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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   26953 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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I am willing and happy to read AI generated stories.

I haven't tried too hard to generate my own. But if one of the stories I was following on Royal road turned out to be an AI story I wouldn't be unhappy except that most of them have a release schedule that is clearly within human abilities, and I'd want more. Once they got revealed I'd expect them to stop sandbagging it.

My limited attempts to get AI to generate interesting stories have kinda sucked. In one instance it took my writing and declared it too adult and I legitimately wasn't sure what the hell it was talking about. Those were early chatgpt days though.

I still have this unverified sense that AI can produce pop, but not jazz. Meaning average mass appealing stuff, but weird individuality is harder for it to generate.

I used AI to refine a work of fiction and found it almost incapable of suggesting anything good; it's very much a rubber duck programming tool. I also struggled to get it to not wax soy-poetic about every passage. the phrases "Earned," "Chef's Kiss," "and that's why it matters" now fill me with rage.

too adult

Have you tried Grok?

I know for no reason at all that it will happily produce period erotic stories from from various historical periods featuring violent and / or racist ideologies.

Does Grok write as well as Claude?

I've not tried much creative writing with Claude.

Claude I use mostly for vibe coding. It's better at this than Grok.

If AI stories can actually be good writing and have artistic value, I would agree. But currently, there are too many AI spammers and grifters who just want to post engagement bait and get a quick buck without spending any effort. They are kind of poisoning the well for anyone who is trying to make something really good using ai.

I remember this article about a magazine that accepted public submissions for stories, and grifters with ai bots ruined it for everyone: https://neil-clarke.com/a-concerning-trend/

The generated works were among the worst submissions we’ve ever received and sometimes bad in entirely new ways.

Genre writers would have known these works wouldn’t have had a chance, so the behavior was unusual.

It turns out that we are the secondary victims of “make money with ChatGPT” schemes pushed on blogs, YouTube, and TikTok, by self-proclaimed side-hustle experts

This shit has of course only gotten worse in the years since 2023

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