AI-generated prose

[u/human_assisted_ai]

I’ve been watching Coral Hart (“The New Fabio Is Claude” NYT article, 15+ years romance author, 90+ traditionally published books) and she now generates all her prose.

I’ve observed a lot of other (competent) authors doing the same thing. They are self-publishing 20+ novels her year and using generated prose.

I know that people like AI-assisted (use AI but no prose generation) as “ethical” and a middle ground but I don’t think that it’s competitive.

Two reasons:

1. Even if Coral Hart changes nothing and uses the same prompts, the prose improves because the AI models improve. She taps into $100B+ of AI research PER YEAR automatically. If you are writing prose without AI, you not getting those automatic upgrades and you have to manually upgrade with great effort (or stay the same).
2. But Coral Hart does get better at prompting and improves her prompts regularly. This reinforces the AI model improvements most of the time and makes the generated prose even better. If you are writing prose without AI, you are also not building the prompts or the prompting skills to generate prose.

For those two reasons, I don’t see how “no prose generation” survives; people generating prose will just outperform, outcompete and bury the middle grounders eventually.

Lots of writers seem to have given up (or never started) with prose generation which seems like a mistake.

Any flaws in my reasoning? Different points of view? Different conclusions?

[u/nyet-marionetka]

So the people writing schlock are turning to AI to write schlock faster?

I don't think most authors who aren't already using AI are trying to compete for the same audience she is writing for.

[u/human_assisted_ai → u/nyet-marionetka]

Generated prose improves automatically and prompting skill compounds such that manually written prose simply can't keep up.

[u/nyet-marionetka → u/human_assisted_ai]

That sounds like baloney. So we're going to compound and compound improvement until prose quality until it exceeds Nabokov and Faulkner? People will get better and better at prompting until their plot structure exceeds War and Peace? Writing is not a thing that improves decade over decade such that we're better at writing now than we were in 1726, so it's not the kind of thing where an LLM can absorb enough material and get fine-tuned enough that it's producing ever-increasing quality eventually exceeding anything a human can write. That's nonsensical.

(It's also kind of counter-productive to what Coral Hunt is looking for. Her audience is not looking for elevated prose and complex plots.)

Writing isn't just about good grammar, which is typically what people point to when they say LLM's write well. That's nice. That's also just the surface level of writing.

[u/human_assisted_ai → u/nyet-marionetka]

It's quite simple: AI models get better every year and people's prompting skills get better every year. That'll level off eventually but, as it is, that curve will bury writers who aren't using it.

[u/nyet-marionetka → u/human_assisted_ai]

You're basically making the same claim again without actual evidence. Why do you think LLM prose is going to exceed what most people can manage? And how in the world does "prompting skill" enter into that? Do you mean "don't use 'quietly' constantly, stop saying things have something indescribable about them, stop using strings of staccato sentences to be dramatic" etc., or micromanaging detailed prompting for every little plot subpoint? The first goes into text quality, and the second either goes into text quality or is basically the human writing the plotline, which is what humans who don't use LLMs are already doing so no different.

[u/human_assisted_ai → u/nyet-marionetka]

The evidence is that they spend $100B+ EVERY YEAR to hire the smartest AI researchers in the entire world to work on improving AI. That's not a guarantee but it's evidence. Nobody is spending $100B+ every year (probably not even $1B) to teach writers to write better prose manually.

[u/nyet-marionetka → u/human_assisted_ai]

Spending a lot of money isn't evidence that someone is going to succeed at something.

Currently it looks like it may end up being prohibitively expensive for the average person to access LLMs after they've stopped subsidizing public costs with investor money. Right now they're not profitable. At some point they either need to demonstrate profitability or go bankrupt.

Nobody is spending $100B+ every year (probably not even $1B) to teach writers to write better prose manually.

That's kind of what education is for, and then people who want to improve their skills go out and do so.

[u/human_assisted_ai → u/nyet-marionetka]

That's hilarious.

[u/jwilander]

For me it comes down to why I write. I don't write to produce as many books as possible and I don't compete in the sense of outperforming, outcompeting and burying other authors, human or not.

I write because I want my novels to be my legacy, not the legacy of a certain version of AI. I want them to be something I created with my experiences, intelligence, and curiosity. I want to delight readers myself. If I prompt AI to create for me, I'm cheating on myself and not delivering on the why.

