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AI vs. Professional Authors Results

94 points by biffles 1y ago

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Aeolun 1y ago
Personally I’m having a blast reading AI generated fiction. As long as the direction is human, and often enough corrected to keep the minor inconsistencies out, the results are pretty good. For me it’s no different from generating code with Claude, except it’s generating prose. Without human direction your result ends up as garbage, but there’s no need to go and actually write all the prose yourself. And I guess that just like with code, sometimes you have to hand craft something to make it truly good. But that’s probably not true for 80% of the story/code.
- antihipocrat 1y ago
  Who's voice are you using when adding your hand crafted prose? Mimicking the style of the 80% or switching to your own? Perhaps I'm a Luddite, or just in the dissonance phase toward enlightenment, but at the moment I don't want to invest in AI fiction. A big part of the experience for me is understanding the author's mind, not just the story being told
  - add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
    > A big part of the experience for me is understanding the author's mind, not just the story being told AI content is really exposing how people fall into a group that does go further than the surface text into deeper layers of context/subtext, and a group that doesn't.
    - Seattle3503 1y ago
      I could be in either group, depending on my inclination at the moment.
  - Aeolun 1y ago
    I think there’s only a very small subset of fiction that uses the prose to that extent. Much like code really. If you are writing original algorithms you cannot use the LLM. If you are just remixing existing ones, it becomes a lot more useful. Also, I guess I missed the brunt of your question, though the answer is similar. Most voice works for most characters. There’s only so many ways to say something, but occassionally you have to adjust the sentence or re-prompt the whole thing (the LLM has a tendency to see the best in characters).
    - exmadscientist 1y ago
      Perhaps on a relative scale "most" fiction doesn't carry any sort of deeper meaning, but if you look at things like "Hugo or Nebula Award nominees" (to pluck out the SF/F genre as a category), I'd say that almost every single one of them, going back all those decades, has something more to say than just their straightforward text. And unless reading is your day job or only hobby, that's a massive, massive corpus of interesting text. (In just one genre! There are more genres!) So on an absolute scale, there is so much fiction to read with more-than-surface-level meaning that I personally just don't understand why anyone would have the least interest in reading AI slop. (I also don't have any real interest in most Kindle Unlimited works, probably for similar reasons. Though I am quite certain there are diamonds there, I've just not had particularly much time for/good luck at finding them.)
      - Aeolun 1y ago
        Sure, but that more than surface level meaning comes out in the story, not often in the specific way the sentences are written (I acknowledge those exist, I just don’t consider them the majority). Also, you say you don’t understand why anyone would be interested in the AI slop. But from the article we learn that one is indistinguishable from the other (apparently even to the one professional author that tried)
        exmadscientist 1y ago
        I was disappointed that the results shown didn't break things down a bit more between star ratings given and authorship guesses. I didn't think any of these stories were amazing flash fiction, and I think that's relevant here. I'm curious to know what people who liked them all, or at least really liked one of them, had to say on judging AI-vs-human.
  - CuriouslyC 1y ago
    Plot twist, people who do first drafts and structural edits with AI can still do line edits and copy edits by hand for personal voice (and you have to anyhow if you want the prose to be exceptional).
- sram1337 1y ago
  I would love to read some of this. Where do you find AI generated fiction?
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  - Aeolun 1y ago
    https://www.royalroad.com/fictions/search?globalFilters=false&tagsAdd=ai_assisted&tagsAdd=ai_generated https://www.royalroad.com/fictions/search?globalFilters=fals... Though I’ll admit I can’t speak to the quality of that except my own stuff (which I’m naturally predisposed to like). This was my attempt at fully AI generated (though edited by human): https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/101072/inherited-wounds https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/101072/inherited-wounds
    - strken 1y ago
      I've had two separate experiences reading a story on RoyalRoad, getting ten chapters in, noticing that any individual chapter is technically great but I just don't care about the characters or plot can't be bothered reading further, and then noticing the story was AI-assisted. I think the AI seems to struggle with consistency of characters and themes, and particularly with character growth over time: it can write touching moments, but these don't fit properly with the character's actions before and then after. It reads a bit like a story written by a hundred professional authors who can skim-read all the previous chapters but are on a strict time limit and don't have access to each other's notes. This makes me wonder if they're just not giving the AI notes on structure and character.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  The only AI generated fiction I read is stuff I create on the fly. Why would you read AI generated fiction made by other people when it’s the same as reading regular fiction?
jay_kyburz 1y ago
Just wanted to be first to say I'm a huge fan of Mark Lawrence. I didn't know he blogged! Now I'll go actually read the post.
- dwd 1y ago
  Big fan of Janny Wurts, particularly the Empire series she co-wrote with Raymond E Feist. Very surprised she was outed as an AI, though she is the only author I've ever had to pull out the dictionary as she used a word I had never seen and wanted to be sure of the meaning in the context.
  - npinsker 1y ago
    I was very (wrongly) confident she was AI. I thought her prose was bland and repetitive and lacking melody, and she was the only human author to explicitly mention demons in the first paragraph, which is something that happens when you prompt an AI for a demon story. The twist had potential, but to me wasn’t executed as well as it could have been. I was hoping for some stronger irony — e.g. if the mainlanders had pushed for the bridge, but not the islanders; or a sentence about how the demons were very surprised, but nonetheless went on to take over the world before they knew what had happened. As it is, it felt underdeveloped and slightly uncanny in an AI-like way.
    - dwd 1y ago
      The twist was the one thing that made me think it was human written. I quite liked her story after the second read. But sad to say, I actually preferred most of the AI ones over the rest.
kristopolous 1y ago
