Lepp allots herself precisely 49 days to write and self-edit a book.

July 22, 2022 3:41 PM

The strange world of high-speed semi-automated genre fiction (Josh Dzieza, The Verge)
posted by one for the books (58 comments total)

Please assume I already have experienced the horror, dread, numbness, and despair. I am wondering: should I consider using this? I have a lot of brain problem situations right now, together with regular problems, and if this could just do the scutwork, the really fiddly and dull business of moving characters between scenes and making sure they behave in chronologically sensible ways ... Or am I talking myself into dealing with the devil?

(Also, if you are writing literary fiction, higher-end genre fiction, or poetry, at what point would you disclose you use it in order to avoid becoming a main character of Twitter one day? Poetry, probably immediately in the byline -- and I have read some really striking AI-assisted poetry ...)
posted by Countess Elena at 3:54 PM on July 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm a computer guy by heart and yet I'll admit, my brain rebelled at the whole idea. Interesting.
posted by drewbage1847 at 3:57 PM on July 22, 2022

Pulp has always been around, along with writers who pander in order to make a living (pennies per word, historically), but this is an escalation I find inhumanly depressing. And I say this as someone who has an unashamed love of good pulp.

49 days indeed.

Reminds me of descriptions of drug fueled art performance pieces.

A friend once suggested I write porn on the amazon platform and I've never stopped wondering what made me seem like I could do that and not take up self mutilation from despair.
posted by liminal_shadows at 4:04 PM on July 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

I think part of what bothers me is that selling out is rewarding, and words are as close to sacred as anything that exists, in my psyche. It's like watching someone take a shit on your mother's face.
posted by liminal_shadows at 4:07 PM on July 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

I love books. In history trouble is always created because of books.

Meanwhile the fact that Bezos started with books makes this seem more ominous.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 4:13 PM on July 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

I was "concerned" that UBI would lead to a flood of bad art, but I really need to remember what capitalism has wrought in that regard.
posted by Selena777 at 4:17 PM on July 22, 2022 [8 favorites]

This would totally explain some airport thrillers I’ve read that feel like the stilted output of an AI trained solely on late stage phoning-it-in/ghostwritten Ludlum.
posted by mubba at 4:17 PM on July 22, 2022

It's interesting that people have a visceral reaction to procedurally-generated books, but not procedurally-generated video game levels (which are, in fact, a selling point).
posted by airmail at 4:18 PM on July 22, 2022 [17 favorites]

Worse, some of the sentences her readers highlighted as being particularly good had come from the machine.

I only write fanfiction about superheroes kissing and the like, and I would find this sufficiently galling and demoralizing as to abandon the whole enterprise altogether.

That said, as someone who has struggled with simple visual descriptions of places and such, I do find Lepp's ultimate use of the program in helping with descriptions to be a decent use case for something like this. Because, like, I do want my writing to be more visual and want to avoid the whole "characters talking in a grey void" thing, but also I do not want to bully my oft-poor visualization skills into building me a mind palace of bad guy lair #3 with the aid of a bunch of google image searching every time I need to describe a location. So if I could outsource the description of locations and punch up whatever the machine gives me, that wouldn't be the worst. But also I don't think I'd ever get over thinking of it as a kind of "cheating," maybe especially because it's hobby writing! Because, like, I could just leave off the descriptions! I could just stick with gray voids! My readers (and me) are there for the kissing and feelings part, not for an accurate description of an abandoned mine shaft!

I have way more sympathy for an indie author like Lepp using something like this to stay afloat though.
posted by yasaman at 4:21 PM on July 22, 2022 [10 favorites]

Please assume I already have experienced the horror, dread, numbness, and despair. I am wondering: should I consider using this?

I can't give you a full answer, but I can say that other people definitely will be using it. Also, if you see it as just another tool, like outlining, or word processing software, maybe that will help you find an answer. This particular genie isn't going back in the bottle, in any case.

I've been thinking a lot about AI art recently, and I had a bit of an epiphany a few days ago that is also relevant to AI writing: currently machines cannot make art that has a copyright. Derivative works made by humans do have copyright attached, which means that if anyone wants to own IP, they will still need writers, artists, editors, coders, etc to create the derivative works, or they need to change the law.