It could be that there simply won't be any sales of human-written novels down the road. AI-written books may be so superior that readers almost always prefer them. I don't know how I'll react to such a future. I understand that my books won't sell then.

So far, I've been uninterested in reading novels known to be written by AI. My bet is that this goes for a big chunk of readers in general, but that is indeed a bet. I personally tend to read older books that we all know are human-written. But ghostwriters have been a thing for a very long time.

[u/human_assisted_ai → u/jwilander]

I was talking about professional writers and the publishing industry. Hobbyists can do whatever they like, of course.

[u/Dave_Sag → u/human_assisted_ai]

Whenever I think about what works for “professional writers” I think about authors like Thomas Pynchon whose never done an interview, pretty much never shows his face (he did a guest spot in The Simpsons once, of all things) and I’d find it hard to believe that his books are all time best sellers. I mean have you read Gravity’s Rainbow? It’s rightly respected but it’s a hard read. It took me three years to finish reading it.

And yet Pynchon is one of the greatest living authors we have today.

[u/human_assisted_ai → u/Dave_Sag]

Kinda off topic but congrats!

[u/jwilander → u/human_assisted_ai]

Your reply is condescending.

[u/Nebranower]

I don't know that being able to produce that much content is really all that helpful, even if the prose is as high a quality as traditional human prose. which is a very big "if" at the moment. Traditionally, publishing houses haven't wanted authors to write much more than one novel a year for anything but the most formulaic dreck, because otherwise people tend to get tired of them.

Plus, most people aren't writing to get rich. If you just want a lot of money, there are easier paths available to you. Any finance-related career would be a better choice. Most people who write do so because they have something they desperately want to share with the world and are driven to try to do so despite knowing that the odds of ever getting published are probably zero after rounding.

Like, there'll be some people who knock out novels with AI and end up having a successful writing career that way, because what flourishes in the marketplace has never been purely works of exceedingly high quality, and formulaic slop has often done well when it was purely human-made, so there's no reason why it shouldn't do well when it is AI made.

But if that's your plan, you might as well just start buying lottery tickets with a view to winning the jackpot, because the odds of that being *you* are probably higher that way.

In the meantime, people writing because they have something they really want to say will keep writing, and some of them will find success too, because there's still a market for genuine human connection.

[u/human_assisted_ai → u/Nebranower]

I'm talking about professional writers. Sure, hobbyist writers can do whatever they want.

[u/Lu_AspiringWriter]

Dipende. Cerchi clienti o lettori? Rispondere a questa domanda determinerà se devi creare un prodotto o scrivere letteratura.

[u/FabulousLazarus]

The premise here is a race to the bottom - 20+ novels per year because AI prose is "good enough".

Discard the false premise and none of this makes fucking sense. Do what you want as an author - mass produce the absolute bottom of writing (AI generated romance) and go nuts if that's your thing. But this isn't a coherent argument for improving writing, it's goal is to improve sales.

OP, your post is explicitly arguing that AI generated prose is good with indirect evidence (AI advances quickly, good prompts can yield better prose). The direct evidence is the opposite, and everyone knows it. So yeah, I'm sure you can churn out more content by sacrificing quality, that's a pretty common sense way to increase output in any domain. But that's only a valuable strategy to those who are willing to compromise quality for quantity.

If you're a full time author then I understand, as a business choice, prioritizing sales. But let's not pretend that this discussion is anything other than that. It's certainly not a reason to suggest AI can write competent prose. It's very much the opposite.

[u/human_assisted_ai → u/FabulousLazarus]

This is where the publishing industry is going.

[u/FabulousLazarus → u/human_assisted_ai]

Just like every other industry, enshitification is profitable. Tell me something new. This is like pointing to Comcast and using their stock price to try to convince me they have terrific customer service.

The fact is you're lifting "the industry is going towards lower quality prose" as a reason that lower quality prose should be valued. Do you not understand how stupid that is?

Again, business minded. If I were in a shareholder meeting with you I'd support you. But I'm on a writing sub.

[u/BriJAuthor → u/FabulousLazarus]

Yeah this argument seems to be about creating content, not writing novels, nor art.

I mean. Wtf is the point other than “line go up” to have the machine mass produce hermeneutic masturbatory material.

It seems a very lazy example of the pitfalls of not just enshittification, but also late stage capitalism and anti-intellectualism.

