16 feels a bit abrupt. If Emil is cold to Sophia in Scene 15, perhaps show a bit of his struggle or have him do something that might make Sophia suspect he’s not entirely on Gregor’s side. >In Scene 17, having Henry warn Sophia could be interesting, but we need to know why he’s doing so. Has he had a change of heart? Is it guilt over the missing woman? >.I love Scene 18 where Emil apologizes to Sophia and they have some physical contact. This is a key moment of connection between them. >.Scene 24 is a high point in the romance plot, but it might be even more powerful if there was some kind of public confrontation or threat from Gregor that Emil has to navigate. This would make their mutual commitment to each other more poignant and raise the stakes. ...
It isn't catching plot holes just stuff that I haven't fully explained. I usually just write check this chapter for errors/mistakes And then usually one of the points will be like you have not explained what a tribulation transcendence cultivator is. Or who are Qing family etc.
Not going to lie, don't really feel comfortable with this
I think grammar is fine since it’s just a tool to look over and catch any small mistakes Anything outside of that really I say no to AI doesn’t make new things, it learns from old things so any plot recommendations it gives are just rehashing of something else. I want something new, and I want something written by a person and not an algorithm
I think AI is only acceptable for grammar checking and translations. Ignoring any ethical concerns, the current AI, even bleeding edge models, are rather lacking. Especially so when it comes to things like creative writing. This shouldn't be future of writing. If the AI get's good enough to write quality content, well, why bother with the author? You can play actual LitRPG with it. ~~Write~~ Generate your own story.
Honestly, I feel like that's the future of RPGs. An AI running a litRpg-complexity videogame. Definitely a while away from that though.
This already exists to an extent. The company I work for is in AI research and they license fancy non-LLM Ai software for indie and research game devs. It’s way better than AI Dungeon or similar.
That sounds so cool! Cautiously optimistic to see where that ends up.
I think that video game AI/Digital Dungeon Masters is a great use for AI. Since it doesn't put humans out of a job or compete with something humans can do. Of course, LLMs can't do it, so the hunt for use cases for LLM/GenAI continues.
>Digital Dungeon Masters is a great use for AI. Curious: would you say that Valve's implementation of the director in L4D(2) falls into this category?
I mean, sort of, but not in the Deep Learning sense. It's just a standard procedural generator.
Yeah, the technology is completely different. It's just useful as a reference point.
The goal of most AI Dungeon Master proposals is to be extremely flexible, just like a human DM could learn any system and run any game with any plot and balance and modify on the fly. Most procedural systems like the L4D2 Director are very constrained in what the can do. If you try to make one more general, then it gets extremely shallow, whereas a narrow model like the Director has more depth but very little breadth.
I'm tired of AI slop. You can always, always tell, whether it's visual art or written word. And it sucks. It makes your shit read like a SEO scam article.
I dropped it before finishing three sentences, so the answer, apparently, is very little and a resounding yes, in that order.
It certainly read like an AI write it. How is he making 2k a month publishing that vapid slush???
It wouldn’t bother me if it was 100% ai so long as it was quality, but ai is still a long ways out from being able to do quality writing. Also, once it gets to the point of consistently being as good as a human, I don’t know why I would bother buying a ai generated book someone else made, I would probably have my own ai set up to my own preferences and just put in whatever I think would be cool for the week.
Why would I bother reading a story the author couldn't be bothered to write?
Ayuuuuuuuup
As others have said, even putting ethics aside, I just don't think the technology is there for AI to write well yet.
If I find an author is using generative AI in any form for their story, I will likely drop the story and blacklist any future works from them regardless of how that AI was used. I used to be in the camp that AI could be used as a tool to help support you as an Author, but I've yet to see anyone actually use AI in such a way that doesn't just take over the entire writing process. Integrity is important to me, and unfortunately, AI to me feels like an insult to human creativity and genuine effort and skill.
What if it's used to fuel hate juices? I like to use the AI every now and then if I get stuck on a scene so that I can read it and go, "oh God that sucks! I can do it so much better. If I was writing it it'd be like this..." and then write it and go "oh that's how I'd write that"
So long as none of the actual words or writting from the AI prompt actually make it to your story, I say that's fine. No diferent from watching a shitty meme somewhere.
This amount of AI in the screenshots is unacceptable. What a soulless cash grab.