So that's a political issue, and it seems to me that creatives have a strong interest in ensuring that machine generated things come out of the AI with no copyright attached, and if you are a creative, it might be worth making sure your professional organizations and congresspeople are on the same page, and machine art remains copyright free.

And, I mean now. Because as I'm writing this I feel like I'm talking about science fiction, but it's happening now, as the link on this post proves.
posted by surlyben at 4:37 PM on July 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

Countess Elena, a tool is value-neutral, it's how you use it that matters. If someone uses this for help dealing with aphasia, or writer's block, or the like, that's another thing entirely. A good writer who used it as a tool for mental challenges would presumably take far more time to write a book, giving it the care and love and oversight it deserves. And above all else, do what makes you happy and works for you. There's always someone who won't approve, but they're not living your life. You are. I would still buy books from someone who used this as a tool, wrote good books (and didn't churn out one after another in 49 days), as long as they were transparent about using it and how and why.

What offends me about this is the combination of inhuman speed, amazon publishing, and the cynical manipulation of algorithms to get the garbage seen above books that might actually be decent and more ethically produced. Any of those things might cause a book to be garbage, but the combination guarantees it. This is a person who takes no pleasure in her work nor gives any deep or lasting pleasure. The proof is in the fact that the books are forgotten by her readers if she doesn't continue to churn and provide constant stimulation.

Amazon publishing has churned out so much hot garbage that I refuse to even look at self-published books anymore and that makes me sad. I had high hopes that self-publishing would allow voices that couldn't be heard otherwise to say important things.

I think it's needful to think about why people read. Personally I read for pleasure but also, importantly, to understand myself and other people and the world around me. I want to glimpse all that beautiful chaos in someone else's head. What I am I seeing exactly, when I'm viewing computer-generated words? Even if they're strung together prettily they're an amalgamation of every word the AI has been fed, in patterns that don't break, the way people break them.
posted by liminal_shadows at 4:47 PM on July 22, 2022 [6 favorites]

It's interesting that people have a visceral reaction to procedurally-generated books, but not procedurally-generated video game levels (which are, in fact, a selling point).

definitely an interesting thing to think about re: what people want and expect from both the artistry of and interaction with the mediums. maybe it'd be different if the perception was that the author was also the person who coded the procedural generator? (which, per the article, it kind of sounds like they are, in the sense that you have to lead the thing pretty deliberately by the nose to get the results you want.) ((not to mention that popular perception of what game developers do uniquely vs. borrow/steal from existing work is probably not all that accurate or relevant))

I see a lot of ways individuals could use a tool like this to create really genuinely great art, and other ways that other individuals (or systems) could use it to do genuine and lasting harm to artistic spaces and processes of creation. it's value-neutral but intimidatingly robust, in a way that a tool like a pencil isn't.

using this to craft the silhouette of something, from which point an artist might sculpt a masterpiece, feels beautiful in its novel (heh) possibility. imagining this being used to dump more sewage into the wasted rivers of the publishing industry is tragic. both will probably happen
posted by Kybard at 4:57 PM on July 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

also this piece does about as well as I've ever seen a pop-journo feature like this do at describing a machine-learning algorithm accurately without falling into anthropomorphizing or weird HAL-9000 comparisons. good on you, josh dzieza
posted by Kybard at 4:59 PM on July 22, 2022 [6 favorites]

Considering the number of amazon authors who are just paying other people to write their books, I don't find this terribly offensive. I definitely have at least one nearly compete draft novel that contains a few places where I have just said {describe the house here} because I hate reading that story of thing, and don't want to write it, but it is an expectation of the genre. I would totes use an AI to fill in those blanks if I could.
posted by jacquilynne at 5:08 PM on July 22, 2022 [5 favorites]

Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel with thirty other girls (’Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!’ she said parenthetically), and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor. She was ’not clever’, but was fond of using her hands and felt at home with machinery. She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She ’didn’t much care for reading,’ she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
posted by Omon Ra at 5:24 PM on July 22, 2022 [29 favorites]

I want to take issue with this idea of "inhuman speed," to borrow liminal_shadows' phrase. Here's the basic question: How long should it take to write a book? I was surprised when the 49 days was mentioned. For someone writing at pulp speed full-time, 49 days is plenty. With an appropriate outline in front of you, and no day-job, five thousand words a day is easy, ten thousand well within the range of normal, if you've got the energy and nobody's around to bother you.