ai fiction really shines in baffling surreal prompts that it tries hard to satisfy. Here's an example: "let's write a story where donald trump is giving a speech to a crowd as people slowly discover he is secretly a northern red oak tree in a human suit to the shock of fans and reporters! The tips of his fingers become branches as he tries to deny it as wildly impossible meanwhile his human disguise continues to fail" After some back and forth, here is what I got: https://9ol.es/md/trump https://9ol.es/md/trump No human would write something that crazy...
- Ancapistani 1y ago
  So... Kafka?
akoboldfrying 1y ago
I applaud OP's transparency and willingness to call this result what it is.
xenotux 1y ago
I think this is similar to AI generated images: it puts a new creative tool in the hands of people who might have had good ideas, but didn't have a mastery of the medium. In that respect, it's cool: if you had a great idea for a sci-fi story but no talent for writing, and if an LLM let you realize your vision, that's neat. It has some negative externalities for the craftsmen, but overall, more creativity is hardly a bad thing. The real problem is that the most lucrative uses of the tech aren't that. It's generating 10,000 fake books on Amazon on subjects you don't care about. It's cranking out SEO spam, generating monetizable clickbait, etc.
- gtowey 1y ago
  And they haven't even gotten around to adding advertising into them yet! Imagine when chat assistants subtly steer you towards certain products. Would you even know it was manipulating you?
  - perching_aix 1y ago
    They kind of did though. Thing tries to make me generate diagrams every step of the way (as a kind of feature demo), even though they're rarely ever a good idea, and even when they are, the pictures and diagrams generated are useless.
- thwarted 1y ago
  > I think this is similar to AI generated images: it puts a new creative tool in the hands of people who might have had good ideas, but didn't have a mastery of the medium. Reading this sentence reminded me of the classic HN position of "ideas are worthless, what matters is the execution", usually mentioned in the context of an "ideas person" looking for their "technical cofounder" and the ideas person thinking they deserve at least 50%, often more, of the ownership of what would be built because without them there'd be no idea. > if you had a great idea for a sci-fi story but no talent for writing, and if an LLM let you realize your vision, that's neat. If your "vision" is only the "idea for a sci-fi story", is that really a vision? Good books leave the reader changed/influenced in some fashion, through the way the idea is presented and developed over the course of the story, not just from a blurb on the book jacket. > overall, more creativity is hardly a bad thing. Is coming up with an idea for a for a sci-fi story the meat of creative act such that that flooding the market with ideas counts as an increase in creativity overall?
bsder 1y ago
Perhaps what this is pointing out is that a lot of writers of the genre of "fantasy" produce mostly formulaic, trope-laden piles of crap that AI is pretty good at mimicking? This is neither new nor news. "The Well-Tempered Plot Device" is almost 4 decades old (see: https://news.ansible.uk/plotdev.html https://news.ansible.uk/plotdev.html). It does suggest that publishers might want to screen new writing with a quick "Did AI write this?" and only publish the ones where it is obvious to humans that AI did not write it.
- spondylosaurus 1y ago
  I thought it was interesting/telling (but maybe not surprising) that the AI-generated stories scored the highest according to reader rankings, yet pinged to me as immediately flat and generic. But I really liked the idiosyncrasies of a few of the human-authored entries!
- exmadscientist 1y ago
  Yes, the human-written stories that I guessed wrong about were the ones that seemed to have nothing to say. When the plot's stereotypical and trite, there's no subtext (difficult to do in flash, but not impossible; some can do it well), and it scans like anyone could have written it anywhere or anytime, well, that looks like AI. (In that vein I am baffled how anyone could think the fourth story, especially, was anything but AI.) (And, as well, the seventh story is interesting because it reads, to me, exactly like someone who's used to writing something longer trying to write flash. It doesn't land anything, it doesn't conclude, but it looks like if it had about twice the length it might be interesting. And it's got some dissonance from breaking with the usual demon-bargaining template. So I pegged that as human. Oops!)
- andrewflnr 1y ago
  > "The Well-Tempered Plot Device" is almost 4 decades old Yeah, we've moved forward a ways in the last 4 decades, or the top of the market has, at least. That was a fun read, though.
- spongebobism 1y ago
  Quoted in the well-tempered plot device: > Our relationship / is beautiful / because / it is ours / because / it relates / to us. Indistinguishable from Rupi Kaur. There is nothing new under the sun.
vunderba 1y ago
The story plot was "Meeting a dragon". As both a human and a writer, challenge accepted: Long ago, there lived a golden dragon whose fractal-like scales gleamed in the glow of the morning in her cave. She was known for her kindness, and many came not with sword or spear, but with humble requests - for you see, it was widely believed that the mystical scales of a dragon would heal illness, cure ailments, and provide fortune. One such visitor timidly looked up at her great shining body and beseeched, "Oh glorious dragon, might I have a single scale?" Of course, the dragon replied warmly. She delicately, almost lovingly, with a slight twinge, used a single claw to prise off a single golden scale, leaving a dull patch. Over the eons, more and more people would come as supplicants. The scales were used for good luck, for warmth, to ward off evil, as the draconic equivalent of a rabbit's foot. In the end, the poor dragon was stripped bare - the fire from her burning furnace now showed clearly through to her patchwork, sensitive, and naked skin. When winter came, she huddled in the cold darkness. And still, when a peasant would come asking for a scale - just one, a single scale nothing more, she would not refuse. In her eternal generosity she would carefully break off another. This time it took longer to find one left upon her body, as the humans had stripped her bare like a tree come winter. Then thus came a knight. "I'm sorry, good sir, but I have no scales left to give," she said pitiably. "Why, your scale was a choking hazard and wasn’t labeled not for ages under 5! Prepare for a class-action lawsuit and also to be impaled upon a lance." The End. I'll pretend I intended it as a parable of the destructive nature of mass tourism or something something Lorax something something truffula trees.
- eulgro 1y ago
  Thanks, I love it.
- taneq 1y ago
  No good deed goes unpunished!
- andrewflnr 1y ago
  For me, the part about "fractal-like scales" would have flagged the author as either an AI or just kind of a pretentious dummy, because that makes very little sense. "Then thus" would actually lean me toward human, because LLMs are usually better at grammar than that. :D