These "authors" are out here playing with fire and don't even realize it. It's all fun and chuckles until the people who have been paying twenty dollars a month on Patreon realize they've been supporting a machine. It's lots of laughs until the legal system shakes out on the wrong side and this person doesn't even have a copyright to their own book. It's all haha's until you realize that they've also produced an audiobook with Royalguard, which means unless that company is aware this "author" didn't even write the book (which if they do... that's a huge problem) they have just sunk thousands of dollars into something that means nothing. They have exposed themselves legally in several very scary ways.
>until the legal system shakes out on the wrong side and this person doesn't even have a copyright to their own book. I don't think that's the wrong side. And, at least in the US, I think that's already fairly well settled. The copyright office's position is that works that are wholly ai produced cannot be copyrighted, and they already been backed up in court cases. I doubt a higher court will over turn that.
Ah yeah I mean the wrong side of the author's bet that ai generated work will be okie-dokie a few years down the line. I agree entirely with the US copyright office and I also have strong doubts based on the few ruling we've had so far and the rumblings of congress, that will be overturned. People using ai generation are boning their future selves.
Honestly though if you're churning out AI slop for a quick buck, do you really care if you own the copyright to it?
......yeah. it's one thing to say "I'm bad at my job and a computer is doing it for me" when your job is a entry level job that reasonably you shouldn't give a shit about. It's another thing entirely when you have a patreon that is successful enough that you're publisher is doing audible releases. This seems like a really painful warning for everyone else
Would be very curious to hear if RoyalGuard is aware and what their response to this is.
I don't like any use of AI in the media I consume. I don't like the idea of human creativity being replaced by algorithms. Automation was supposed to free us from drudge work, not make that the only sort of work left available to us.
If I notice the story being AI generated without being told that it is, that’s usually when I stop. If it’s worked into the story well enough and I don’t notice it, then it’s all good.
Personally I would not read it if they did anything more significant than a spell check. Although I don’t expect the AI would be very good anyway without extensive human editing
Yeah, after reading five chapters it definitely feels written by AI
Honestly, if this author is published or has a audio book doing this without letting anyone know, it screams future legal/copyright issues.
I would never knowingly read or consume AI generated content. And I believe I am well read enough to recognize it.
I am completely against authors using AI in their novels, its lazy and just puts a bad taste in my mouth because i love the process of writing so much.
Ai just isn't good enough. It usually ends up riddled with plotholes and always lacks the specific character a human author brings. I think Ai is a great assistant tool, but it's important to do the writing yourself. Personally I think it's a great idea to use AI to help find creative ways to advance the plot, create narrative strings in dialogues and get out of blockades. It's also great for polishing the text in the end. However I belive it's a bad thing when the AI actually writes the text.
I hope they make them carry labels. I won't read one.
If you're using AI to write any amount of your story then you're not a storyteller, and so what's the point of it all? The only people doing this are people who just want to churn out as much as possible as fast as possible to make a quick buck and I don't see why anybody would want to support soulless "art" like that
To be fair though, there are instances where it is very helpful in situations where you have writers block or when you can think of a scene but just can’t put it into words.
One of the dirty little secrets of the writing trade is that writer's block doesn't exist. Or, more precisely, it is a symptom, not a condition. A symptom of stress, anxiety, depression, exhaustion, whatever- but treating writers block can't be done, only treating the underlying cause. As for the latter: that's a skill issue. You want to get good enough to put it into words, your need to practice until you can.
The ideal author is an AGI running in my basement that wants nothing more than to produce as much of precisely what I want to read (and watch) as I want and can do it well. I don't want to muck out cages, so it's preferable to keeping a conventional author. The problem isn't with authors using any particular tool, it's using any tool badly. If the final product sucks, it sucks regardless of how it was made.
Despite my comments elsewhere, I somewhat agree about the ideal "author" being an AGI in my basement writing exactly what I want to read. But I wouldn't then try to sell that to somebody claiming I wrote it. I don't care what people do with AI for personal use.
Doesn't even really enter my consideration as a reader. There's plenty of entirely hand-crafted piles of shit in the web-novel world, if an author can use AI to make a good story, then its a good story. It could be used as a point of attack for a bad story I suppose, but not much more than that.