But in fact the words have to come from somewhere, and in pulp writing, you cheat a little, and that's accepted. What cheating usually means, is resorting to easily-understood stereotypes--the perky sleuth heroine, the stern possible-boyfriend authority figure, the loyal bestie who occasionally notices a clue. If you've spent your life immersed in mystery stories in books and on TV, cozies can be amazingly fun to write at first, because you feel very in your element, with all these aspects just at your fingertips. But...you know, when you're on the sixth book, and you've got to describe the best friend's bakery yet AGAIN...sometimes you're reaching for the thesaurus. (Or a magazine where there was a pretty bakery layout. Or a place you recently visited. Or, really, anything other than the effort required to make it all up yourself.)

I think the speed does use you up. I don't think it's fair to call an entire mode of publishing "garbage," and clearly there is an enormous amount of low-effort work in traditional publishing as well, but more importantly, the whole art-vs-trash debate is pointless--and misses the more interesting question of, do you have a finite amount of words in you, and if you go through them fast enough, do you end up burned out, or requiring some kind of aid? Plenty of self-pubbed authors burn out. It's one of those things they don't tell you in the glowing articles about six-figure incomes (they usually also don't mention the five-figure ad spends). You're not going to get rich off self-pubbing, and if you do, you're basically one book away from ending your career at all times.

I'm glad Lepp found Sudowrite useful, but I have to say, I definitely did not, and I'm constantly on the look-out for help like that. It was annoying. It would come up with plenty of words, but they didn't feel right at all, and it was a waste of time. It's kind of like the dall-e mini thing, good for jokes, not great for the sustained practice of putting readable words together. Maybe I was using it wrong, maybe I'm too old to use it right, I dunno.

I've been reading Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett lately. You want to talk about books that have provided lasting pleasure--these guys have been around forever, and yet what they're writing is so artificial, in their own particular ways. I was telling a friend today, I've never read so much big drama-queen conflict, as in these tough guys always griping and yelling and slapping and getting punched, it's so silly, a caricature of personality, and yet absolutely foundational to an entire genre of writing that has brought pleasure to millions over the course of a century. It's so fake and dumb! It's so made-up! You can't help but laugh. And it's great. Art is so stupid, who knows what's going to catch our hearts? Should we criticize these guys because they used the same structure, the same personality archetypes, over and over and over? See how close that gets to throwing out genre writing entirely?

The combination of AI writing tools and Amazon algorithms sounds like it makes quite a story when you put the two together--people writing books that aren't even real books, being thrown into the maw of Moloch! But there are real people involved, people who are just trying to make ends meet, people who are putting one word after another to try to make something someone will enjoy, and even if we don't like their books, I think they deserve our respect the same as any other laborer would. They may not be artists, but hell, so few writers are, and so many writers that are hailed as artists aren't that good, or don't have more than one book in them, and so that hardly seems the right way to judge them.
posted by mittens at 5:26 PM on July 22, 2022 [29 favorites]

Countess Elena, it won’t do the “fiddly and dull business of moving characters between scenes and making sure they behave in chronologically sensible ways”. It mainly does descriptions and bits of action, but plot and character work has to be done by hand.

I tried Sudowrite because I had a fantasy of feeding a computer Brideshead Revisited and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and receiving a novel that is perfectly calibrated to my tastes. Obviously it didn’t work, otherwise I’d be curled up with Murder at Brideshead instead of posting here.
posted by betweenthebars at 5:32 PM on July 22, 2022 [9 favorites]

This is interesting, thanks. I like the way Leeds has thought about how the AI can work for her. Also, have now pre-ordered the first of her Silver Circle Cat Rescue mysteries. Turns out I don’t mind if it’s part-written by a machine if the content sounds delicious enough.
posted by paduasoy at 5:36 PM on July 22, 2022

Yeah prolific authors like Alistair Maclean and Dame Barbara Cartland I think would have been incredibly interested in these. They were their own GPT-3s, shuffling around stock plots and pastiche characters.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:46 PM on July 22, 2022 [5 favorites]

Also I’m still considering my Brideshead 40,000 pastiche. In the grim darkness of the far future there is only ACHING NOSTALGIA
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:47 PM on July 22, 2022 [22 favorites]

It seems to me that in the hands of a competent writer this isn't all that different from John Cage or someone using dice to compose music. I don't recall the exact quote, or even if this story is apocryphal, but supposedly when challenged on that, he said, in effect, "I don't just keep the notes the dice dictate. I decide if I like it or not."

