Why AI Writing AI Falls Short in Creating Fiction

We all want AI to write a best-selling novel for us so we can make millions with very little work, but there are two problems with that: if AI could write best-selling novels by the hundred, they wouldn't be worth anything and we would make zilch; and AI simply can't write well enough, so I conclude that there's no way round the hard work and writing your own words in your own voice.
This video shows the process of me beginning to edit what AI had written and finally rewriting every word to make it sound reasonable to my own ear.
You may think the AI version is good enough. You may prefer it to mine. That still doesn't get round problem one.

[@guillermoelnino]

Don't treat it like a writer. treat it like an intern.

[@katka8490]

I think where AI shines isn't in having it write your prose. You'll put the time and effort in, but use Claude to pick its brain. Upload your document and start peppering it with questions. Ask it for the weaknesses in your scene and ask it to analyze characters. Used right, AI will make for better books.

[@chickenbacon5197]

I once got bored and just had Claude do a back and forth with over world building concepts, themes for the story, and character arcs. It was an interesting practice because I could pick and choose and build off of outputs in my mind. I think someone with a strong imagination could use it to break through writer's block, but they'd still need to be a good writer to make the most of it.

[@ClassicGhost]

Yes I think you’re correct. The use will be not getting it to write your story but to help you write it yourself

[@brianseay8242]

I think it should be used as a TOOL, but not a replacement for writing a book using your imagination and effort, even if AI could create a full, cohesive novel. But used right, yeah, AI or ChatGPT, is a good tool to use for research, and editing (and even then a writer who knows their craft will use their writerly discernment and pick out the good prose it produces vs. the purple prose and wordy sentences) and making scenes stronger in a story, but on top of that, writers should self-edit their own work first, and use real people to edit as well to ensure it satisfies potential readers because we are writing for humans to read, no AI robots. At best, a REAL writer can't help but use their imagination to plot story ideas and work hard at their craft to ensure a quality book.

[@takkik282]

Right now, LLM are perfect assistants. If you don't give them enough direction, they will just produce average content. Perhaps I'm wrong, but look like you don't give them enough information about the style you want. Like it was said in one of your video, ask gpt or claude to analyse an example of your writing to get the style. You can even try to give them a personality as a writer. The context mater to drive the AI in new directions. And you have more advanced techniques like chain of thoughts or tree of thoughts. One of the best use is for data analyse. It can resume, outline specific informations etc... (code interpreter, Claude 2 100k tokens or some vector database trick). It can be helpful when preparing your story. Let the LLM parse your documentation !

[@jennab176]

I watched your video twice so I could write down all my thoughts the second time. I have a lot to say! 1. The get rich quickers. Sure, there are people using AI for that reason. Even before AI, KDP has been filled with book stuffers, with "authors" who buy reviews to get people to read their novels, with the scammers. Those people have always been around and they're not going anywhere, with or without AI. These days, whether you're incorporating AI into your writing process or not, the market is over-saturated, and your chance of making millions is slim at best. 2. The saleability factor. There are many genres of romance that have been long neglected simply because the big-name publishers don't think they will sell and refuse to give them a chance. Self-publishing has changed this somewhat, because people can now write the books they want to read, and cut out the middle man, so to speak. However self-publishing alone has already made it so the value of a book is close to zero. AI will likely make that worse, but it was true before AI became available to us. 3. Cost equals quality. This isn't always true. Let's take the example of medications. Both brand-name and generic medications are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which ensures that they contain the same active ingredients in the same amounts. The main difference between the two is often just the marketing and the packaging, meaning that in many cases, the cheaper, generic versions work just as well as their more expensive counterparts. 4. Time. When you’re learning how to do something, it takes a lot longer than once you’ve mastered it, right? As we learn to streamline the process of incorporating AI into our workflow, like with using code interpreter, for example, the time it takes to write with the help of AI will shorten. And there are so many uses outside of writing the actual prose! The brainstorming, the plotting, the writing of blurbs and synopsis, etc. Even if you don't want to use AI for the actual writing of the prose, you have to agree that it is certainly helpful in other ways related to writing. 5. "Most people can't write good prose." Here you sound a bit like a book snob. As a longtime lover of romance, both in reading and writing it, I have long been looked down on for my tastes. People who don't read romance don't understand how many phenomenal authors there are writing romance. How many well-written, well-researched romance novels exist. That being said, not every novel has to be the greatest work ever written in the history of mankind! There should be room at the table for everyone. 6. Comparing the AI version to your edited version. Honestly, the AI version is scarier! More foreboding and ominous. That is my genuine opinion. It sounds more like horror, and I think that's what you were going for here? My final thoughts. AI is a tool. Use it in the way that works best for you. Just because you don't like the prose it creates, don't give up on it entirely. As they say, don't throw out the baby with the bath water. I have enjoyed so much hearing your thoughts on AI, and watching your process. I hope you won't stop putting out AI writing content entirely. I also really enjoy listening to your voice. Have you thought about being an audio book narrator? For me, AI has given me hope that I can finally finish the novels that have been sitting written or half-written on my computer for years. I am a SLOW writer, and I really think AI can help me write faster, brainstorm and fully develop my ideas faster, etc. I also want to give you one more AI writing tool to try. NovelAI. They just came out with their newest model Kayra and it's amazing. It's important to note that NovelAI trains their own models. They don't use chatgpt or claude or anyone else's AI, it's completely their own. NovelAI has trained their models differently also, almost exclusively on fiction, from what I understand. They now offer an instruct mode, which means you can ask it questions similar to chatgpt or claude. But writing the prose is different also. You work WITH NovelAI. You go back and forth, writing some and then letting the AI write, etc. It's much more of a hands-on process. I wonder if you might like it better? In a week's time Kayra will be offered even at their lowest paid subscription....maybe give it a try then if you don't want to pay the 25 for top tier? I for one would certainly be interested to hear your thoughts. I've experimented with the free trial and have really loved what I've produced, and that was only with using Clio, their older model that is being replaced. One important thing about NovelAI...they don't censor!! You can write about whatever you want, sexual content, violent content, etc. I know one of your complaints about AI is that it produces prose too saccharine for your taste. Give NovelAI a go and see if you like it better! I'll be subscribing when Kayra comes to the middle tier.