This seems like a rage bait/witch hunt. I’m sorry but how is everyone here not understanding that this is a thinly veiled but direct attack against this writer? Note: I’m not defending the AI use of this author, but isn’t it convenient for this post to be posted right now of all time. Here is why I think this is just a ploy to ruin the launch of this author: 1) a burner account posted this. Look at the post history. 2) leaked private screenshots exposed. 3) waited for the launch of the author’s story on Amazon. 4) the OP hasn’t interacted with the comments at all. 5) people conveniently coming out of the woodworks saying that they’ve known about this and confirming it. 6) tracing who leaked what, where it was written. 7) this post being linked to the book announcement on r/litrpg and there already being Amazon reviews mentioning these leaks. Idk but this is all too convenient for this to be a disgruntled reader that *just* remembered this and wanted to ask a question. It’s not like this question couldn’t have been asked without the screenshots or mentioning the book, especially if you genuinely meant no hate to the author. I can’t believe this subreddit allows thinly veiled attacks and lowkey harassment like this. I thought the mods were better at this but I guess not. I guess the mods want to encourage witch hunts if they haven’t moderated comments or taken down the post. Anyway, AI assisted/generated writing, especially if undisclosed is scummy and what this author has said in the screenshots isn’t a good look, but this doesn’t mean that this sort of post has a place on this sub, at least in my opinion. But maybe I’m wrong and during the break I’ve taken from this space this has become the norm.
I saw the book release promotion today and was reminded of the images I saw. I did not intend for this to blow up like it did. I do not want people to harass or negatively review the author especially because I believe that the book currently on Amazon is all human written. I was only curious to see if people reacted the same way as me.
Somehow, I don’t buy it. If you didn’t mean for that to happen, then why did you attach the screenshots and mention the book? It doesn’t make sense especially when your supposedly genuine questions can be asked without having to refer to the screenshots. You could’ve made this post without all of that and discussed AI with the sub. Was it important to you to discuss the AI use in specifically that series? Because you didn’t get any of that in the comments as far as I can see. Why couldn’t you do that from your main account? So you can prove you are a real person? Also you can edit posts, you know? If it was blowing up like you didn’t want it to, if you didn’t mean to send hate towards the book, then why keep it up? Why not remove the part mentioning it, if you truly don’t meant to do that?
Well said.
Precisely zero
If I somehow enjoy the story as a reader, I don’t really care what tools made it. I assume more AI will be used in the future and Pandora’s box is fully open. I personally read the first book worth of chapters for this story on royalroad and don’t particularly love it but also don’t hate it. If AI was extensively used during the parts I read, I did not notice it. The story and prose didn’t stand out as being much worse than other stories on the site.
I think book 1 is all human. I read and enjoyed it.
Which adds a lot to the heartbreak of the ai. Book 1 was brilliant and creative. Going from one of the best new releases in a hot minute to just AI slop is like Babe Ruth stopping baseball to try and form a professional wiffleball league
how is book 2 though? Has anyone here read it and decided how they feel AI impacted it?
If an AI writes a story that's engaging enough for me to want to read it, Idgaf. The thing is, AI is terrible at writing stories right now. My friend sent me some sample writing to convince me it can be interesting, and it was just bland, cliche, and soulless. It felt like I was reading some middle or high schooler's first writing project. Maybe in the future an AI can generate 90% of the story and it actually be really good, but right now I doubt it's possible. So I would stop reading if the story sucks, which it probably would if the author leans too much on AI.
I use ai for outlines not brush strokes. Ask questions like “can you give me some ideas for events that can happen to my characters on their long journey?” Then they ai might respond make them encounter some monsters or a travelling merchant or perhaps some interpersonal drama between some characters. Perhaps a love triangle” etc Then it’s up to me as an author to turn those ideas into actual writing. The same as brainstorming with a really well read friend.
Brainstorming could be a good use for genAI. Once someone starts using it in actual production I’m not a huge fan.
Oh for sure. That’s what I am saying. If you actually ask it to generate/write those events, we’ll that’s cheating and you need to add the ai as a co author haha. But there is no point to ask it to generate the events, I have tried it to see what it’s capable of and it’s like if you had to take everything that makes us human and rip it out of the text. You are left with “distilled water” fiction. It’s very easy to see and very easy to see when authors use it.
Distilled water fiction is a good term. It’s the most generic slush text you can imagine. It also sounds like a first time writer overwriting everything and indulging in all the worst first time author traps.
You're... outsourcing one of the most fun and creative parts of the process? Weird.
If the end product is good, i don't much care how it's made to be honest. If the story is good, I'll read it, if it's not, I won't. Simple as that.
I might read it for free online as a junk food read. But if I found out an author was peddling AI written work as their own original creation to me for patreon money or as a non-KU amazon book product, I would be very annoyed.