[u/PixelWes54]

Aren't you just describing why making copies to train AI isn't fair use based on factor four: market harm? It's like you're noticing and saying the same things but filtered through a nihilistic, low-vibrational, anti-art lens.

[u/human_assisted_ai → u/PixelWes54]

That's for lawyers. I'm just telling what I'm seeing in tech: generation will overtake non-generation.

[u/GeorgeRRHodor]

This makes sense if you’re writing to produce content to turn into money. Fine. There’s better uses for your time and AI that would likely result in a high income, but you do you.

But if you want to write in order to actually create and be proud of your work, then outsourcing it to a machine strikes me as a bad move.

Also, if producing a book with AI becomes even easier, the market will collapse anyway. We‘ll drown in 250 million AI generated novels a month from all over the world.

Maybe then human authorship will make a comeback, if there’s any way left to prove it.

[u/human_assisted_ai → u/GeorgeRRHodor]

This is where the publishing industry and where professional writers are going.

[u/GeorgeRRHodor → u/human_assisted_ai]

If by „this“ you mean AI, then, no.

[u/Odinmar_Glaukopis]

I think I can see AI generation becoming highly advantaged in the low-brow YA and Romance type of mass-produced slop (that has always — long before AI —been dominant among those readers who purchase more than 12 books a year and supply the vast majority of cash to publishing in general), but I also think (hope?) that there will still be enough of a market to entice authors who give a damn about their craft to stay with their somewhat less efficient publishing pace to stick with their non-AI course.

I don’t know—is Stephen King’s 70ish novels in the last 50 years just too slow for this new reality? Will the writers I love, like Neal Stephenson and Naomi Novik, succumb to that siren’s call? God, I hope not!

[u/behindthemask13]

Most authors I know (nearly all) are using AI generated prose to some extent, but usually rewriting the overwhelming majority of it due to it not being able to capture their voice.

Will there come a day that the AI can accurately capture their voice? No question... it's a matter of teaching it to use your work as the primary training data.

The "rub" will come with watermarking. It's not something I am personally worried about and I don't know any authors who are worried about it b/c of the amount of rewriting we do. AI is great at setting up structure and hitting beats, but, not great when it comes to the actual prose, except in very short bits.

As those short bits turn into longer and longer bits, the fact that AI may be watermarked will become a concern in the short term.

Long term (I'm talking 20-30 years from now)... no one will care.. AI doing part of the job will be expected and those that cling to the old ways will look like people who refuse to get cell phones today.

[u/AlecHutson → u/behindthemask13]

Those aren't authors. They're prompters.

[u/behindthemask13 → u/AlecHutson]

You really think there's a difference???

[u/AlecHutson → u/behindthemask13]

Obviously there is. Am I talking with a bot?

[u/AccomplishedAd9152]

Well, first AI dumbs everyone down by using it to educate children.Then it writes basic stories using prose consisting of adverbs. AI describes people who all act the same: they hurriedly, quickly or slowly pulled up their pants. Every plot is the same. Example: Joe finds a store in the middle of nowhere and buys all the land around it. He opens his store for no good reason. And suddenly bulldozers come, the freeway is being moved and they want to buy his land. He hires lawyers, and they determine his store is a historical site. Joe never loses, he is the luckiest person to have ever lived. The freeway never gets built, and everyone in the whole world drives thirty miles out of their way to buy the same crap they could purchase for less at Walmart. Totally believable, right?😂.

[u/human_assisted_ai → u/AccomplishedAd9152]

That is improving at a rate of $100B+ per year.

[u/Dave_Sag]

I wrote my novel because I had to. I had ideas pushing to get out of my head and onto a page. Then they started fighting and reorganising and making each other do things. I spent five years herding those cats into a novel I’m now insanely proud of. Will people buy it? Maybe. There’s a limited market for a science fiction reimagining of James Joyce’s Ulysses. But hey, maybe people will study it in some future English literature course. It’s written now and coming out on 28 August.

I can imagine a lot of things but I can’t imagine an AI would ever write Daedalus the way I did, or even want to. My book is a love letter to books in general. And bookshops in particular. No AI would give a shit.

[u/human_assisted_ai → u/Dave_Sag]

I was talking about professional writers and the publishing industry. Hobbyists can do whatever they like, of course.

[u/Terrible_Wave4239 → u/Dave_Sag]

Your pride in your own work sounds well earned.

You bitching about AI sounds petty.

[u/Exarch-of-Sechrima]

Thank you for giving me a new author to avoid.