[@tylerwilde5355]

I only just now got the idea of what you are describing. I haven't written anything for 20 years and thought that chatgpt was going to let me pump out a story in no time. I quickly realized with no experience that the AI can't write crap for me. This does not mean I have not found it to be a fantastic tool that keeps me engaged. One example of a problem I see is that every response I get is for peaceful conflict resolution. I have to constantly specify to the ai that I am looking for a certain kind of conflict or hostility. For instance of what I am using it for is world building. More specifically, referance note for how nations might respond to situations and other nations. I ask it to give me historical references and examples of both fiction and non-fiction. This expedites my research and fills me with new ideas. I only had it write one chapter for me, and it was so short and uninspiring. I plan to use it only as a bare bones and will rewrite it. I'll decide then if it's worth keeping. If not, I will write it organically and then ask it to rewrite it and compare those results.

[@brentp183]

I think AI works best as a minor virtual assistant in the writing sphere. If we look at GPT, it is good in the ideation stage, helps come up with outlining ideas that I haven't always thought of, if I work the beats up it will write a good very rough first draft in any given scene if I provide good enough beats. I'm like you, the writer in me screams at the purple prose but it actually sparks me to write the same story in a much better way... it does help be shuck the blanket of procrastination from me. In the editing sphere I find it very useful. I feed my own sentences to it that I'm not comfortable with and gives me a number of alternative ways of saying the same thing. It will extract my dialogue from the scene in seconds so I can work on it. It will do a decent copy edit scene by scene that does save me hours of time. But at the heart of everything I am the writer and the AI is the junior assistant doing all the drudge work that slows me down. At anytime when I reverse this relationship nothing works out. But I must say my own writing is better now because AI is a good sounding board and addition to my own work. In my experience it takes me roughly the same amount of time to output something I'm happy with, but I do think the quality of my own work is definitley improving because I'm afforded more time to concentrate on my own craft. I did posit your conclusion on the value of a book decreasing as more people submit books as a result of AI generation to a popular forum and had a bit of a debate how that will or won't be in the future. I came out the other side still agreeing with your point of view. Love your experiments, I carry out a similar testing process in AI. But I have come to a slightly different conclusion, if aligned on some points. To use an analogy, I see myself more as George Martin in the process, as well as John, Paul George or Ringo, I guess, where I do don the hat of the artist but also add session musicians and everything else post production. Or to be more accurate film director rather than screenwriter or DOP. BTW I did prefer your story :)

[@Raven15567]

You hit the nail on the head ai is amazing for not only writing bur character development good tips on foreshadowing but the best of all you can have the ai pretend to be one of the characters I kid you not I asked one of my characters how he felt about someone else in the story and he told me he cares about them but he feels like he doesn't deserve this person affection when I asked for more detail he started to name off his other insecurities after writing a backstory for the character I could put it into a i and name the effects of what happened in the story to that character and how certain traumatic situations change their personality you can even put them in hypothetical situations and see how the personalities will Clash or complement each other but not you can give your AI a hypothetical situation they can tell you how to solve it

[@trevorama]

Very insightful. I really appreciate your putting this video together. Your version was clearly better. Point well taken about a writer’s voice. Thank you!