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Abdii430 1y ago
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61579582377159 https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61579582377159
thedevilslawyer 1y ago
We're at a key milestone in the IP wars; IP was inducted into our civilization to protect the few who had the ability to create. This idea is well past it's due date. We should move to a liberal IP regime, with copyright strictly reduced to 7-10 years, with all works then entering public domain. Our society will universally thrive with the abundance that will come. I understand and empathize that a class of vocations today will go away, but so did lamplighters. The roles may become extinct; but we will endure as a people.
- HPMOR 1y ago
  Why is it always taken as a conclusion that humans will persist? Lots of species go extinct, and it is not clear that won’t be true here as well.
  - thedevilslawyer 1y ago
    We won't go extinct because of the removal of an arbitrary law around monopolizing ideas.
- rwyinuse 1y ago
  I'm not sure people left without a job will endure, at least if they're unfortunate enough to live somewhere without social security. The key question is whether AI will somehow create enough new jobs for those let go (I doubt that), or just cause a massive unemployment.
  - thedevilslawyer 1y ago
    Indeed, I'm proposing that we figure out a solution for this. That would be better than bearing the cost of knowledge not being open and universal.
- ordinaryradical 1y ago
  There are hundreds of years of art already in the public domain and society is not “universally thriving?” Why would adding a couple more recent years change that? Seems very utopian magic thinking to me.
voidhorse 1y ago
Interesting study. I think the use of AI boils down to this: is the product independent of the process and the context? Or is it dependent on it in some way? I think, when it comes to art, the latter is truer than the former, and most use of AI in creative fields is predicated on trying to convince people to engage with art in an extremely shallow way (art strictly as soulless, time filling entertainment). When an author writes a novel, the novel does not exist in a vacuum. The author's persona and the cultural exchange that emerges around the text also becomes an important part of the phenomenal status of the the work and its cultural recognition. Even when an author remains pseudonymous and makes no appearance, this too is part of the work. If an author uses AI as a tool and takes care to imbue the output with artistic and personal relevance, it probably will become an art object, but its status may or may not be modulated by the use of AI in the process to the extent that the use does/doesn't affect people's crafting interpretations of the work, or the author's own engagements. Contrarily, AI generated work that has close to no actual processual involvement on the part of the author will almost always have slop status, just because it's hard to imagine an interpretive culture around such work that doesn't at some point break down in the face of the inability to connect the worm with other cultural touchstones or the actual experience of a human being. Maybe it could happen, but if it did, at that point the status of the work is till something different in so far as it would be a marker not of human experience, as literature traditionally has been, but something quite new and different literature-cum-hypermarket(we already had mass market) product.
waltbosz 1y ago
There is an Asimov story called "Someday" in which a toy computer called a Bard generates random fairy tales and reads them to children. In the story two children try to hack their Bard, to make it tell more interesting modern stories, by feeding it a new vocabulary of modern words. In the end, it just generates the same old fairy tale plots using the new words it has learned. I really feel like that story embodies today's AI generated stories. I've tried to get ChatGPT to generate original fairy tales and whatever plot prompt I give it, it spits out what is essentially the same dull story every time. I always enjoy spotting a good anachronism in a sci-fi story (societies with space travel but still use typewriters), but this is a case of really spot on prediction.
- thenoblesunfish 1y ago
  Is this why the Google product (now just called Gemini) was called that?
  - godelski 1y ago
    I don't know if anyone has officially said so but there was a public statement about it being chosen as a reference to story telling (Celtic language). So could be for similar reasons or could be a reference. Not surprising considering how famous the story is and how famous Asimov is. But maybe someone else knows more definitively.
    - andrewflnr 1y ago
      Celtic? The name "Gemini" is much, much, much better known from Greek myth, if it occurs in Celtic culture at all...
      - strken 1y ago
        Gemini was originally called Bard. That's what thenoblesunfish was asking about: the original name, not the new one.
      - godelski 1y ago
dwd 1y ago
The best fantasy/sci-fi literature involves a lot of world building. For some, the world building came first and the stories were an offshoot of that. Tolkien needed a world and stories to bring life to the languages he was inventing. Raymond E Feist's Midkemia was a massive collaborative effort for a RPG world. He has stated: "I don't write fantasy; I write historical novels about an imaginary place. At least that's how I look at it." This is what you won't see AI doing...yet.
- antisthenes 1y ago
  World building...is just having a really large context window.
- ethan_smith 1y ago
  Multi-agent LLM systems with persistent memory are actually making significant progress on world-building coherence, maintaining consistency across thousands of interactions while incrementally developing complex fictional universes.
unignorant 1y ago
Here are my notes and guesses on the stories in case people here find it interesting. Like some others in the blog post comments I got 6/8 right: 1.) probably human, low on style but a solid twist (CORRECT) 2.) interesting imagery but some continuity issues, maybe AI (INCORRECT) 3.) more a scene than a story, highly confident is AI given style (CORRECT) 4.) style could go either way, maybe human given some successful characterization (INCORRECT) 5.) I like the style but it's probably AI, the metaphors are too dense and very minor continuity errors (CORRECT) 6.) some genuinely funny stuff and good world building, almost certainly human (CORRECT) 7.) probably AI prompted to go for humor, some minor continuity issues (CORRECT) 8.) nicely subverted expectations, probably human (CORRECT) My personal ranking for scores (again blind to author) was: 6 (human); 8 (human); 4 (AI); 1 (human) and 5 (AI) -- tied; 2 (human); 3 and 7 (AI) -- tied So for me the two best stories were human and the two worst were AI. That said, I read a lot of flash fiction, and none of these stories really approached good flash imo. I've also done some of my own experiments, and AI can do much better than what is posted above for flash if given more sophisticated prompting.
- codechicago277 1y ago