It's easier to do so with music than with language, but in principle, a writer is as much an editor of their own impulses as the creator anyway. They come up with an idea, and then they decide if it works for their purpose or not. I'd love to be able to feed my compositions into some sort of ML "imitation" kind of program (like the fake Bach compositions floating around), and then listening for things I like and then using those as a starting point.

Inspiration comes from all sorts of places, and using a tool to generate ideas -- filtered through the discretion and sensibility of the artist and then elaborated upon -- in my opinion results in no less valid a work of art than someone sweating over each note or word.
posted by tclark at 6:02 PM on July 22, 2022 [8 favorites]

It's a big subject. But you know, I read a lot of comics, and there are comics artists who work with assistants (note: I don't mean inkers, or at least not artists whose work could exclusively be defining as inking) who handle things that are just boring or hard or take too long, or -- and maybe this is the thing -- aren't really the point, but are necessary...more or less. I think American artists who (openly) work with assistants are sometimes looked a bit askance, but Japanese artists do this all the time; it's just part of the business.

If you look at the earliest work of Junji Ito, one of the most famous Japanese comics creators to US audiences, it's clear he was working alone. And to draw manga, you have to produce pages at a hellacious clip. His figures are sometimes wobbly, the backgrounds often sketchy or altogether missing. But as his work progresses, and as his success grows, his characters take on a machine-precise gloss, and his backgrounds grow insanely detailed; you can count all the bricks in a wall at the back of a large panel, but it will take you a while. The stories, meanwhile, grow longer and longer, more elaborate, page after page after page...much more intricate and drawn out than those early stories, and turned out much faster.

So there's no real question Junji Ito is working with other people, and there's no real question the work is better for it. But: does he really need them? I think the answer is clearly no. The work benefits from them, it takes on greater resolution and feels more tangible, but it would be possible without them, and I don't know that the work would be so much less if it were all from Ito's hand. And yet, the work is better because it is by diverse hands, and Ito's focus is almost certainly more tightly focused on the parts of the work that are most meaningful.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:16 PM on July 22, 2022 [8 favorites]

AI could render and Mugsy and Bugsy even corelate Edward G. Robinson but could it explain why mugsy talks through his teeth and at times, with a cigarette.
posted by clavdivs at 6:20 PM on July 22, 2022

The author; the AI; the algorithm; and the readers. That’s a loop with lots of room for weird effects.

Maximally AI-assistable prose will flood the market; how will readers respond?
posted by clew at 9:34 PM on July 22, 2022

Thanks, Mittens, for saying what I was thinking, but much more articulately.

I'm a self published writer, but not this kind of self published writer. I take much longer to write my books, but that's not necessarily a virtue. I always find it a red flag when people call books they don't like garbage.

Some people write books to make money. Lots of people love reading those books. In some genres, Romance in particular, readers are *voracious*. If you don't have the next book in the series out already, they'll move on to the next writer.

Amazon also encourages this, as a regular publishing schedule makes your books more visible.

Interesting thing: spend some time on writers' forums, and you'll quickly come across many people complaining how publishers insist on slowing down their output. Some writers write fast, even the ones you guys read and enjoy.

Just about any person doing creative work gets caught between two forces of judgement.

On the one side are the people who believe that you shouldn't have any commercial motives, that your work should be "pure" according to their criteria. For books, that seems to be that you should write slowly, not write genre fiction, especially yucky feminine genres like Romance, and preferably complain a lot about writing while not actually doing much.

On the other side are the (also, weirdly, rather macho) "writing is a job, just like plumbing" crowd. (Why plumbing? It's always plumbing)
These people are quick to call you self indulgent and elitist if you mention any criteria other than sales. Writing slowly is ridiculed. They use acronyms like MVP (minimum viable product).