[@aaronvond]

Novel-writing is one of the uses of Narrative Generation. LLMs are only one technology required to pull off Narrative Generation. We're very close to a big step forward in Narrative Generation that could end up being *much better than most people at prose* and I'm concerned that there are *so many* lazy people wanting the bot to write for them, I probably should not make it very easy to use. I don't know.

[@stuartist]

I like generative AI for helping me come up with ideas, and for cleaning up my text at times, but I just don't think it can create a compelling novel (at least not yet).

[@mageprometheus]

It's essential to only use current AI as a brainstorming assistant or configure it to be an expert in a narrow discipline. Create your own plots, characters, arcs, timelines, outlines, and plot points, while using the useful aspects of the LLM to offer suggestions and improve small parts after giving clear instructions and setting boundaries. I find it helpful for finding great setup ideas and foreshadowing options for a payoff. Stick within the limitations of the tool and accept more help as it evolves and improves. Perhaps one day it will be good enough to be a coauthor, but that's not today. I enjoy your earlier prose videos too. Thank you.

[@giantsbane8439]

The whole idea that "My work is great , it's just not getting picked up because publishers are about salability not quality", but a hallmark of quality work is that it's desirable to other people, ergo salability is a hallmark of quality. Telling yourself "I do good work they just don't understand" then patting yourself on the back telling yourself that "I'm just being passed over" is a good way to ensure you never actually improve by identifying what's holding you back. I'm glad the guy here came to the realization that using the AI to do all the work of writing prose for you isn't the right solution for producing actual good writing, (and as an aside, if you're using the AI as a ghostwriter to do all the prose for you, then you're not actually writing, you're just managing.). I think the funniest video I saw on this topic with its creator huffing huge amounts of copium was titled "writers who hate writing", where he goes on to talk about how he's writing books by using the AI to do prose for him (but also, watching some of his other videos, they're basically being used for everything involved in the books which makes it even more hilarious for him to call it his writing). The people below here have the right idea of using it as an assistant to provide services you'd utilize as a professional writer anyway, like proofreading / various types of editing and heck even brainstorming asking it questions, or having it ask you questions about your story / world / characters. Utilizing AI as a tool to learn faster is one of its major strengths, and you're doing yourself a disservice if you actually desire to write stories by trying to offload 100% of the work because you're not learning the actual skills that would make you better at developing said stories.

[@nucktard]

Everyone does things with determined eyes for some reason.

[@bIuecrimson]

Second has better rhythm and character voice. Neither excite me though.

[@jeffhampton8464]

Have you trained an AI to write in your style? It’s not difficult and the results are typically far superior to the typical mediocre AI writing. Still not perfect, but usually a much better starting point. Also, keep in mind that you are actually talking about current AI technology. AI power is doubling every 6 months. Compare writing done by GPT4 with models from just one year ago, then consider what this technology will be like a couple of years from now.

[@GreylanderTV]

Judging what AI _will_ be able to do based on what it _currently can_ do is a fool's errand. The LLMs you see today are not even designed or intended to be able to "write", per se. They do not even understand the words of your prompt or the words & phrases they generate as a response. What they do is a complex statistical prediction of what an "average mashup of humans" would write as the next word after your prompt, and the next word(give prompt and previous word), and the next(given prompt and previous two words), and so on. They do not understand the world and have no internal or external experience to draw from. Future AIs will have both internal & external interactive experience, and will actually understand words as they relate to experience, intention & human behavior (sight, sound, touch, inner emotion, external emotional expression, relationships, plans, goals...). Future AIs will be able to write novels that would blow you mind judged by the standards of literature as of 2023. You are correct that when AI _can_ write an original novel as good as anything today's (or past) humans can do, such novels will lose value. Supply & demand, after all. What will then have value will be the creative products of human+AI and/or the products of enhanced humans(genetic engineering) and/or the products of the most advanced & powerful AIs (which will be rare super-computers).

[@carmencampeanu7810]

I gotta say you are a great writer, I always feel like I want to hear more when listening to your stuff... as for the AI stuff, its sooo dull , it makes me lose my love of reading.

[@Leonid.Shamis]

Thank you for sharing. More sophisticated LL models may be trained to address the issues you raised at the start of your video - this will increase the quality of AI-written prose. May I ask which TTS you use to produce voice-overs?

[@classicdetective]

It's Eleven Labs.

[@otakunemesis34]

I want to see what happens when it improves. A lot of writing out there is apparently bad according to some people even though to me a writer had to do a lot of work to get their book finished and published.