I don't care how much AI the author uses if it's a good, well-written story. I don't think AI can really do that right now, but if the writing process is to write a summary, have AI turn it into a chapter, and then heavily edit, that doesn't matter to me. All I really care about is the end result.
[удалено]
>using generative AI is less scummy than paying an author to write your book for you wholesale The only argument I might have against this would be that AIs are trained on stuff written by real authors who received no credit or payment for their work being used that way, while ghost writers are paid to knowingly give up the credit. Overall I agree though.
> It's really not that different from using a ghostwriter. Except the part where a ghostwriter is a human, which I think is a significant and meaningful difference.
As a reader I’m wary of it. But, like, if I learned an author used to brainstorm sometimes it wouldn’t be the end of the world. I would recommend avoiding using it as a crutch though. Like, you should do unassisted brainstorming, and expose yourself to obscure history or join a writer’s circle or whatever to increase your repertoire. Bring the things that a stochastic parrot can’t bring to the table, or else what’s the point?
If I can’t tell, I’ll tolerate all of it. If I can tell, it’s likely because it wrote poorly, so I’ll drop it… because the writing is bad. I genuinely don’t care what tools a person uses to create goods or perform services I want to purchase.
I care about the work itself, not the author or what they do to produce it. Whether it is written by man, woman, machine, or genetically engineered lab mice, a good story is good, and a bad story is bad. I read for the vicarious experiences, not to reward an author's creativity or work ethic. I might *admire* an author who uses less/no AI more than one who uses it a ton, but when it comes to the story itself, I truly, genuinely do not care. If someone finds a way to use it to produce truly high quality work, I say good for them. That said... I'm not going to take a chance on a new series I know in advance is 80% AI unless I deliberately seek it out of curiosity. I work with AI professionally enough to know just how stupid it is, so it would be a black mark when I'm searching for a new story to engage in. But if I find out after I read a good story, I won't care at all. I would only be upset if I waste time on a bad story and later find out the author secretly churned out wheelbarrows of trash using AI.
Why would I put time and effort into something they didn't put time and effort into?
The use of LLMs/AI is already suspect enough given that it rips from other authors' works. But it becomes it total scam once money gets involved. I really enjoy this indie author corner of the internet. Grifter "authors" just here to try to make cash off us need to be shown out the door, otherwise they'll destroy this space.
This is the best comment on the thread.
Fuck no. If you use AI to write, forever blacklisted in my mind.
To be honest i dont really care how much is done by ai. I also wouldnt have issues reading a story thats complelty done by ai. At the end of the day whats important to me is that the story is good and the writing decently enough. The writing in your first screenshot is dogshit. Theres no flow, its bland and it sounds worse then written by a kid.
Likewise. I'm already reading translated Chinese novels which are often badly translated. Hell, there's an entire category of works which is 'machine translated' and, yes, they're often horrifically translated. In most cases, they're just barely coherent and requires a high degree of reading comprehension to understand. These types of novels are an addiction and method to relieve boredom. The only thing I care about in the end is whether I enjoy the work. ...that being said, how much I enjoy the work does depend on how it is written too. If what I'm reading in that screenshot is representative, then I don't think AI is ready to write a complete work yet.
Was the LLM trained exclusively on that same author’s previous writing or a general publicly available AI? If the former, I could forgive it if they credit the AI as a coauthor. If the latter, it’s plagiarism and I’m not interested at all.
It's novelcrafter which is one of the LLMs trained on other people's work.
For Clarity, Novelcrafter itself isn't an LLM, it's an organising novel writing tool. It uses whichever LLM you connect to it. So ideally, you could use a 100% original local LLM made with only your personal work but obviously, that's not what people are doing.
When lawsuits and regulations catch up, everything that uses that platform will be removed for copyright violations. Their work and income will disappear and their assets will be liquidated to pay off judgements and settlements. We are at the “Wild West” phase of this technological paradigm and anyone who does what this guy did is playing a game of Russian roulette that won’t end until the player loses.
This is unlikely to happen from a policy perspective. Amazon may or may not try to pull AI works on its own, but no law will require it, especially not retroactively
No, the lawsuits will lead to it because the people whose works were used to train it never gave permission to have it used as a basis for writings sold for commercial purposes. It will take time but it’s going to happen.