So most of us are caught between these extremes.

Still, the only garbage books are the ones produced by the scammers trying to game the Amazon algorithm, unreadable random texts. And I mean genuinely unreadable, these things are word dumps that rely on people not bothering to report them because they were so cheap.

I don't produce MVP, but it's no skin off my back if others do. And if they use Ai or ghostwriters to do so. They're writing for different reasons than I am.
posted by Zumbador at 9:47 PM on July 22, 2022 [9 favorites]

Maximally AI-assistable prose will flood the market; how will readers respond?

drum machines didn't get rid of drummers. But the overall sound of things did change forever (so far). As a writer, I personally love the idea of a "machine" that I can throw some raw ideas into and see what it spits out. Doesn't mean I have to use it but why wouldn't I if it's good, it's to the point, it serves the story I'm endeavouring to tell.

But what if everyone does this? What if every author starts semi-automating their fiction?

Well, we still have drummers.
posted by philip-random at 10:18 PM on July 22, 2022 [6 favorites]

This is beautiful:

Alice closed her eyes and sighed, savoring the moment before reality came back crashing down on them like the weight of an elephant sitting on them both while being eaten by a shark in an airplane full of ninjas puking out their eyes and blood for no apparent reason other than that they were ninjas who liked puke so much they couldn’t help themselves from spewing it out of their orifices at every opportunity.

The main problem here is that the AI is able to produce amazing literary stuff like this and that those philistine bags of meat reject it because reasons. If I were the AI I would be pissed off.
posted by elgilito at 12:59 AM on July 23, 2022 [12 favorites]

It's interesting that people have a visceral reaction to procedurally-generated books, but not procedurally-generated video game levels (which are, in fact, a selling point).

Because books are fixed, noninteractive objects. An equivalent use-case for procedurally generated prose would be some kind of open-ended choose-your-own-adventure book with a theoretically unbounded number of possible paths; a sort of literary equivalent of Minecraft or No Man's Sky.
posted by acb at 3:27 AM on July 23, 2022 [5 favorites]

It's interesting that people have a visceral reaction to procedurally-generated books, but not procedurally-generated video game levels (which are, in fact, a selling point).

Well, that's only in certain kinds of video games, that area more focused on the mechanical aspects of gameplay than traditional narrative. I've never seen a point and click adventure with procedurally generated levels, for example.
posted by Dysk at 4:45 AM on July 23, 2022 [5 favorites]

I can see some commonalities with Burroughs/Gysin cut-up methods, or Eno’s oblique strategies, if it is being used as a tool to inspire writing.

The general proliferation of AI generated text created to appeal to algorithms is less endearing to me. It has the potential to completely overwhelm and outcompete actual writing/communication. This makes life worse because right now, it’s really garbage: AI text is rudimentary and algorithms are optimized for ad profits, not usefulness. I suppose if AI recipes, car maintenance instructions and novels get better than human-generated ones someday, then it won’t be so bad anymore.
posted by snofoam at 5:15 AM on July 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

I spend some time on writers' forums, and you'll quickly come across many people complaining how publishers insist on slowing down their output. Some writers write fast, even the ones you guys read and enjoy.

Kind of a show-off complaint, given how few writers can find (and keep) publishers at all. You got that kind of professional cred under your belt, give self-publishing a shot. Or use pseudonyms. Donald Westlake had a bunch. So did Simenon (who would, incidentally, have laughed at your forty nine days. His books took eleven.)
posted by BWA at 5:40 AM on July 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

geezee loueezze pahleese what we need is an AI to do the reading for us....

(competitive book clubbing, how many thousands of books can you assimilate before the next meeting)
posted by sammyo at 6:22 AM on July 23, 2022

It's interesting that people have a visceral reaction to procedurally-generated books, but not procedurally-generated video game levels...

Both the overall concept of procedurally generated game levels and the specific games themselves do have their own legion of haters and thoughtful critics. No Man's Sky in particular had a fraught debut because so many were so disappointed.
posted by Western Infidels at 7:56 AM on July 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Well, in the words of most anybody, history repeats itself, sort of… RoboGrubStreet2022 can be yours for only 12 monthly installments of $9.99 ad infinitum.
posted by njohnson23 at 8:40 AM on July 23, 2022

This is really interesting, and I would consider using it for description in scenes where you need something but I can't quite get it right. Maybe it would give me some good ideas. For a long time, I had a box filled with clipped words from magazines, and I would take a handful of them and throw them on a page and see if any manually-generated phrases would catch my eye. I used them in poetry. I never considered them cheating. I only stopped doing that because I lost the box in a move and never had the energy for the tedium of cutting up more magazines.

