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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8317 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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I doubt an AI agent's ability to generate a feature length anything that's coherent. Ask an AI to write a novel and it'll fizzle out around 10,000 words in. I'm convinced that the AI assisted smut romance novels that are popular recently are mostly driven by a human gooning while proompting the AI for the next chapter. I doubt that it can be done fully autonomously, those actually fake books that are just words on a page not included of course

I would expect that one of the biggest limitations on long run narrative coherence is time horizon. The doubling time for time horizon is anywhere from 2-7 months.

A typical novel is about 80000 words, so three doublings in length (6-21 months). To be conservative i'll assume novel complexity/task time scales with the square of word count. This is based on each additional word having to mesh with all previous words. This would give 6 doublings or 12-42 months.

I suspect this is an overestimate because complexity probably increases until the climax then begins to drop off.

To be fair to AI I've fizzled out on a dozen or so stories after writing about 10k words.

I think there might be a hump at a that point where where story idea turns into story and I'm not sure it's easy for most people to pass.

This is very unlikely to be accepted:

  • Too subjective to be useful, and far too ambiguous. Who's doing the grading here? How are they assessing "coherence"? How are we blinding things, if not, how do we account for bias?

  • We strongly prefer actual programming tasks, not creative writing. We could easily ask Claude to write a novel, and it would do it, but then we're back at the issue of grading it properly.

If you want to propose something like this, you need to be as rigorous as @faul_sname up in the thread. At the very least, propose evaluators that aren't you or the two of us, and we can see if it's possible to make this work.

This wasn't meant as a suggestion, just an observation. My suggestion is below.

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