  I had similar results, and story 4 is so trope heavy I wonder if it’s just an amalgamation of similar stories. The human stories all felt original, where none of the AI ones did.
  - unignorant 1y ago
    I'm not sure I agree that the human stories felt original. I was pretty unimpressed with all of the stories except maybe 6, and even that one dealt in some common tropes. 5 had fewer tropes than 6 (and maybe as a result of that received the highest average scores from his readers) but I could tell from the style it was AI
- biffles 1y ago
  Could you expand on your point re more sophisticated prompting? I have found it hard to replicate high quality human-written prose and was a bit surprised by the results of this test. To me, AI fiction (and most AI writing in general) has a certain “smell” that becomes obvious after enough exposure to it. And yet I scored worse than you did on the test, so what do I know…
keiferski 1y ago
I think if you compared the AI stories to works by “top” authors, the results wouldn’t really be as close. No one is confusing a story by Kafka or Conrad with a ChatGPT one. Because unfortunately, one reason why readers can’t tell the difference between the AI and human authors is because they don’t have much exposure to the greats. The average person reads something like 2 books a year, and they probably aren't reading Nabokov.
- vunderba 1y ago
  My personal litmus test that works fairly effectively with these AI generated stories is this - if someone asked you "What was the story about?" - could you reply with anything more substantial than the prompt that was given to generate the story to begin with? Have a read through the 10 dragon stories where the prompt was "Meeting a dragon" and you'll see what I mean. https://mark---lawrence.blogspot.com/2023/09/so-is-ai-writing-any-good.html https://mark---lawrence.blogspot.com/2023/09/so-is-ai-writin...
- bubblyworld 1y ago
  That's probably true, but as the author points out, it's still interesting to see where the boundary is at the moment. It's a lot further along than people typically argue imo.
  - keiferski 1y ago
    I don’t really find it that surprising - if you write generic low-quality stories, it’s difficult to differentiate your work from an AI writing generic low-quality stories. People have been selling slop stories on Amazon for a long time before AI tools, so describing them as professional authors is not exactly damning here.
    - bubblyworld 1y ago
      Okay, but if your argument is that people couldn't differentiate them because these particular authors also write "slop" then you should just lead with that. I think many people would reasonably disagree with you.
lithiumii 1y ago
I love what he is doing but really hope the voting interface was better. Also I wonder what the results would be if there are AI-assisted stories, but maybe real authors would hate to do that.
famouswaffles 1y ago
I put the basic prompt to 5 medium thinking in the API (because most of the writing gains seems to be tucked away in the reasoning mode and because you can't trust the router for this stuff) and this is what i got. It's not flash fiction, more a short story, but i'm impressed. https://pastebin.com/huGhbX7u https://pastebin.com/huGhbX7u
relevant_stats 1y ago
I'm very surprised according to results people struggled with identifying [3] and [4] as AI. IMO both are simply bad and both contain usual telltales in spades (continuity problems, failed or trite metaphors/analogies, semantic failures, overall feeling of 'wtf is even being attempted here'). I'm not so surprised that people struggled with identifying [1] as human - the confounding factor is that this flash story is unpleasantly written, and it's not easy to realize that its failure modes (eg. trying to cram too much in too short a text) are rather human like. And I'm sure the fact that arguably the hardest to digest and rather bad human story opens the poll might somewhat influence the further analyses. As others in the poll I failed to identify [5] as AI even though in hindsight the telltales are also there. That's because I rather liked it, and as a result it was harder to be vigilant. I also was very undecided on [8]. Finally I scored 6/8, but I wouldn't say it was easy. Shame that comparing to the previous contest https://mark---lawrence.blogspot.com/2023/09/so-is-ai-writing-any-good.html https://mark---lawrence.blogspot.com/2023/09/so-is-ai-writin... is not straightforward. In that one I scored 9/10 while having very easy time (I didn't even finish reading some of them before making up my mind). I also felt completely excused with my only failure, incorrectly identifying as AI the story written in the style of exhaustingly banal fan fiction. But frankly I found almost all the human stories in the previous edition better then the current ones. In retrospect ChatGPT4 was a terrible writer. ChatGPT5 seems to be an improvement to the admittedly worrying point. Still not impossible to discover though. However these are my impressions only and it looks maybe I was lucky and I should not generalize it? According to the website people had serious trouble discerning gpt4 writing also 2 years ago. And I'm rather shocked they did. And that they scored some of those banal AI stories positively. If it's not luck on my part, then maybe discerning AI writing is a skill very different from 'writing' or 'being deeply interested in literature', skills of people who usually frequent this blog?
spongebobism 1y ago
Maybe this is cope, maybe it's my dislike of modern fantasy, a genre that keeps repeating the same narrative elements to get the same reactions out of the reader, but I found the stories kinda bland, and to me they all seemed like something ChatGPT could have written on a good day. Compare them to Behm-Steinberg's Taylor Swift [0], which has a far more interesting premise, significant character development, and good style (to be fair, story number 6 also has relatively good style). Or to Samatar's The Huntress [1], a poetic piece of flash fiction that is willing to leave much more ambiguity and really shows what's possible in terms of style. [1] https://tinhouse.com/the-huntress/ https://tinhouse.com/the-huntress/ [0] https://gulfcoastmag.org/stories/2015-barthelme-prize-winner-taylor-swift,889 https://gulfcoastmag.org/stories/2015-barthelme-prize-winner...
paulmoulinex123 1y ago
A lot of folks here seem sure that models cannot hold long-form context. In my experience that is not true. The real issues are model choice and how you frame the task. For the past few months I have been generating full-length fiction on topics I care about, and the quality is good enough that friends in blind reads get just as absorbed as with solid human-written work. Example of a long book I put together in about 20 minutes: docs.google[dot]com/document/d/1mA-q1ugWRa6BaOghUTH17kYdjHpaNPIWgoNKg6OvOko/edit?usp=sharing Yes, there are rough edges, but the character arcs and the lore stay coherent from start to finish. Disclosure: I am building an iOS app that lets anyone spin up a book with any cast and starting situation, in a voice close to a favorite author, and then steer the story while reading. On-demand long-form content is already here. It is just not packaged very conveniently yet.