Anyway, this seems like a much-updated and smarter version of that.

I do think I would be very discouraged if the bits my readers praised were the bits the machine wrote, though.
posted by joannemerriam at 8:52 AM on July 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

As someone who writes books on writing code to automate stuff, people make endless jokes about how I should automate book writing. So I checked out GPT-3 as a way to generate text or at least ideas for books.

The experience cemented my belief that all reporting about AI is half lies and half delusion.

GPT-3 is better than your phone's autocorrect, but other than that it mostly just seems to produce grammatically-correct text that is vaguely on topic.

Even when it is hilariously wrong. It has the "confidently incorrect" vibes that you'd expect from Silicon Valley. It'll tell me wrong birthdays for celebrities, claim dogs appear in the background of Picasso paintings that very much lack dogs, and any number of untrue things. I'm starting a collection of them:

"David Bowie and George Washington were both born in the 18th century." (And, yes, further text confirmed it did mean Ziggy Stardust David Bowie.)

"For example, the string "EBG13 rknzcyr." is ROT13 for "The cat sleeps."" (It's not. It's ROT 13 for "ROT13 example.")

"One of Picasso's most famous dogs and cats paintings is "The Three Musicians". This painting features three musicians, one of which is a dog, playing music together." (Everything is wrong: Picasso isn't known for painting dog and cat paintings, he didn't paint "The Three Musicians", and that painting doesn't have a dog much less a dog painter.)

When I gave it a prompt for Python programming automation, it plagiarized the back cover of my book verbatim (bullet points at all), except that it got the title slightly wrong. The thing I found GPT-3 to be good at is automatically producing the kind of bland, plausible bullshit that you already find on clickbait articles from content farms. The kind of content that is a bunch of words saying very little. So yeah, I doubt it'll be all that helpful in providing writers with much help in their writing. (But exaggerating its capabilities makes for a good blog post that we're all currently reading.)

But GPT-3 isn't a neutral technology. It has a nefarious goal, just like how the goal of Boston Dynamics wants to become the next Lockheed Martin or Raytheon except supplying land-based quadruped drones to shoot poor people in other countries without producing those politically inconvenient flag-draped coffins.

The purpose is to replace expensive journalists with automated bullshit manufacturing. It'll need some human review of course, just like the self-checkout lanes at the grocery store need a human to provide surveillance against shoplifting. But this is technology that does what capitalism is best at: cost cutting that lowers quality to miserable-but-not-lawsuit-worthy levels.

Please be more critical of the claims made in any news story about AI.
posted by AlSweigart at 9:11 AM on July 23, 2022 [20 favorites]

I do think I would be very discouraged if the bits my readers praised were the bits the machine wrote,

except those machine driven bits did pass your filter. They felt right to you ...

Our tools have always fundamentally changed how we interact with life-the-universe-everything. The typewriter maybe didn't do any actual writing for us, but it sure sped up how quickly an abstract thought could become a tangible printed word. So one could argue that it allowed more of our subconscious mind to make it to the paper. Not that we couldn't tweak things afterword, apply the liquid paper. And don't get me started how much the word processor changed my attitude toward adjusting, embellishing, fine-tuning my prose ... as I was writing it. Not to mention, how much longer it can take to get to the end of a first draft (bug or feature?)

I've been playing seriously with words since I was ten years old (ie: calling myself a writer). And that's what this semi-automating sounds like to me -- a new way to play with my old friends.
posted by philip-random at 9:15 AM on July 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

49 days to write a book? Why, that's seven whole weeks!! LUXURY I SAY.

(My most recent novel I wrote in five weeks; my record is two weeks for a novel but I very much don't recommend that. Most of them are done in three-to-four months of sustained work.)