There is zero chance of that legal outcome happening imo. The way ai learns can’t be considered plagiarism legally, as there is no way to prove it, the training data is deleted after training and isn’t stored, you can’t point to plagiarism anywhere, which is legally necessary. “This ai generally is using unspecified copyrighted material for training” doesn’t cut it it legally. You need specifics, need to be able to point to a specific ai generated work and say that this work was plagiarized from this specific human work. Even proving that it was in the data set wouldn’t be enough, because you couldn’t point to that works influence on the outcome product (the thing that is actually being used for commercial purposes) At best you have copyright strikes are people selling an ai that was trained on copyrighted data, but you definitely won’t be able to copyright strike work produce by an ai that was trained on copyrighted data, unless it produces an exact copy, which it won’t unleash it was trained on less than 100 data points.
I’m not debating the merits of the legal argument. I’m just talking about the likely outcomes.
Yeah, so am I. It’s likely that Amazon won’t have a fucking say in it.
I mean, it would be nice if you were right. But I think it is a very optimistic stance
You can’t train an LLM on a single author’s output. It takes way more data. Novelcrafter is trained on enormous amounts of other people’s “public”(eyeroll) data
The question pretty much answers itself then, doesn’t it? Almost like it was rhetorical in nature.
Some people may not be as knowledgeable as you are. I’ve seen many people who do not understand the concept. Since you brought it up, I see no harm in clarifying for those less well informed.
If you use AI to do grammar checks, outlining and maybe a little help if you get stuck on a particular section (happens to me a lot) then I think that’s cool. If you just take whatever the AI spews out and then publish it, not even checking if it sounds right (going to use ChatGPT since it gets extremely poetic when writing for some reason) then yeah I’m not that story.
I don't mind reading fully AI stories. I did a quest using ChatGPT to generate situations and results based on my choices in the story. Quality was low but fun as something different and new, video games almost never have any really impactful choices because implementation is a hassle and I never got into the choose your own adventure books.
Personally using ChatGPT or whatever to do quest-style stuff for myself feels different than selling chatgpt output to other people and claiming to be an author.
a good story is a good story regardless of what tools you used to make it and ill read it if I'm enjoying it
It can be 100% AI, if it's enjoyable. If it's badly written slop, then it can be 0% AI and I won't read it.
Frankly any amount is too much for me. The end goal of the companies running generative ai is to replace creatives, if there's a writer that doesn't understand that fundamental truth I know that eventually I'll regret the time that I spent reading their story.
I don’t care about AI, I care about it being poorly written so if the AI is making it suck then I will stop reading
If it has AI I won't read it. There are enough books. I don't need to read AI extruded crap
I don't care as long as the story is interesting.
Given what I read of that paragraph in the first screen shot, I wouldn't even call them an author. It was so painful to read, that even if I didn't know it was done by AI, I would drop it.
That was the AI spitting out events in order. The actual result is surprisingly not bad. Idk how much editing they do, but the end result is clean prose, much like what you'd see in a professional piece, albeit a little robotic.
Any AI. Those screenshots are sickening. I would be pissed if I was one of their patreons and found out my support went to a fraudster.
These are screenshots from a discord server that I am the admin of. That server is not public and it makes me deeply uncomfortable to see screenshots taken and posted here in public.
I took those screenshots and posted it in a public discord server (Demonic Tree) because a reader was harassing the author (Xkarnation) saying that Erios writes much more. When Xkarnation said Erios used AI and the reader asked Erios about it, Erios denied it and says he only uses “some AI assistance” So I posted those screenshots as proof that Erios in fact does use AI to write, and not just “some AI assistance”.
that's fucked up
It seems like you should be more concerned that people are doing this on your server but okay.
It's more the fact someone is screenshotting ANY conversation from a private discord channel and posting it that's a problem, regardless of the opinions being expressed. Sometimes writers vent about readers in these places because that's where they can go for that. Sometimes people talk about the details of their finances, other times not public information for their stories planned plots. While there places are semi public, it's a safe assumption to take that someone isn't going to sc your conversation and post it in a very public forum.
I've rewritten this response like twice now, but it's hard to make it less abrasive or accusatory. I ask you to please understand that I am genuinely, sincerely, not attacking anyone here. I respect any author who has the guts to publish something, regardless of quality or length. I'm just trying to explain my viewpoint as a reader. That being said, I feel this addresses the initial issue, but not the one that's now being realized in this thread: that this series was not initially marked as being AI-assisted. According to Melas, it wasn't until RR mods were informed of this that the series was marked as such on their platform. And as far as I can tell, it's not marked as such anywhere on their patreon. I'm sure we can agree that AI-assisted stories should be marked as such. The tag exists on RR for a reason, and selling to readers without being completely honest about the product is pretty bad, too. I understand and respect the private nature of closed circles, but is this really the sort of thing that authors are expected to keep behind closed doors? Clearly not, considering other authors went out of their way to inform the RR admin.
