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While I do agree with everything substantive and specific you wrote, I think the framing falls into a trap common to a lot of thinking about AI. Specifically, that AI will simply extend or accelerate a given domain and technology. In this case, publishing and fiction.
There's not going to be an AI written book that wins any prestigious award. This is because it would be foolish to simply have an AI write one immutable story. Instead, "AI writers" will be either fine-tuned or wholly trained models that people use to write stories on the fly that still adhere to a central plot, world, and character collection.
To use a common reference point, let's take Game of Thrones. People have their favorite characters, subplots, settings, etc. With an AI-writer-model, you could say "Hey, write a new subplot where that blonde with the dragons and whatnot flies on up to the blizzard place and fucks around for a while." (side note: I never watched or read GoT, ironically enough, so all my references are going to be bad)
Now, you're creating new content that still stays within the "world" of GoT. And it works at innumerable levels of detail. The casual consooomer will write one sentence slop generator stuff - and love it. The aficionado will create complex subplots and tweak small elements of character profiles to see how these reverberate throughout the grander story. I predict that once the cost of GPUs gets low enough (or models get efficient enough) people will literally be writing and producing full scale movies at home.
Instead of human authors and writers being the nucleus of "art" it will be a constellation of models, with humans recombining them ad infinitum. I look at this as a good thing. You can un-cancel your favorite show (The Wire!), Hemingway becomes immortal and produces infinite books. Unlimited GoT fanfic erotic (......yay?)
I know this will happen because I'm already doing it. My mental bubblegum is hardboiled neo-noir paperbacks. Think something in the vein of The Last Good Kiss. Over the course of a dozen 2 - 3 hour evenings, I've put together a GitHub repo of characters, settings, themes etc. I've used an AI toolchain to develop scenes. I then line edit them mostly for continuity issues (which AI still stumbles on) or to make a sudden plot twist because I feel like it. I am not doing this to publish a book. I am doing this because I genuinely find it far more entertaining and exciting that Netflix scrolling or re-watching the actually good stuff. And it's low stakes. I don't really care if the plot doesn't quite hold together. I don't care if a character's motivation self-contradicts after a while. It's fun. It's unlimited fun. Over the 40+ hours I've put into it, I've probably spent $100 in API credits. You can definitely argue that's actually quite a bit less cost effective than Netflix etc. But I believe the received value is excellent.
AI will not be a linear extension of current industries. I'm not saying it's a step-function for everything either. It will simply be a very hard to predict tangent. In many cases, this will be absolutely good for all parties. In many cases it will be a massive tradeoff and shift in the "center of gravity." I think there are only a few cases I can see where it represents a system-breaking potential.
Anyways, I'm off to writeread about Detective Jar-Jar Binks' latest case involving Anton Chigurh.
I feel like apps like Infinite Worlds are already tapping into this kind of thing. It's a relatively decent AI Choose-Your-Own-Adventure website that allows for a human creative to set up "worlds" with set plot points or details for players to play through. It's not as good as my favorite AI-powered game to date (the sadly defunct Medieval Problems), but it seems to have taken a writing forum I frequent by storm.
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The problem for writers is that outside of really amazing talents, 99% of it is some flavor of bubble gum. You don’t need to create award winning stuff.
Take science fiction. A lot of it is some form of retooled space opera. If I took the basics of such a story — a story set in space, space battles, robots, and so on — I’d probably be able to prompt a LLM into producing a decent first draft of a space opera. Taking story elements and recombining them is how the shelves of barns and noble get filled. Yes, most of it, from a literary standpoint, is crap. I don’t think most people who appreciate good literary fiction are going to dispute that 99% of the stuff available is even decent as literature. It’s only better than trash TV in the sense that it requires you read the story yourself rather than having actors read the story to you. But then again that’s what the public generally wants in entertainment. They don’t want to have to think about what they’re reading, they don’t even really want to notice any particular literary quirks of the author. They want to mostly escape the world and for the most part be able to congratulate themselves for reading instead of watching a video or playing spider solitaire on their phones.
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Yes, it is already happening, and it was even before AI. Entertainment media can be provided bespoke - that's exactly what artists working on commission do. For a whole lot of people and purposes, the quality/price curve is or very soon will be in AI's favor. I have a couple hours of music about wizards drift racing and I am eager for the moment I can poke at an AI for a bit and receive custom made retro game bubblegum tailored to my exact whims.