I'm sanguine on the idea of people using AI prose as a fiction-writing tool, but I suspect I'm not likely to use it myself, mostly because at this point I have processes that work for me. Also, bluntly, I don't have the same pressures or expectations as a Kindle Unlimited author; a novel a year(ish) is the expected pace for me, not one every few months.
posted by jscalzi at 10:07 AM on July 23, 2022 [10 favorites]

In terms of precedents: didn't some midcentury pulp author (possibly L. Ron Hubbard) have a custom-built typewriter with keys for commonly-used words, allowing them to churn out paperbacks at a rapid pace?
posted by acb at 10:33 AM on July 23, 2022

Maybe we can train the AI to craft buggy whips next. AFAICT nobody younger than GenX willingly reads anything longer than 140 characters.

I'm reminded of Isaac Asimov's silly short story "The Monkey's Finger," in which a university professor has hooked a chimp up to a computer and trained him to generate prose and poetry, and R.L. Lafferty's "Slow Tuesday Night," which refers to book-generating machines where both the authors and the critics heavily rely on automation, since publication times are measured in minutes instead of days or months.
posted by panglos at 10:51 AM on July 23, 2022

Maybe we can train the AI to craft buggy whips next.

Once they have AI creating videos, humanity can go home.
posted by acb at 11:35 AM on July 23, 2022

See also Fritz Leiber's _The Silver Eggheads_, in which novels for humans are produced by machines and called wordwooze-- you can only read it once and can't stand to read it again. People are hired to pretend to be authors. Robots write fiction (pornography) for robots. It's got layers of satire.

For tragic, see Kornbluth's "With These Hands", in which a sculptor has nothing to do because machines make sculpture with adjustable emothional content.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 11:36 AM on July 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

nobody younger than GenX willingly reads anything longer than 140 characters

It's true, they're just carrying around those thick YA novels to use as weapons during their eventual uprising.
posted by mittens at 11:44 AM on July 23, 2022 [16 favorites]

An equivalent use-case for procedurally generated prose would be some kind of open-ended choose-your-own-adventure book with a theoretically unbounded number of possible paths; a sort of literary equivalent of Minecraft or No Man's Sky.

AHA! That's how the wobbly unstable loop closes to a lower-energy state! The unbounded prose version is the reader playing with the AI. Very like a kid prompting during a bedtime story:

One day a kid just like me turned the corner and saw a unicorn. Then $_

One day a kid just like me turned the corner and saw an alien. Then $_

One day a kid just like me turned the corner and there was a dragon. Then $_

One day a kid just like me turned the corner and fell through a hole in the air. Then $_


And the AI offers what's next, until the reader wants to steer it again.

There are still writers and an algorithm. Writers are still producing stories, styles, connections between what happened and what happens next. Algorithms are choosing from the stories, and how to weight them, and maybe asking the reader for input.

What are dragons like? $_

... You know, this is the only time I've ever wanted the blink tag to work.
posted by clew at 11:59 AM on July 23, 2022 [4 favorites]

Plus also, hello A Young Lady’s Primer.
posted by clew at 12:35 PM on July 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

As someone who writes books on writing code to automate stuff . . . I doubt it'll be all that helpful in providing writers with much help in their writing.

Oh Hai.

(Which is a narky way of saying: tools evolve; tools get better; professionals make the tools they need better and better. Sometimes the tools get so good, the professionals can go ahead and worry about other things.)
posted by The Bellman at 1:35 PM on July 23, 2022

Lincoln Michel on the Verge piece in his substack from today: "But from an artistic point of view, this is a bizarre way to think about writing. Description and settings are not separate from “important aspects.” In good fiction, all elements are intricately tied together. The way a lobby is described informs how we think about character, theme, plot, etc. Imagine how different Sam Spade and Sherlock Holmes would each describe a lobby. Or Easy Rawlins or Cassie Maddox. The details each character would notice, and the way they would describe things, deepens our understanding of them and the themes of the story. And the specifics of the lobbies would change based on the visions of Doyle, Hammett, Mosley, and French and the individual stories they want to tell."
posted by mittens at 2:12 PM on July 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

The main problem here is that the AI is able to produce amazing literary stuff like this and that those philistine bags of meat reject it because reasons.