[@frankstone8930]

Hollywood doesn't need good fiction. Same with music. Just repeat everything from the last 30 years. Problem solved. 😂😂😂😂

[@Lhorez]

"People like with many things want to get rich quick. So we all want the passive income where we earn 500k a month ..." What about the people who want to earn an extra 400 a month so they don't have to work that third job? No disrespect to the rest of your content but get rich quick trope was in vogue 10-20 years ago. Surviving without killing yourself on the job is all the rage now.

[@francoisneko]

That is scary to think that the progress lead us to struggle even more

[@martok666]

i agree with him that AI writing not good enough for fiction because of the way the machine learning picking up wide range of information and some of it is not good and it influence the outcome in the prompt, but he forgot one thing, AI image generator is trained on general model and specific models maining that you train the AI to generate anime like styles if the training model is designed to learn anime styling, same principal will apply on language models. there will be a language model comprise of the best fictional novels and will probably change his mind over this matter

[@bIuecrimson]

Would you try AI again? Look into fine tuned models. You can fine tune a model on your writing style to: Change AI text to your style, or Write beats to prose. If it works, you can put more focus into the underlying content.

[@classicdetective]

I’d use it as a research assistant and a critique of my words

[@paulhiggins5165]

Your points about the value of AI generated content trending toward zero are I think very valid- however I suspect that your comments about the quality of AI generated content may not age well, given how fast these systems are being improved. Most people think value and quality are the same- but AI is clearly going to prove them wrong I think. The interesting question for creatives is how the 'consumers' of AI Generated outputs will come to view them. If it were to take far longer to read an AI Generated book than it takes to write it would people still be happy to invest their time and energy in the enterprise? Or would this come to seem a futile way to spend one's time? Herberts 'butlerian jihad' may manifest in a more mundane form should it turn out that the outputs of Generative AI come to be seen not as usefull enhancements of culture but as a form of cultural pollution that threatens the ecosystem of human creative activites while adding no value of it's own. We might see a general rejection of AI Generated outputs once it becomes clear just how much the mass production of psudeo culture will undermine virtually every metric of value and even veracity of the world in which we live. The one variable the propagators of this technology may not have adequately accounted for is human nature- empathy not often being their forte. 'Move fast and break things' may not work so well if people actually value the things you are breaking more than the things you offer in their place.

[@anthonyzeedyk406]

It's a good thing that this is as good as AI will ever get and that it will never get better at doing things it hasn't been designed to do yet.

[@TheStephaneAdam]

ChatGPT ain't AI.

[@anthonyzeedyk406]

@@TheStephaneAdam You have no idea what you're talking about.

[@TheStephaneAdam]

@@anthonyzeedyk406 ChatGPT is a Large Language Model, nobody who actually knows their stuff call it AI. It's exactly as smart as your toaster. It's an impressive piece of tech, but it's still just a (really advanced) chatbot. It's a tool, just like a hammer. The rest is media hype.

[@anthonyzeedyk406]

@@TheStephaneAdam AI is a term that has been used since the 1960s to describe applications of machine learning with artificial neural networks. It is most definitely described by experts as AI, specifically as a narrow AI, as opposed to general AI, which is what most people who aren't well-versed in the field think of when they think of "AI."

[@anthonyzeedyk406]

@@TheStephaneAdam Saying ChatGPT "ain't AI, it's a Large Language Model" is like saying "a toaster isn't an appliance, it's a toaster."

[@NikolaNevenov86]

Honestly as an artist, I've been asked to use Midjourney for work. And 9 out of 10 the thing I get from the AI looks nice but is totally useless even for inspiration. Only once...and I remember it clearly since only once I was actually inspired by the AI's generated image

[@xxjones]

I have been enjoying your experimentations - and I agree with your conclusion, that the language for fiction produced by the AI is at best, mediocre. That is what I have seen so far, though I have no been as systematic and invested like you. Thank you for doing this! It has certainly been an adventure. I enjoy your comments and thinking, taking us on a meta story. I am looking forward to whatever you come up with next 🙂

[@martiwilliams4592]

Tony! Please don't!!!! I am running away from this SCRRRRREAMING! Also because I am an artist. AI is beneath my dignity.!!!!!!!!

[@classicdetective]

I didn’t :)

[@martiwilliams4592]

Still your biggest fan :0)@@classicdetective

[@user-mp8mr6ys5q]

Im right behind you. This isn’t good at all !

[@martiwilliams4592]

Thank you!!!!@@user-mp8mr6ys5q

[@ericgranberg8893]

AI writing is in its infancy.

[@paulareadman7478]

It’s a pity AI doesn’t create readers. The more readers there are in the world, the more books will be sold. The problem is too many readers think books should be free. AI can only give you some ideas. A craftsman is only as good as his tools.

[@zenpanda100]

Oh no