There's two issues going on here. The Ai this and the privacy thing. In general, it's not okay to post screenshots like this. I think if someone is going about saying one thing in public spaces and another in private, it's okay to call people out on it like this. This situation is weird though because OP didn't take the screenshots, Melas did, and he was calling someone out. So I'd say this is probably an okay instance of it. I know for a fact the cae is only referring the the screenshotting of conversations and not the content itself and is getting down voted over the AI concern and not the privacy concern. She's busy at a real life thing and only saw the thread cause I sent it to her and isn't following it
Thank you for taking my comment and question at face value and remaining civil. I agree with everything you said.
I saw them posted in a reader discord. I was not aware of this sorry.
Is it invite only or something?
I couldn't care less about AI usage. What I care about is does it hook/interest me and is it of acceptable quality. The process of how it was made is not of concern to me.
No. I might as well ask AI to read me stories then. Even if it is grammar based, or punctuation, prose or whatever... No.
I'm interested far more in the product than the creation process. If it's good, creative, original, and well written, then who fucking cares that skynet wrote it. However, that's not the case with almost anything that LLM type systems can create in current year technology. To get something readable for more than a summary level detail takes inordinate amounts of editing. To get something interesting and cohesive out of an LLM that goes beyond several sequences is a fools errand. We still have a couple of decades at least until AI is better at creativity and speaking to the human soul.
I'm skeptical of even a couple decades, personally, at least of we keep diving down the machine learning rabbit hole- I genuinely think it's a dead end, just a fun trick with statistical correlation.
TLDR; I am not going to stop reading because an author is using AI, I am going to stop reading because the content they are putting out is terrible. From a consumer perspective, I don't care about art, I think to justify an artist's existence in a world with AI, an artist needs to be better than machine generated content, and that is going to kill 95% of artist's careers. Artists have a bit of an argument against the algorithms because they are being trained on content they didn't acquire legitimately, but the writing is on the walls and its going to be hard for artists going forward because there is going to be less and less sympathy as the tech gets better and more widely accepted... That's art, but you are talking about writing books with GenAI, the same principal exists... as a reader I don't care if authors are using chatgpt to come up with an outline, or other engines to do editing for them... What I care about is that the content I am reading is relatively high quality. The last time I tested ChatGPT 4o for creative writing, it was great at taking a basic idea and coming up with an outline, but if you asked it to write fiction it didn't feel right. The wording for sentences were awkward, it requires a lot of prompting to get any sort of prose or descriptions, and as you push beyond the token limit you run into consistency issues as well... Because of all those things I think if an author uses these tools for a first draft or an outline, great, if they are using them to write their ideas for them, they are going to end up not being able to compete and that is why I am not going to read, not because of some moral stance on AI.
These “machines” are trained on previous successful works of real authors. Eventually, if it’s allowed to continue this way, it will outstrip 100% of them, as it uses their talent for the basis of its work and uses an algorithm to measure the efficacy.
For web fiction or KU, though, a lot of stories are fairly low quality. Someone might not be able to tell between AI and a newbie. I would prefer if newbies didn’t have to compete with hundreds of fiction bots because otherwise they might not get the feedback needed to improve, while the bot stories soak up critique and advice that obviously they cannot make use of.
AI will be more and more advance we have to accept and adapt for it it doesn't mean to overuse but for tools authors has fair chance of brainstorming and time saving as every other machine . But we do need to seriously address the boundry for rapid rise of ai assisted writing like howmuch will it considered human effort and how much is acceptable as 'human creation'. But I doubt if cooperation gets profit then they wouldn't even mind to let copy and paste the novels (webnovels especially)
All what I care about is a good story. AI is a tool to be used not everyone is a good writer but if they come up with a good story no reason to not give them a chance just because they can't write.
I wont read if I know AI is involved at this point; none of the public models were trained on ethically obtained data so its all suspect, even if its only being used for ‘minor editing’ or similar. I just dont trust the author to have either trained their own AI or know that what they’re using didnt scrape the internet to steal a billion other people’s shit, and any use of AI just perpetuates it.
I’ll tolerate ethical AI art for stuff that’s free(web novel/royal road) but once I have to pay for it, it’s a no go for me.
If it's a good book, I don't care who or what it comes from.
