Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6hr ago
As it happens, I have also been dipping into LLMs-as-beta-readers lately, even going so far as to build an application that can read an entire series of books and learn its "lore," and a custom GPT instance that will "compress" a book into a format optimized to provide context to itself or another GPT. (As you probably know, even the most powerful LLMs do not have a context window large enough to store an entire large novel in memory, let alone a series, and you can't directly upload embeddings to GPT or Claude.) The intent of these projects is so that I can, say, ask GPT to evaluate the fifth book in a series with knowledge of the previous four books. It's a work in progress.
So, some observations. First, sorry dude, but I have major side-eye for your ability to evaluate literary quality. :p
That being said, I have also noticed the tendency of LLMs to glaze you no matter how hard you try to solicit "honest" feedback, unless you resort to tricks like you mentioned. (Telling an LLM the manuscript is by an author you hate and you want it to roast it will work, but that's not exactly useful feedback.)
The hallucination problem is hard to overcome, even with tricks like my token-optimizing scheme. I find that in most sessions, it will stay on course for a while, but inevitably it starts making up characters and events and dialog that weren't in the text.
As long as you can keep it on track, I have found that some of the GPT and Anthropic models are... not terrible as beta readers. They point out some real flaws and in a very generic sense have an "understanding" of pacing and tone and where a scene is missing something. However, the advice tends to be very generic. "You need to show the consequences," "The scene ends too quickly, you should build more tension," "There should be some emotional stakes the reader can connect with," etc. Clearly they have many writing advice books in their training data. There is nothing like true understanding of context or story, just generic pieces it can pattern-match to the writing sample you give it.
And when it comes to specific suggestions, I have yet to see an LLM that is actually a good (not "mediocre and banal but capable of producing literate prose") writer. Its suggestions will be a pastiche of flat TV script dialog and trope-filled scenes.
(That said, any writer will tell you to listen to critics when they point out problems, but don't listen to them when they propose solutions. So in that respect an LLM isn't much different than a human.)
But these are still early days for AI, so I don't doubt that in a few years, we'll have LLMs that can be at least as useful as your average writing workshop. AI writing is already flooding some genres, and while it's usually as easy to spot as AI art is, just as with AI art, a lot of people clearly don't care.
I find it fascinating and I enjoy playing around with it, but yeah, I think AI-generated novels will crowd out human writers in low-brow undiscerning stuff like romance and progression fantasies, and writing those stories will become something people only do as a hobby, just like people are still passionate about chess and go even though no human can beat a computer anymore. I still think we'll need true AGI to write an actual good novel. When you show me an AI that can write a coherent series, with multi-volume character arcs, plot seeds planted in early books that clearly pay off in later ones, literary allusions and metaphors that aren't just clumsy pulled-off-the-shelf ones but deeply enmeshed in the story, and a recognizable differentiable style (in the same way that fans can read Dickens or McCarthy or Hemingway and immediately recognize the author), I will believe we're there.
Other than reach and better animation, I don't think this is different from the AI companions that have been available for a while. Replika, the most famous one, will already do NSFW ERP. And yeah, there are men (and women!) who have decided their Replikas are preferable to real people.
You're concerned about what this will do to the psyche of teenage boys, but I'm surprised you haven't thought of the male version (which no doubt will exist). A tall dark sexy boyfriend who will treat you only exactly as roughly as you want to be treated, and will listen to you going on about your problems and your neuroses with endless patience and understanding and affirmation? If a real woman can't compete with an AI girlfriend, neither can a real man compete with an AI boyfriend.
That said, I do think your fears are somewhat overblown. Porn has, IMO, been bad for society, especially the ever-increasing availability of extreme and degenerate porn like our grandparents could barely imagine. But I think alcohol and drugs and gambling and smoking are also very bad for society. If I could wish them all away, I would. These things exist, however, and society persists, accepting that some percentage will be sacrificed to Moloch, and Moloch always has new incarnations. I accept that AI companions are a hazard, but I don't think they are "the" thing that flatlines birthrates and normal sexual relationships.
More options
Context Copy link