94 points by biffles 1y ago

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Aeolun 1y ago

Personally I’m having a blast reading AI generated fiction. As long as the direction is human, and often enough corrected to keep the minor inconsistencies out, the results are pretty good. For me it’s no different from generating code with Claude, except it’s generating prose. Without human direction your result ends up as garbage, but there’s no need to go and actually write all the prose yourself. And I guess that just like with code, sometimes you have to hand craft something to make it truly good. But that’s probably not true for 80% of the story/code.

antihipocrat 1y ago
Who's voice are you using when adding your hand crafted prose? Mimicking the style of the 80% or switching to your own? Perhaps I'm a Luddite, or just in the dissonance phase toward enlightenment, but at the moment I don't want to invest in AI fiction. A big part of the experience for me is understanding the author's mind, not just the story being told
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  > A big part of the experience for me is understanding the author's mind, not just the story being told AI content is really exposing how people fall into a group that does go further than the surface text into deeper layers of context/subtext, and a group that doesn't.
  - Seattle3503 1y ago
    I could be in either group, depending on my inclination at the moment.
- Aeolun 1y ago
  I think there’s only a very small subset of fiction that uses the prose to that extent. Much like code really. If you are writing original algorithms you cannot use the LLM. If you are just remixing existing ones, it becomes a lot more useful. Also, I guess I missed the brunt of your question, though the answer is similar. Most voice works for most characters. There’s only so many ways to say something, but occassionally you have to adjust the sentence or re-prompt the whole thing (the LLM has a tendency to see the best in characters).
  - exmadscientist 1y ago
    Perhaps on a relative scale "most" fiction doesn't carry any sort of deeper meaning, but if you look at things like "Hugo or Nebula Award nominees" (to pluck out the SF/F genre as a category), I'd say that almost every single one of them, going back all those decades, has something more to say than just their straightforward text. And unless reading is your day job or only hobby, that's a massive, massive corpus of interesting text. (In just one genre! There are more genres!) So on an absolute scale, there is so much fiction to read with more-than-surface-level meaning that I personally just don't understand why anyone would have the least interest in reading AI slop. (I also don't have any real interest in most Kindle Unlimited works, probably for similar reasons. Though I am quite certain there are diamonds there, I've just not had particularly much time for/good luck at finding them.)
    - Aeolun 1y ago
      Sure, but that more than surface level meaning comes out in the story, not often in the specific way the sentences are written (I acknowledge those exist, I just don’t consider them the majority). Also, you say you don’t understand why anyone would be interested in the AI slop. But from the article we learn that one is indistinguishable from the other (apparently even to the one professional author that tried)
      - exmadscientist 1y ago
        I was disappointed that the results shown didn't break things down a bit more between star ratings given and authorship guesses. I didn't think any of these stories were amazing flash fiction, and I think that's relevant here. I'm curious to know what people who liked them all, or at least really liked one of them, had to say on judging AI-vs-human.
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
  Plot twist, people who do first drafts and structural edits with AI can still do line edits and copy edits by hand for personal voice (and you have to anyhow if you want the prose to be exceptional).
sram1337 1y ago
I would love to read some of this. Where do you find AI generated fiction?
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- Aeolun 1y ago
  https://www.royalroad.com/fictions/search?globalFilters=false&tagsAdd=ai_assisted&tagsAdd=ai_generated https://www.royalroad.com/fictions/search?globalFilters=fals... Though I’ll admit I can’t speak to the quality of that except my own stuff (which I’m naturally predisposed to like). This was my attempt at fully AI generated (though edited by human): https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/101072/inherited-wounds https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/101072/inherited-wounds
  - strken 1y ago
    I've had two separate experiences reading a story on RoyalRoad, getting ten chapters in, noticing that any individual chapter is technically great but I just don't care about the characters or plot can't be bothered reading further, and then noticing the story was AI-assisted. I think the AI seems to struggle with consistency of characters and themes, and particularly with character growth over time: it can write touching moments, but these don't fit properly with the character's actions before and then after. It reads a bit like a story written by a hundred professional authors who can skim-read all the previous chapters but are on a strict time limit and don't have access to each other's notes. This makes me wonder if they're just not giving the AI notes on structure and character.
deadbabe 1y ago
The only AI generated fiction I read is stuff I create on the fly. Why would you read AI generated fiction made by other people when it’s the same as reading regular fiction?

jay_kyburz 1y ago

Just wanted to be first to say I'm a huge fan of Mark Lawrence. I didn't know he blogged! Now I'll go actually read the post.

dwd 1y ago
Big fan of Janny Wurts, particularly the Empire series she co-wrote with Raymond E Feist. Very surprised she was outed as an AI, though she is the only author I've ever had to pull out the dictionary as she used a word I had never seen and wanted to be sure of the meaning in the context.
- npinsker 1y ago
  I was very (wrongly) confident she was AI. I thought her prose was bland and repetitive and lacking melody, and she was the only human author to explicitly mention demons in the first paragraph, which is something that happens when you prompt an AI for a demon story. The twist had potential, but to me wasn’t executed as well as it could have been. I was hoping for some stronger irony — e.g. if the mainlanders had pushed for the bridge, but not the islanders; or a sentence about how the demons were very surprised, but nonetheless went on to take over the world before they knew what had happened. As it is, it felt underdeveloped and slightly uncanny in an AI-like way.
  - dwd 1y ago
    The twist was the one thing that made me think it was human written. I quite liked her story after the second read. But sad to say, I actually preferred most of the AI ones over the rest.

kristopolous 1y ago

ai fiction really shines in baffling surreal prompts that it tries hard to satisfy. Here's an example: "let's write a story where donald trump is giving a speech to a crowd as people slowly discover he is secretly a northern red oak tree in a human suit to the shock of fans and reporters! The tips of his fingers become branches as he tries to deny it as wildly impossible meanwhile his human disguise continues to fail" After some back and forth, here is what I got: https://9ol.es/md/trump https://9ol.es/md/trump No human would write something that crazy...

