What if I have wonderful plot in my head and I use LLM to pour it into acceptable stylistic form?
What if you have wonderful plot in your head and you ask writer to ghost-write it for you? And you’ll be so generous as to split the profits 50-50? No writer will accept such an offer, and I’ve heard that established writers receive such requests all the time.
“Wonderful plots” are ten a penny. Wonderful writing is what makes the book worth reading, and LLMs are not there yet.
This is the way most people feel about writing. I do not think wonderful plots are ten a penny; I think writers are miserable at creating actually good plots from the perspective of someone who values scifi and realism. Their technology and their sociology is usually off in obvious ways, because understanding those things is hard.
I would personally love to see more people who do understand science, use AI to turn them into stories.
Or alternately I’d like to see skilled authors consult AI about the science in their stories.
This attitude that plots don’t matter and writing is all is why we get lazily constructed plots and worlds.
This turns literature into mostly a sort of hallucinatory slop instead of a way to really understand the world while you’re being entertained.
Most writers do seem to understand psychology so that’s a plus. And some of them understand current technology and society, but that’s the exception.
Plots that are profitable to write abound, but plots that any specific person likes may well be quite thin on the ground.
I think the key here is that authors don’t feel the same attachment to submitted plot ideas as submitters do (or the same level of confidence in their profitability), and thus would view writing them as a service done for the submitter. Writing is hard work, and most people want to be compensated if they’re going to do a lot of work to someone else’s specifications. In scenarios where they’re paid for their services, writers often do write others’ plots; consider e.g. video game novelizations, franchises like Nancy Drew or Animorphs, and celebrity memoirs. (There are also non-monetized contexts like e.g. fanfiction exchanges, in which participants write a story to someone else’s request and in turn are gifted a story tailored to their own.)
I wouldn’t describe LLMs’ abilities as wonderful, but IME they do quite serviceable pastiche of popular styles I like; if your idea is e.g. a hard-boiled detective story, MilSF, etc., I would expect an LLM to be perfectly capable of rendering it into tolerable form.
What if I have wonderful plot in my head and I use LLM to pour it into acceptable stylistic form?
What if you have wonderful plot in your head and you ask writer to ghost-write it for you? And you’ll be so generous as to split the profits 50-50? No writer will accept such an offer, and I’ve heard that established writers receive such requests all the time.
“Wonderful plots” are ten a penny. Wonderful writing is what makes the book worth reading, and LLMs are not there yet.
This is the way most people feel about writing. I do not think wonderful plots are ten a penny; I think writers are miserable at creating actually good plots from the perspective of someone who values scifi and realism. Their technology and their sociology is usually off in obvious ways, because understanding those things is hard.
I would personally love to see more people who do understand science, use AI to turn them into stories.
Or alternately I’d like to see skilled authors consult AI about the science in their stories.
This attitude that plots don’t matter and writing is all is why we get lazily constructed plots and worlds.
This turns literature into mostly a sort of hallucinatory slop instead of a way to really understand the world while you’re being entertained.
Most writers do seem to understand psychology so that’s a plus. And some of them understand current technology and society, but that’s the exception.
Plots that are profitable to write abound, but plots that any specific person likes may well be quite thin on the ground.
I think the key here is that authors don’t feel the same attachment to submitted plot ideas as submitters do (or the same level of confidence in their profitability), and thus would view writing them as a service done for the submitter. Writing is hard work, and most people want to be compensated if they’re going to do a lot of work to someone else’s specifications. In scenarios where they’re paid for their services, writers often do write others’ plots; consider e.g. video game novelizations, franchises like Nancy Drew or Animorphs, and celebrity memoirs. (There are also non-monetized contexts like e.g. fanfiction exchanges, in which participants write a story to someone else’s request and in turn are gifted a story tailored to their own.)
I wouldn’t describe LLMs’ abilities as wonderful, but IME they do quite serviceable pastiche of popular styles I like; if your idea is e.g. a hard-boiled detective story, MilSF, etc., I would expect an LLM to be perfectly capable of rendering it into tolerable form.