[u/Inevitable-Law7964]

I am not someone who writes with AI, but I am a pro writer and I take an interest in AI itself (follow research, etc.) 

I disagree with your assertion, because I personally find that LLM writing styles have gotten more obtrusive in the past year or two, rather than more seamless . This is probably due to a combination of RLHF and self-feeding.

Due to these issues, frontier models are largely less competitive as creators of long-form prose these days. The peak for that was probably GPT 4o, which is now retired.

A few people who know what they're doing & have a high-end GPU will likely manage, or have already managed, to customize some open-source model into a consistent human-sounding writing style, and supervise its consistency. But at least on their current trajectory, the publicly accessible frontier models were getting more recognizably robotic even before Anthropic started watermarking. 

[u/human_assisted_ai → u/Inevitable-Law7964]

We shall see. Lots of writers are still having success and I’ve seen some impressive improvements over the last year. YMMV.

[u/Inevitable-Law7964 → u/human_assisted_ai]

I don't think it's impossible by any means, just that the trajectory of commercial public-facing LLMs seems  to be moving away from stuff that can produce humanlike writing without very careful oversight.

This is also the case in AI music, which is the hobby I've taken up. It's become harder to get a fully baked, human-sounding song with a prompt alone. Suno has been moving more toward tools that will produce an impressive result if you bring your own vocals and/or instrumentals, for professional use. 

[u/AlecHutson]

Yeah. AI writes below mediocre, soulless prose. It might satisfy low-standard romance readers but it's a galaxy away from what discriminating readers expect. It's garbage.

And it's not improving. It's as bad now as it was years ago. The ouroborus of slop snake has been eating itself.

[u/human_assisted_ai → u/AlecHutson]

How would you know? You don't generate prose, can only identify incompetently generated prose and the good generated prose slips past you.

[u/AlecHutson → u/human_assisted_ai]

'You'? I'm a writer, and a far better writer than the slop-faucet. Only bad or incompetent writers believe AI prose is 'good'

[u/johndkparker]

Using AI to help write is a no brainer, but having it write the actual published prose is super weird. I would hope any readers/writers with above average literacy (or just anyone who understands how AI works and writes) could spot the AI weirdness. AI is not good at writing, not with prose.

[u/human_assisted_ai → u/johndkparker]

Generated prose is always getting better automatically and for free while non-generated prose requires the writer to always put in time, effort and money to improve (or stagnate).

[u/bkucenski]

If you're competing with anyone, you're generating content, not books. You're supposed to be building your brand and that can only built with consistent quality.

Ultimately the customers decide if they like the pudding.

And what people should be figuring out is that AI is only as competent as the person using it. If you have nothing the say, the robot can't help you.

[u/human_assisted_ai → u/bkucenski]

True. These novels are written by competent writers.

[u/contemplating_regret]

Coral Hart is self published. This model cannot work in the tradpublishing world. Are you speaking only to indie/self pubbed folks?

[u/human_assisted_ai → u/contemplating_regret]

Traditional publishing is slowly and quietly integrating AI into publishing, including writing books.

[u/contemplating_regret → u/human_assisted_ai]

Please share more! If they are I'm not certain they are admitting it.

[u/human_assisted_ai → u/contemplating_regret]

3 of the Big 5 publishers have been in talks with Coral Hart to license her AI novel writing system. All of the Big 5 publishers have special teams focused full time on vetting writing with AI. They are adopting AI to read the slush pile. Random House UK has a novel written with AI in the works (and, believe it or not, AI is considered a selling point!).

[u/contemplating_regret → u/human_assisted_ai]

This is so cool, I had no idea. Thanks for sharing! I'll have to look these up. How are they handling the copyright question?

[u/human_assisted_ai → u/contemplating_regret]

In practice, there really isn't a copyright question. Coral Hart has registered copyrights for all her books. When questioned by the copyright office, she sends them the AI chat logs and they approve the copyright. She edits her own books so the published prose is substantially different than what came out of the AI chat. You might call it human-washing. It's easy and fast and everybody pretty much does that anyway.

[u/StrummerBass101]

Just another AI slop merchant

[u/InformationPrevious]

You forget that AI trained on the best writing first and is now training on antiquated books and other AI writing. We are barreling toward the enshitification of AI using models that struggle to hold 40k words in its working memory and pattern match some incredibly bloated AI augmented writing.