Ancapistani 1y ago
So... Kafka?

akoboldfrying 1y ago

I applaud OP's transparency and willingness to call this result what it is.

xenotux 1y ago

I think this is similar to AI generated images: it puts a new creative tool in the hands of people who might have had good ideas, but didn't have a mastery of the medium. In that respect, it's cool: if you had a great idea for a sci-fi story but no talent for writing, and if an LLM let you realize your vision, that's neat. It has some negative externalities for the craftsmen, but overall, more creativity is hardly a bad thing. The real problem is that the most lucrative uses of the tech aren't that. It's generating 10,000 fake books on Amazon on subjects you don't care about. It's cranking out SEO spam, generating monetizable clickbait, etc.

gtowey 1y ago
And they haven't even gotten around to adding advertising into them yet! Imagine when chat assistants subtly steer you towards certain products. Would you even know it was manipulating you?
- perching_aix 1y ago
  They kind of did though. Thing tries to make me generate diagrams every step of the way (as a kind of feature demo), even though they're rarely ever a good idea, and even when they are, the pictures and diagrams generated are useless.
thwarted 1y ago
> I think this is similar to AI generated images: it puts a new creative tool in the hands of people who might have had good ideas, but didn't have a mastery of the medium. Reading this sentence reminded me of the classic HN position of "ideas are worthless, what matters is the execution", usually mentioned in the context of an "ideas person" looking for their "technical cofounder" and the ideas person thinking they deserve at least 50%, often more, of the ownership of what would be built because without them there'd be no idea. > if you had a great idea for a sci-fi story but no talent for writing, and if an LLM let you realize your vision, that's neat. If your "vision" is only the "idea for a sci-fi story", is that really a vision? Good books leave the reader changed/influenced in some fashion, through the way the idea is presented and developed over the course of the story, not just from a blurb on the book jacket. > overall, more creativity is hardly a bad thing. Is coming up with an idea for a for a sci-fi story the meat of creative act such that that flooding the market with ideas counts as an increase in creativity overall?

bsder 1y ago

Perhaps what this is pointing out is that a lot of writers of the genre of "fantasy" produce mostly formulaic, trope-laden piles of crap that AI is pretty good at mimicking? This is neither new nor news. "The Well-Tempered Plot Device" is almost 4 decades old (see: https://news.ansible.uk/plotdev.html https://news.ansible.uk/plotdev.html). It does suggest that publishers might want to screen new writing with a quick "Did AI write this?" and only publish the ones where it is obvious to humans that AI did not write it.

spondylosaurus 1y ago
I thought it was interesting/telling (but maybe not surprising) that the AI-generated stories scored the highest according to reader rankings, yet pinged to me as immediately flat and generic. But I really liked the idiosyncrasies of a few of the human-authored entries!
exmadscientist 1y ago
Yes, the human-written stories that I guessed wrong about were the ones that seemed to have nothing to say. When the plot's stereotypical and trite, there's no subtext (difficult to do in flash, but not impossible; some can do it well), and it scans like anyone could have written it anywhere or anytime, well, that looks like AI. (In that vein I am baffled how anyone could think the fourth story, especially, was anything but AI.) (And, as well, the seventh story is interesting because it reads, to me, exactly like someone who's used to writing something longer trying to write flash. It doesn't land anything, it doesn't conclude, but it looks like if it had about twice the length it might be interesting. And it's got some dissonance from breaking with the usual demon-bargaining template. So I pegged that as human. Oops!)
andrewflnr 1y ago
> "The Well-Tempered Plot Device" is almost 4 decades old Yeah, we've moved forward a ways in the last 4 decades, or the top of the market has, at least. That was a fun read, though.
spongebobism 1y ago
Quoted in the well-tempered plot device: > Our relationship / is beautiful / because / it is ours / because / it relates / to us. Indistinguishable from Rupi Kaur. There is nothing new under the sun.

vunderba 1y ago

The story plot was "Meeting a dragon". As both a human and a writer, challenge accepted: Long ago, there lived a golden dragon whose fractal-like scales gleamed in the glow of the morning in her cave. She was known for her kindness, and many came not with sword or spear, but with humble requests - for you see, it was widely believed that the mystical scales of a dragon would heal illness, cure ailments, and provide fortune. One such visitor timidly looked up at her great shining body and beseeched, "Oh glorious dragon, might I have a single scale?" Of course, the dragon replied warmly. She delicately, almost lovingly, with a slight twinge, used a single claw to prise off a single golden scale, leaving a dull patch. Over the eons, more and more people would come as supplicants. The scales were used for good luck, for warmth, to ward off evil, as the draconic equivalent of a rabbit's foot. In the end, the poor dragon was stripped bare - the fire from her burning furnace now showed clearly through to her patchwork, sensitive, and naked skin. When winter came, she huddled in the cold darkness. And still, when a peasant would come asking for a scale - just one, a single scale nothing more, she would not refuse. In her eternal generosity she would carefully break off another. This time it took longer to find one left upon her body, as the humans had stripped her bare like a tree come winter. Then thus came a knight. "I'm sorry, good sir, but I have no scales left to give," she said pitiably. "Why, your scale was a choking hazard and wasn’t labeled not for ages under 5! Prepare for a class-action lawsuit and also to be impaled upon a lance." The End. I'll pretend I intended it as a parable of the destructive nature of mass tourism or something something Lorax something something truffula trees.

eulgro 1y ago
Thanks, I love it.
taneq 1y ago
No good deed goes unpunished!
andrewflnr 1y ago
For me, the part about "fractal-like scales" would have flagged the author as either an AI or just kind of a pretentious dummy, because that makes very little sense. "Then thus" would actually lean me toward human, because LLMs are usually better at grammar than that. :D

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Abdii430 1y ago

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61579582377159 https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61579582377159

thedevilslawyer 1y ago

We're at a key milestone in the IP wars; IP was inducted into our civilization to protect the few who had the ability to create. This idea is well past it's due date. We should move to a liberal IP regime, with copyright strictly reduced to 7-10 years, with all works then entering public domain. Our society will universally thrive with the abundance that will come. I understand and empathize that a class of vocations today will go away, but so did lamplighters. The roles may become extinct; but we will endure as a people.

