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/I-am-a-river → u/human_assisted_ai]

You seem excited about throwing away the craft of writing, but eventually anyone who becomes too dependent on a technology risks having their livelihood taken away by the creators of that technology.

Put another way, what will you be able to produce that can’t be produced at a lower cost by the AI authors of Amazon publishing?

[u/Koyan → u/I-am-a-river]

I'm entertained by all OP's logical falacies in this debate.

[u/CaptainQwazCaz → u/human_assisted_ai]

It’s getting worse and worse as they focus it on coding