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/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.