HPMOR 1y ago
Why is it always taken as a conclusion that humans will persist? Lots of species go extinct, and it is not clear that won’t be true here as well.
- thedevilslawyer 1y ago
  We won't go extinct because of the removal of an arbitrary law around monopolizing ideas.
rwyinuse 1y ago
I'm not sure people left without a job will endure, at least if they're unfortunate enough to live somewhere without social security. The key question is whether AI will somehow create enough new jobs for those let go (I doubt that), or just cause a massive unemployment.
- thedevilslawyer 1y ago
  Indeed, I'm proposing that we figure out a solution for this. That would be better than bearing the cost of knowledge not being open and universal.
ordinaryradical 1y ago
There are hundreds of years of art already in the public domain and society is not “universally thriving?” Why would adding a couple more recent years change that? Seems very utopian magic thinking to me.

voidhorse 1y ago

Interesting study. I think the use of AI boils down to this: is the product independent of the process and the context? Or is it dependent on it in some way? I think, when it comes to art, the latter is truer than the former, and most use of AI in creative fields is predicated on trying to convince people to engage with art in an extremely shallow way (art strictly as soulless, time filling entertainment). When an author writes a novel, the novel does not exist in a vacuum. The author's persona and the cultural exchange that emerges around the text also becomes an important part of the phenomenal status of the the work and its cultural recognition. Even when an author remains pseudonymous and makes no appearance, this too is part of the work. If an author uses AI as a tool and takes care to imbue the output with artistic and personal relevance, it probably will become an art object, but its status may or may not be modulated by the use of AI in the process to the extent that the use does/doesn't affect people's crafting interpretations of the work, or the author's own engagements. Contrarily, AI generated work that has close to no actual processual involvement on the part of the author will almost always have slop status, just because it's hard to imagine an interpretive culture around such work that doesn't at some point break down in the face of the inability to connect the worm with other cultural touchstones or the actual experience of a human being. Maybe it could happen, but if it did, at that point the status of the work is till something different in so far as it would be a marker not of human experience, as literature traditionally has been, but something quite new and different literature-cum-hypermarket(we already had mass market) product.

waltbosz 1y ago

There is an Asimov story called "Someday" in which a toy computer called a Bard generates random fairy tales and reads them to children. In the story two children try to hack their Bard, to make it tell more interesting modern stories, by feeding it a new vocabulary of modern words. In the end, it just generates the same old fairy tale plots using the new words it has learned. I really feel like that story embodies today's AI generated stories. I've tried to get ChatGPT to generate original fairy tales and whatever plot prompt I give it, it spits out what is essentially the same dull story every time. I always enjoy spotting a good anachronism in a sci-fi story (societies with space travel but still use typewriters), but this is a case of really spot on prediction.

thenoblesunfish 1y ago
Is this why the Google product (now just called Gemini) was called that?
- godelski 1y ago
  I don't know if anyone has officially said so but there was a public statement about it being chosen as a reference to story telling (Celtic language). So could be for similar reasons or could be a reference. Not surprising considering how famous the story is and how famous Asimov is. But maybe someone else knows more definitively.
  - andrewflnr 1y ago
    Celtic? The name "Gemini" is much, much, much better known from Greek myth, if it occurs in Celtic culture at all...
    - strken 1y ago
      Gemini was originally called Bard. That's what thenoblesunfish was asking about: the original name, not the new one.
    - godelski 1y ago

dwd 1y ago

The best fantasy/sci-fi literature involves a lot of world building. For some, the world building came first and the stories were an offshoot of that. Tolkien needed a world and stories to bring life to the languages he was inventing. Raymond E Feist's Midkemia was a massive collaborative effort for a RPG world. He has stated: "I don't write fantasy; I write historical novels about an imaginary place. At least that's how I look at it." This is what you won't see AI doing...yet.

antisthenes 1y ago
World building...is just having a really large context window.
ethan_smith 1y ago
Multi-agent LLM systems with persistent memory are actually making significant progress on world-building coherence, maintaining consistency across thousands of interactions while incrementally developing complex fictional universes.

unignorant 1y ago

Here are my notes and guesses on the stories in case people here find it interesting. Like some others in the blog post comments I got 6/8 right: 1.) probably human, low on style but a solid twist (CORRECT) 2.) interesting imagery but some continuity issues, maybe AI (INCORRECT) 3.) more a scene than a story, highly confident is AI given style (CORRECT) 4.) style could go either way, maybe human given some successful characterization (INCORRECT) 5.) I like the style but it's probably AI, the metaphors are too dense and very minor continuity errors (CORRECT) 6.) some genuinely funny stuff and good world building, almost certainly human (CORRECT) 7.) probably AI prompted to go for humor, some minor continuity issues (CORRECT) 8.) nicely subverted expectations, probably human (CORRECT) My personal ranking for scores (again blind to author) was: 6 (human); 8 (human); 4 (AI); 1 (human) and 5 (AI) -- tied; 2 (human); 3 and 7 (AI) -- tied So for me the two best stories were human and the two worst were AI. That said, I read a lot of flash fiction, and none of these stories really approached good flash imo. I've also done some of my own experiments, and AI can do much better than what is posted above for flash if given more sophisticated prompting.

