After all, thoses shorts are an easy read, by skimming the boring past, I see myself coming for more. I try to see the AI pattern. So far: Unecessary Time jump . And boring everyday dialog still in. Weirdn as some dialogs are perfectly fine but the Ai keep some uninteresting one in here. One point during the story, at the begining, I would have bet a human writer did some editing. I read the "Jupiter protocol"
Prose quality aside, I find it impressive how well the platform is able to synthesise the Nature papers listed at the bottom of each story to generate the plot ideas. The prose will improve over time. Tell it to write in the voice of David Lindsay or Olaf Stapledon and you've already lifted it part of the way.
HARD disagree. Most people aren't exposed to unchampioned writing - even the shit on Amazon has someone believing in it. Any chump with a copy of the Foundation trilogy can churn out 80%-of-the-way-there garbage - what keeps most people from reading it is (1) it takes a while to write (2) it takes even longer to get it in front of you. If you've ever been in a writer's group you know that the people around you spent months or years making things as bad as what you're trying to be polite about. The stuff that people actually read has come through that forge refined. It's no longer 80% of the way there, it's 99-100% of the way there and it gets there through learning, experience and artistry. There's this idea that "hey, computers are 80% of the way there, they'll make the extra 20% in no time at all" that's been pervading these discussions since we were all forced to learn the words "trolley problem" and what has happened, universally, is that AI boosters have successfully lowered expectations. If I walk halfway to the wall every minute how long will it reach me to touch the wall? Yeah, sure, engineering approximations and all that but we aren't expecting AI to walk halfway to the wall. We're expecting it to walk twenty percent closer each time which, practically speaking, means that it's never going to get closer than 88.8% of the way there. there is nothing in the AI toolkit that crosses the asymptote. All that's happening is people are claiming that 88 is the new 100.The prose will improve over time.
Tell it to write in the voice of David Lindsay or Olaf Stapledon and you've already lifted it part of the way.
I don’t necessarily see this as an obstacle. If you gave 80% there copy to any decent developmental editor and line editor, you could probably get to the level of any bulk genre novel on the shelves at B&N within 6 months. The content of most novels is derivative even when written by human authors and professionally edited and published. Theres very little art in those novels, as most of them tend to follow formulae for creating characters and plots and settings that are common enough to have worksheets being used in production. To be blunt, AI is going to absolutely decimate the writing industry because most of the published works are derivative and formulaic — and that’s exactly what AI is good at. Just to give an example, this (https://savethecat.com/beat-sheets) is the Save the Cat beat sheet page. Save the cat is a plot structure used by Hollywood rather extensively and is fairly common in novels. It’s also fairly specific in how a plot should be structured— down to the page number in the case of movie scripts (https://savethecat.com/beat-mapper). This isn’t people learning from experience, this is basically an algorithm for telling a story. And this is what is expected in the industry. I’m sure the there are niches in high literary fiction that are less derivative and more artistic, but this is only a very small part of the book industry, and furthermore it’s not easy to do well. One huge thing that AI detractors don’t like to admit is that AI doesn’t have to be perfect to be adopted for a purpose, it just has to create content that’s worth editing in this case. This is a pretty low threshold because of the economics— the AI is owned by the publisher and other than the software license, it’s FREE. And if the AI can produce 5000 novels that can be edited for publication, why bother with humans? If all that novels do is follow formulae then there’s no point to the human.
1) Blake Snyder was a casual friend of mine. 2) I was repped at William Morris for screenwriting. 3) I was repped at Darhansoff & Verrill for novels. 4) My letter of recommendation to grad school was written by Terry Rossio. 5) I was introduced to my agent by at D&V By Douglas Preston. 6) My novel was edited by Richard Marek. KCAL did a stand-up in 2006, 2007. Peak "Save the Cat!" time. They put a camera, a reporter and a microphone on the corner of Hollywood & Vine and asked random passers-by "how's your screenplay coming?" Eighty percent of them had an answer other than "I don't have a screenplay." And yet, none of them - not a one! Got made into a movie. I had a friend who would read eight screenplays a day. Did so for a couple years. Not a single one ever got greenlit. Is your argument that ChatGPT can do a better job than a human? Because I said they were 80% of the way there and your argument is that an editor could get them on the mass market shelves. So... all those writers out there banging away, unable to get published... are they worse than ChatGPT? It took M Night Shamalyan 9 rewrites before he figured out Bruce Willis was dead. Is ChatGPT going to figure it out in 10? 20? 30? Ever? It took Anne LaMott 20 drafts before her daddy's agent would shop around her first book. She ended up at a vanity press anyway. Are you suggesting that ChatGPT writes better than Anne LaMot? I might happen to agree; I find her tedious. Jeff Bezos tho So rather than go chapter and verse on the how and why of you being wrong, I will merely suggest that you're out over your skis, and if you disagree I suggest that you give this a try.If you gave 80% there copy to any decent developmental editor and line editor, you could probably get to the level of any bulk genre novel on the shelves at B&N within 6 months
Yup! What the world needs to help cut through all the terrible sci fi out there is... more terrible sci fi! Critters is free and has been giving you five or six terrible sci fi stories a week, each better than anything on that page. None of them have a publisher, none of them ever will, none of them will ever make any money, each of them have been slaved over by a real live human being for weeks or months, but sure. Put an AI on it.
the last story at this time 'echoes of the living' is badly written. I wouldnt tell it is AI though. And the twist is pettry okay and come well together. (Funny fact: I won a short story context with exactly the same ending: revelation of an old time communication betwen Human and an alien species. Mine was from another star. May be less impactful than this one) Still I'm not enticed to read the others stories. To be fair, as much as I like SF, I hardly find any writer worth reading. Beside F.Herbert, and some Azimov (for the plot only)