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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   1963 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 2, 2026

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So, I'm a bit late to the thread here, but I've been playing around with Gemini off-and-on the past few weeks.

Now, I keep encountering "AI boosters" extolling the universal utility of LLMs, that there's nobody who can't benefit from using an LLM as a tool in some portion of their job or daily life. Well, I've been looking for those uses, and I'm not seeing it.

So, my question: what is my personal use-case for an LLM? I'm a NEET, I don't code, I don't do any of the things I see people regularly using LLMs for.

Most of what I use LLMs for is creating bespoke fiction. Have you ever had a story you wanted to read, but nobody has written? AI can do that. The top creative writing models (claude-fable-5, claude-opus-4-6-thinking, gemini-3.1-pro-preview, etc.) are really good at this. If you want smut, then your best bet is grok-4.20-beta1.

Alternatively, you can use them to create explainers in the style of your favorite authors (also a creative writing capability). Go ahead and ask them to explain economics like they are Scott Alexander, or write a moving guide in the voice of Eliezer Yudkowsky, or an introduction to anime in the style of Robin Hanson.

They can also do your research for you. Suppose you want a list of 1950s science fiction movies in color along with a short review written in the format of Leonard Maltin, including runtime and year of release? Done.

Have you ever had a story you wanted to read, but nobody has written? AI can do that.

As they say, "Press X to doubt." What I've seen of AI-written fiction is barely fanfic tier at best.

The top creative writing models (claude-fable-5, claude-opus-4-6-thinking, gemini-3.1-pro-preview, etc.) are really good at this.

And how much do those cost?

Alternatively, you can use them to create explainers in the style of your favorite authors (also a creative writing capability). Go ahead and ask them to explain economics like they are Scott Alexander, or write a moving guide in the voice of Eliezer Yudkowsky, or an introduction to anime in the style of Robin Hanson.

And why would I ever need this?

They can also do your research for you. Suppose you want a list of 1950s science fiction movies in color along with a short review written in the format of Leonard Maltin, including runtime and year of release? Done.

Again, why would I ever need this?

As they say, "Press X to doubt." What I've seen of AI-written fiction is barely fanfic tier at best.

Here's some samples of Fable 5 writing:

If you know any fanfic like that, hook me up; I'm always looking for good authors.

But, honestly? Looking at this and your other replies, I think that your problem is that you just don't want to do anything.

Well for starters, most fanfiction (or fiction of any kind) consists of more than 4k words stapled together from eight loosely connected vignettes.

I guess there's value in the specificity, but I feel like baseline Mottizan imagination could crank out one of these but better while taking a crap.

Sure, but you’d have to pay me.

I don’t actually have much confidence in my fiction skills. It’s not something I’ve practiced. I could regurgitate tropes in your direction, maybe sprinkle in some memes, but I suspect modern genAI would outperform me on this task.

Talking about personal consumption, not fivrr farming the requests to fellow posters. I mean that the real utility of this type of generative flash fiction is the hyper-specificity. But if you can already think of the hyperspecific thing you want, and the end result is so short and constrained, I'm not sure you get much value from reading the generated story compared to just spending 5 minutes daydreaming.

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