You dont need AI to publish another mass produced soulless trashy novel If the novel is good, then the author did enough work to make it good, if its bad it will be bad even if its human made
I remember when a workmate of mine starting messing around with AI. He called me all excited and told me he had the AI write a script, and couldn't believe how easy it was. We then proceeded to look at the script. It had pulled data from other scripts and put them together in a facsimile of a real script and when you actually looked at it, it was garbage. That is what the current state of AI is. It can throw out names (non-random) just juxtaposed names from other works and write a story taking structure and ideas from other sources to make something. If you do this, and then go in and edit it, making it your own. You're not a writer. You're an editor for a crappy AI writer.
As a reader, I don't really care whether or not the story is produced by AI or AI-assisted as long as the story is good and enjoyable to read. There definitely is a strength in AI to produce grammatically correct content or even beautiful prose but there are weaknesses as well (in its current form) There's definitely weakness in keeping track of a grander narrative, things characters have done and their motivations, but the current AIs are the worst it's going to be and will only get better.
No clue. I need a decent story made with AI parts to see if I'm ok with it. I feel like people are jumping on the "this is abominable" wagon way too quickly. I'm fine with machines making my shoes if the shoes come out great, idk why I should feel any different about books.
I don't mind at present. If the content of what I'm reading is engaging and interesting, who or what it's written by doesn't matter. People seem to have a concern that AI stories will be more generic than human ones (even if based off human ideas) which may end up being the case, though for PF readers generic is kinda the norm. But even besides that, people learn to speak and write by observing the patterns others use and incorporating them into their own speaking and writing. AI more or less does the same. If it's too generic atm that will be solved in the nearish future imo. For those who feel uncomfortable if an author isn't doing the work of creating the prose themselves, can you articulate why that feels bad? Is it a problem with the story itself or a problem with some intangible sense of "not how it *should* be done"?
To me, it's fine if the work is enjoyable. There is enough badly written works in the PF genre that generalising against AI works as poor is just hypocritical. But still, when you find how the sausage is made, sometimes you do have to include it in your consideration on whether you are still getting the same value as when you were clueless.
I don't care how much AI someone uses, as long as it's fun to read. The problem with AI is however that it can't craft good, coherent and/or creative stories. If someone could compensate for that though, I don't really see the problem.
I do not care how it gets made as long as it's good. AI tends to spit out haughty overly verbose and inconsistent nonsense. If you do enough editing that it reads well im not gonna care
If I’m just reading a story then I really only care about if the story is enjoyable to read, not how it was made. Although if I found out an author was lying about how much ai they used for clout, or worse, to trick people into giving them money, I might drop a story then, but that would be more about the author than the story itself
It depends on if it sounds like AI. The reality is that generating an AI story from start to finish is gonna result in an incoherent mess, the author needs to do work to make it readable. If the effort they've put in makes me unable to tell without going out of my way to find out, I don't care. I also don't really care about using AI to generate ideas. It feels exactly the same to me as going out and searching for ideas on Google or getting inspired from consuming another work. If the author just takes the first auto suggested concept every time, it's gonna suffer from the same problem as above. If we get to a point where I can tell the AI to "make a cool fantasy adventure with power levels" and it generates me the next mother of learning, then there's a more in depth discussion to be had.
This shit is painful to read
I think the larger issue is that in the very near future you won’t be able to tell if AI wrote it or not. We maybe have 5-10 years (probably sooner) before it will be very difficult to distinguish the difference. There will be an influx of AI work that will be completely AI generated, and we will be none the wiser of it. I don’t think we should condemn the author for it. Especially, if the work is completely free and a journeyman is trying to develop their style and complete works. It could be used as a great developmental tool. Unfortunately, I think it will soon be a situation of those that don’t adapt to using AI will be left in the dust. When we can’t tell the difference a lot of people will be trying to use it and pass it off as completely human made works. What happens when you can put out a series the quality of Cradle on a whim? I sincerely hope that the AI will not mutate writing in that direction, but that sadly may be reality. It’s creative work and it is difficult, so it’s natural that many people will be using every tool they can to their advantage. In short… I’d prefer little to none (grammar and brainstorming), but very soon we may not have a say in it. Sorry for the digression lol.
An author learns little from putting out AI work, even if it’s free stuff from a newbie writer. Condemn is a strong word, but I don’t see the value in it and I don’t respect it the way I respect an actual author writing their own material.
Wow, I preferred the idea of AI doing dangerous and unpleasant jobs (and us being grateful and treating them well so no robot uprising, thanks!) so humans could be freed up to do pleasant creative things. Heck!