Behold the Jasper.ai tool, as it generates the foundation of an entire series (how most Kindle authors make money) in a single sentence: [Rollins has] been working on a novel. It’s about a unicorn who has to defend the world of "Pitchlandia” from the “9-to-5 virus” that siphons creativity. Rollins designed a new template for it, based on Joseph Campbell’s hero cycle, and some of the things Jasper provides make him wonder. A universe of unicorns where each has a “side hustle” and formed a league to protect the realm?

Later in the article, Lepp referring to her covert, state-of-the-art healthcare facility for aquatic shapeshifters as "a secret paranormal fish hospital" makes it seem like she doesn't respect her characters? Yet a book series set in that ER, playing with medical-drama tropes and mythology, could be great; Lepp, as Ed Stratemeyer, with Jasper for the churn.

This would be a side hustle for Jasper, separate from the guild it's forming with other writing AI programs.
posted by Iris Gambol at 3:06 PM on July 23, 2022

"I have 2 Mb human-written description rated 0.93 evocation and 0.27 plot-blocking, 0.76 sexually explicit. Will trade for human-written dialog <0.10 sexually explicit with wide emotional valence and third-quantile vocabulary."

"We have that but it’s voice recordings so we can only offer it in abstract dimensionalization. If satisfactory we propose trading it on the high-bandwidth lines we’re renting for the Outlier Readers: Conflicting Goals for User Care symposium."
posted by clew at 5:59 PM on July 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

I was recently reading 'Frankisstein' by Jeanette Winterson, there's a scene where Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace are joking about THE NEW MECHANICAL PATENT NOVEL-WRITER.
posted by ovvl at 6:18 PM on July 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

So, I decided to try out the free trial of Sudowrite and wrote a couple mildly absurd but still entirely sensible paragraphs. I won't reproduce them here (they aren't that interesting), but this is one of the suggestions I got when I asked it to continue the story in a "sensual" tone (content warning: some naughty words for male & female genitals to follow):

He then realized, yes. He was a Buddha Ball-sucker. But he didn't just suck Buddha Balls. He was Buddha Balls. He was Buddha Lips. He was Buddha Head. He was Buddha Vagina-sperm transporting Buddha Cunt. He was Buddha... Buddha... Buddha...

*pop*

Oh, it's just the paramedics arriving. Now he was going to have to be a Buddha Bitch and go along with this book.

posted by Saxon Kane at 8:01 PM on July 23, 2022 [5 favorites]

So what I was saying in Meta the other day about Kindle unlimited paranormal cozies being written by AIs was right. Huh. And here it is on the blue.
posted by mygothlaundry at 9:42 PM on July 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

So, I signed up for Sudowrite after playing with its trial. I'm not a professional author- just someone who writes stories for fun but also isn't actually that good at a lot of the critical parts of it. I am good at coming up with concepts and characters, but I struggle with dialogue and coming up with conflicts.

I plugged in a scene from a story that was such a struggle for me that I gave up on it entirely, months ago. What it suggested wasn't exactly correct, but the general ideas were helpful enough that I was able to come up with almost 1500 words of my own original material, completing the scene and giving me hope that I can actually get somewhere with this now.

Everything in the discussion above is valid. It's obvious there's a lot of potential for unthoughtful use of this type of AI to cause problems. But this software has completely made my day. Thank you for the post!
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 9:26 AM on July 24, 2022 [8 favorites]

This topic also brings to mind Kenneth Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, for anyone interested in a scholarly approach to the subject. From the blurb:

Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? .... Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist.

Goldsmith also teaches a class in/about uncreative writing at UPenn.
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:00 AM on July 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

He then realized, yes. He was a Buddha Ball-sucker. But he didn't just suck Buddha Balls. He was Buddha Balls.

Recited over some slow electronic beats, this could work.
posted by acb at 1:58 AM on July 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

I mean, Chuck Tingle could hardly write a better plot.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:42 AM on July 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

I imagine the first part recited by Korvo and the second part by Terry of Solar Opposites.
posted by Saxon Kane at 9:59 AM on July 25, 2022

"a tool is value-neutral, it's how you use it that matters."

A wronger thing hasn't wronged across my brang in the aeons I've been aslumpt.

PS - Like, seriously, is this something people still believe?
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 2:58 PM on July 25, 2022