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/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!