codechicago277 1y ago
I had similar results, and story 4 is so trope heavy I wonder if it’s just an amalgamation of similar stories. The human stories all felt original, where none of the AI ones did.
- unignorant 1y ago
  I'm not sure I agree that the human stories felt original. I was pretty unimpressed with all of the stories except maybe 6, and even that one dealt in some common tropes. 5 had fewer tropes than 6 (and maybe as a result of that received the highest average scores from his readers) but I could tell from the style it was AI
biffles 1y ago
Could you expand on your point re more sophisticated prompting? I have found it hard to replicate high quality human-written prose and was a bit surprised by the results of this test. To me, AI fiction (and most AI writing in general) has a certain “smell” that becomes obvious after enough exposure to it. And yet I scored worse than you did on the test, so what do I know…

keiferski 1y ago

I think if you compared the AI stories to works by “top” authors, the results wouldn’t really be as close. No one is confusing a story by Kafka or Conrad with a ChatGPT one. Because unfortunately, one reason why readers can’t tell the difference between the AI and human authors is because they don’t have much exposure to the greats. The average person reads something like 2 books a year, and they probably aren't reading Nabokov.

vunderba 1y ago
My personal litmus test that works fairly effectively with these AI generated stories is this - if someone asked you "What was the story about?" - could you reply with anything more substantial than the prompt that was given to generate the story to begin with? Have a read through the 10 dragon stories where the prompt was "Meeting a dragon" and you'll see what I mean. https://mark---lawrence.blogspot.com/2023/09/so-is-ai-writing-any-good.html https://mark---lawrence.blogspot.com/2023/09/so-is-ai-writin...
bubblyworld 1y ago
That's probably true, but as the author points out, it's still interesting to see where the boundary is at the moment. It's a lot further along than people typically argue imo.
- keiferski 1y ago
  I don’t really find it that surprising - if you write generic low-quality stories, it’s difficult to differentiate your work from an AI writing generic low-quality stories. People have been selling slop stories on Amazon for a long time before AI tools, so describing them as professional authors is not exactly damning here.
  - bubblyworld 1y ago
    Okay, but if your argument is that people couldn't differentiate them because these particular authors also write "slop" then you should just lead with that. I think many people would reasonably disagree with you.

lithiumii 1y ago

I love what he is doing but really hope the voting interface was better. Also I wonder what the results would be if there are AI-assisted stories, but maybe real authors would hate to do that.

famouswaffles 1y ago

I put the basic prompt to 5 medium thinking in the API (because most of the writing gains seems to be tucked away in the reasoning mode and because you can't trust the router for this stuff) and this is what i got. It's not flash fiction, more a short story, but i'm impressed. https://pastebin.com/huGhbX7u https://pastebin.com/huGhbX7u

relevant_stats 1y ago

I'm very surprised according to results people struggled with identifying [3] and [4] as AI. IMO both are simply bad and both contain usual telltales in spades (continuity problems, failed or trite metaphors/analogies, semantic failures, overall feeling of 'wtf is even being attempted here'). I'm not so surprised that people struggled with identifying [1] as human - the confounding factor is that this flash story is unpleasantly written, and it's not easy to realize that its failure modes (eg. trying to cram too much in too short a text) are rather human like. And I'm sure the fact that arguably the hardest to digest and rather bad human story opens the poll might somewhat influence the further analyses. As others in the poll I failed to identify [5] as AI even though in hindsight the telltales are also there. That's because I rather liked it, and as a result it was harder to be vigilant. I also was very undecided on [8]. Finally I scored 6/8, but I wouldn't say it was easy. Shame that comparing to the previous contest https://mark---lawrence.blogspot.com/2023/09/so-is-ai-writing-any-good.html https://mark---lawrence.blogspot.com/2023/09/so-is-ai-writin... is not straightforward. In that one I scored 9/10 while having very easy time (I didn't even finish reading some of them before making up my mind). I also felt completely excused with my only failure, incorrectly identifying as AI the story written in the style of exhaustingly banal fan fiction. But frankly I found almost all the human stories in the previous edition better then the current ones. In retrospect ChatGPT4 was a terrible writer. ChatGPT5 seems to be an improvement to the admittedly worrying point. Still not impossible to discover though. However these are my impressions only and it looks maybe I was lucky and I should not generalize it? According to the website people had serious trouble discerning gpt4 writing also 2 years ago. And I'm rather shocked they did. And that they scored some of those banal AI stories positively. If it's not luck on my part, then maybe discerning AI writing is a skill very different from 'writing' or 'being deeply interested in literature', skills of people who usually frequent this blog?

spongebobism 1y ago

Maybe this is cope, maybe it's my dislike of modern fantasy, a genre that keeps repeating the same narrative elements to get the same reactions out of the reader, but I found the stories kinda bland, and to me they all seemed like something ChatGPT could have written on a good day. Compare them to Behm-Steinberg's Taylor Swift [0], which has a far more interesting premise, significant character development, and good style (to be fair, story number 6 also has relatively good style). Or to Samatar's The Huntress [1], a poetic piece of flash fiction that is willing to leave much more ambiguity and really shows what's possible in terms of style. [1] https://tinhouse.com/the-huntress/ https://tinhouse.com/the-huntress/ [0] https://gulfcoastmag.org/stories/2015-barthelme-prize-winner-taylor-swift,889 https://gulfcoastmag.org/stories/2015-barthelme-prize-winner...

paulmoulinex123 1y ago

A lot of folks here seem sure that models cannot hold long-form context. In my experience that is not true. The real issues are model choice and how you frame the task. For the past few months I have been generating full-length fiction on topics I care about, and the quality is good enough that friends in blind reads get just as absorbed as with solid human-written work. Example of a long book I put together in about 20 minutes: docs.google[dot]com/document/d/1mA-q1ugWRa6BaOghUTH17kYdjHpaNPIWgoNKg6OvOko/edit?usp=sharing Yes, there are rough edges, but the character arcs and the lore stay coherent from start to finish. Disclosure: I am building an iOS app that lets anyone spin up a book with any cast and starting situation, in a voice close to a favorite author, and then steer the story while reading. On-demand long-form content is already here. It is just not packaged very conveniently yet.