Fuck AI

50 shades of grey was also stupid and bad and it very much was not written by AI.

Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description.

Which are all ways of creating more text without saying anything. Repetition is another classic.

I feel like that's a problem with all low-effort, AI-generated texts (which is the vast majority of them): You give it a prompt with maybe ten pieces of information and expect it to generate a text that's a hundred times as long, while also not straying too far from the prompt.

Of course, it's going to take every opportunity to not say anything that would advance the plot. Because advancing the plot means either using up the little input you gave it, or to invent new information which might contradict the prompt...

Other tells I've noticed: lots of purple prose, sentence fragments, and the good ol "not X---Y" framing. Another tell is jarring tone shifts from chapter to chapter or even scene to scene i.e. a character might come across as sympathetic in one part of the story and an absolute psychopath in another for no reason.

It's a problem in fanfic right now, but I think this'll pass when prices innevitably go up. It's not like fanfic writers are really making that much from donations.

I mean yeah they mostly learned from fanfic authors.

I was recently talking to an independent bookshop owner, looking at some of the submissions for self-published books. It was depressing as fuck. An absolute slop fest. The 'illustrated' childrens books were by far the worst offenders.

LMMs are just mediocrity machines.

You input one great book, and 25 dogshit fanfictions, you're not going to output a great book.

It's like teaching someone how to cook Chateaubriand, but also 19 recipes for hot dogs, and then expecting them to make braised lamb or some shit.

No kidding. Anyone else visit the SCP wiki? It's so blindingly obvious which new skips are LLM-generated, but the "authors" always play dumb like "Huh??? What makes you say that????" when their skips are like "SCP-12345 is multiversal, ethereal, and ruminant. We are not containing it—it is containing us."

I remember the stuff they added to Duolingo after the leadership went "AI first".

Duolingo has these story exercises. Old stories were all kind of fun and distinctive, and the characters are fun and memorable. Then they got the bright idea to AI generate more stories.

"Oh, don't worry, the new content will all be reviewed by humans", they said.

Were they?

The new stories were... I don't even remember any more. Best I can describe them is "there's stuff and it happens and the characters are just kinda there". It went in one ear, out of the other. I fucking can't. I don't think I was learning stuff from that.

And these were tiny stories, like couple of hundred words tops. Anyone uses LLMs to write novels is out of their rocker.

And yet 50 shades of grey came out before llm general availability

🤩That's not true! 🚀 You people are so mean. 😤

"Research" must have never met my friend Sturgeon. (Of Sturgeon's Law. No I didn't actually know him).

I'd expect AI fiction to be equivalent to the 100 monkeys in a room with 100 typewriters. Eventually they'll push out a good one but mostly it'll be just crap.

peak mediocrity

Lots of fiction is mediocre so this tracks.

Also the human part, the general idea of what the story is about is unoriginal because of the AI user himself