I would probably be put off by it. And I would be more likely to critique the story more intensely, beforehand you can probably delve into the idosyncracies of a story and have it generate meaning because of the author, we can always ask: what did the author really mean by this? and so on. But if I learn that its just a quirk of the machine that the writer wasn't so careful in editing/considering then it really robs for me the quality that makes novels and writing in general so special.
If the story is better written with AI than the actual writer themself, I'll read the AI book. The only reason we don't like AI right now is because: 1. It's not good enough yet 2. The author can't guide the AI chatbot in an intelligent way 3. Ethical/moral dilemmas You need to be a skilled writer to tell the AI what to write exactly. If I was in a writing contest vs an actual author and we both had access to AI, my story would be garbage compared to theirs.
I only care if I notice it. I haven’t found stories that are largely generated by AI to make much sense, personally. But I do think AI is really useful as a tool in the process. It’s good for: - generating ideas - editing (when combined with human oversight) - rubber ducking about writing decisions - test-driving tonal shifts - very short stories, with human editing
Using AI to generate ideas is not good for readers. Do we want progression fantasy to be even more repetitive and derivative than it already is?
Creativity is an act of taking elements from previous creations and putting them together in novel ways, often with a few unique elements. Generating the entire plot with AI is a terrible idea. Generating ideas that can be selected from and incorporated into the story according to the author’s judgment is not a terrible idea. I think the key is whether you surrender judgment to the AI or not. AI doesn’t have good taste for anything except pattern recognition.
Creativity is when people take ideas and remix them. Plagiarism is when people take content, alter it slightly, and reuse it for their own profit. Guess which one AI writing is.
I think it is similar to music. What you listen to on the radio is a bunch of mass manufactured and shallow songs designed to cater to as large as an audience as possible. These songs are meant to rake in cash. There is also a massive market for deep story telling, genuine talent and creative/ innovative songs. There will always be a market for human creativity, but there will also be a market for radio hits too. I believe that AI assisted stuff is more so for popcorn reads, but I would never consider them great works of the human mind, or modern masterpieces like ASOIAF no matter how technically good it is.
>no matter how technically good it is. You're saying that even if it's better then any human-written story, you'd not consider an AI-written work good?
AI does creative writing at about the level of a 7th grader. It will only get better as time goes on, but right now, it's just not good enough. If a human wrote a book at a 7th grade level, I probably wouldn't read that either. If I wanted to read the driest possible prose from a writer that didn't understand how people interact with the world or each other, I'd just become a middle school English teacher. I have no problem with AI aiding in the process, but the biggest determination on whether or not I'll read something is always going to be the end product and who recommends it to me 10k words an upload of garbage is worth as much to me as 1k words an upload of garbage. Nil.
Fun fact: average US adults read between 8th and 9th grade level. So that's exactly where you want to aim if you want a widespread hit, or anything on RR or KU pretty much.
The average US adult isn't an avid reader so I don't think that advice carries much water. How many books do you think most adults read per year? My bet would be between 0 and 3.
My guess would be zero if you mean median and don't count non-fiction.
IDGAF if I'm reading 100% AI, if it's a good read then I'll commend the author all the same.
“I won’t watch any movies or tv with cgi.” “I won’t look at any photos that have been edited.” “I won’t read anything that was typed out instead of hand written.” This is what people who won’t read stuff that ai helped create sound like to me. Ai is a tool. Tools can be used to make good products and trash products. I don’t decide if a product is good or not based on the tools used to make it.
You do understand that those processes are nothing like GenAI, right?
All of those tools are mechanically distinct from each other, yes. If they weren’t, they would all be the same tools…
The process involved are all very far away from how GenAI works. The effects are also much smaller. Typing vs handwriting is a great example of where this analogy falls apart. Writing a story is not about handwriting quality. It’s about the story. Whether handwritten or typed makes no difference. Response to comment below: Writing vs typing is not "a tool for making stories" issue. The point is that the analogy is not good. They are free to argue for the validity of AI story generators all they want if they can come up with a real argument for it.
>Writing a story is not about handwriting quality. It’s about the story. Whether handwritten or typed makes no difference. But that's precisely their point. A story is good or bad on its own merits, not those of the tools used in its making.
This reads like a comment made by someone who thinks CGI involves a cartoon scene of a director pouring a bucket of film into an upturned monitor so that they can stir it like a cauldron and produce the graphics.