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Disagree there. I like Dungeon Crawler Carl for what it is–very entertaining pop culture trash, which I say lovingly. It is reminiscent of the old pulps (love me some Howard and Lovecraft, but elegant wordsmiths or deep miners of the human condition, they were not). But DCC is exactly the kind of story an LLM can or soon will be able to churn out– some metaplot and a bunch of recurring characters distinct enough to kind of care when they die, plowing through absurd bullshit choose-your-own-adventure scenarios and RNG-table boss battles rife with gross-out humor. There is no genius there except in the marketing and not much originality. I'd say Dinniman is a moderately better writer than the vast majority of writers on RoyalRoad or any LLM, but most of the former could already be replaced by the latter.
Can't comment on Ulysses as I haven't read it, but what else I have read of James Joyce was not particularly to my taste but clearly the product of a human mind that is not (yet) replicable by an LLM.
I've got to disagree. Have you read any more recent stuff on RoyalRoad? For whatever reason, AI writing has exploded on there in the past couple months, and it's very easy to tell which authors are using it (even when they say they aren't). And not in a good way. I wish I could just get an LLM to pump out pulp to my specifications, but if anything I think the newest models have regressed on prose, and they were never even mediocre.
The problem -- and it's been the problem since R1 -- is repetitive structure and cliche. Most of these aren't awful, per se, the issue is that instead of getting one per thousand words -- already enough to get on my nerves -- the model will stuff three of them into a paragraph. Into every paragraph. It's unreadable.
Most of the authors on RoyalRoad aren't very good, that's for sure, but they know that and their prose is appropriately simple and unambitious as a result; it doesn't call attention to itself. LLM writing is probably better on a technical level, but it's nowhere near as good as it (seems to) think it is, so it refuses to get out of its own way.
(This might be a prompting or process issue? I can't be certain other authors with better techniques aren't just slipping under my radar. If someone thinks they have an example of actually good AI writing, I'm willing to give it a shot and change my mind if I agree. Like I said, I really wish this worked.)
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