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I'm willing to predict a >50% chance that some guy in his basement (okay, maybe expand it to a "dedicated team of five or fewer people") manage to produce a feature length (90 minute) film that is completely AI Generated and, to the general audience's view, is on par with a mid or low-budget Hollywood fare, in terms of 'quality' of the end product... by the end of THIS year. Its already been 1 year since I saw the Shadowglades 'trailer' which, despite being just 2 minutes of disconnected imagery, portrayed a world I would really like to enter and set stories in. And just today those folks put out a new trailer that is just as visually interesting, and much more dynamic and coherent! I can tell who the protagonist is!
I'd predict it WON'T be an action movie because no video AI I've seen can produce a legible fight scene, plus all the model restrictions on depicting violence. Not Scorcese quality for sure, and it'll play to AI's strengths and eschew its shortcomings, but it will be coherent visually and plotwise.
But even if that basement guy started TODAY, if he can produce 1 minute of usable footage a day, on average, it'd be 90 days to get the footage, which leaves another 90 to edit, adjust, produce (AI generated) soundtrack, and fine tune actor performances and 'line reads'. Doable for a dedicated enough, decently talented enthusiast with enough money to burn on the credits. And that assumes someone isn't already halfway done with one already.
I'm already champing at the bit to start work on the pilot episode of an anime adaptation of one of my favorite books, and the early results I've been getting with just the free options available have convinced me I could pull off producing a ~20 minute episode in about 1 month if I were able to fully 'lock in' to doing it. I won't lock in, life just won't allow that right now but it'd be such an invigorating project that, like you and your pulp novel generator, I'd be willing to spend like $100/month or so just working on it for the sheer pleasure of seeing the end product, even if its never published or enjoyed by anyone else.
@faceh @phailyoor It wasn’t done with AI, but one guy in Latvia already managed to effectively make an academy award winning box office success from his basement. It’s called Flow
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How much are you willing to wager on this claim? What are examples of a baseline of mid-budget Hollywood?
"Mid-Budget Hollywood" would be approximately any recent A24 film..
With stringent enough definition and an agreeable arbiter, I'd put up $500 in favor of it, at even odds.
Note I'm NOT saying the film gets a theatrical release or gets published on a streaming platform, just that someone releases the movie for the viewing public, even if its just a random download link, and an average American citizen could watch it and NOT immediately guess it was AI-Generated. Doesn't have to fool a film buff, but also could fool an adult, not just a kid.
I'd also still consider it a win if the film were less than 90 minutes long, but that's the fairish benchmark for 'feature length' that would differentiate it from a TV episode.
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My use case is similar to what you describe. A gacha that I play has 300+ playable characters, that’s 50k of possible interactions just one-on-one (100k if you care who’s on top, har-har) — forget official writing, there are not enough fanfic authors for that. DeepSeek might not get what I’m going for with an experiment victim who retains emotions but has trouble expressing them, and a guy with literal emotion transceiver as a race trait who just doesn’t have many emotions, but after pointing it out it can write a passable scene between the two.
I’d be surprised if none of gachas are working on officially integrating such generative functionality already.
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You may be right that AI basically creates a new sort of entertainment experience (e.g., tooling together a pipeline to create your own homebrew fanfiction). And there is nothing wrong with just doing what's fun. My reaction was mostly just, I guess, a defense of actually caring about literary quality. Not that everything you read/enjoy has to be high quality (I like my litrpgs and cheesy space operas too.)
Oh, I think you were right and have a very valid point.
In regards to "high art" literature, I think we're going to see a revenge of the typewriter. Writers will make a point to not only not use AI, but to disconnect entirely and write only from inside their own brain. I earnestly believe some will even resort to using typewriters again as a verifiable medium - there's no way I AI'ed this. Hell, maybe some will even return to longhand.
And this will create both excellent literature, and a snobbery class of weirdo "purebread writers" who still turn out slop, but they do it with artisanal pencils and free-range raised tree paper.
Tree paper? Like the stuff you wipe your ass with? I only read works scribed on vellum.
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