Erotica is a whole separate class of smut than porn (in the cultural sense, that we understand the term “porn”). It’s literally like calling a book a movie.
It’s also, on the whole, a much more ethical and engaging form of smut. I don’t really have an issue with the choices of consenting adults, but the (video and image) pornography industry is so seldom that.
I've heard that word used to refer to (still) pictures, and in more casual/offhand use to refer to text. I don't understand it as being quite so restricted by media-type as you seem to.
- If you can generate something you're happy with, that's typically enough. External validation usually isn't a requirement for getting off to yourself, as opposed to other content where many of the primary benefits often are sharing
- Plenty of people are into very niche things. Sometimes almost nothing exists (or is discoverable) that exactly hits the spot. Generative AI lets you hit the spot that nothing else has
- AI is less complex than managing a real friendship. Even if people exist who can help you out with this, it can be difficult to arrange, or you lose access to them etc. AI doesn't lose interest in you, get busy with life stuff or decide you don't deserve a second chance.
Also sharing is still a huge benefit if you can manage it. Sometimes you will only find other people share your spot once you start posting the type of content they've been looking for. (Woe is me that FurAffinity unconditionally bans any LLM assistance now)
Because fiction is a different genere and historically at least AI was much worse at it.
The big differences:
- fiction tends to be longer, AI struggles with making a satisfying coherent plot structure after a certain length.
- fiction tends to be subtler. You want characters to have nuance, shades of grey, symbolism, etc. Not everything should be shouted in your face. This is the opposite of writing persusaive literature where you are trying to convince someone of something.
There's money in copywriting, there's money in writing code, but long form creative writing? Almost an opposite of money.
Thus, very little incentive for AI labs to spend any effort on improving long form creative writing performance.
Most of tunes on this generation of AI systems are basic RLAF, and aimed at something like "punchy short form writing". The potential is largely unexplored.
I tried it once. Maybe 8-9 months back.I recall doing it soon after one travel, so that's why I can pinpoint it and this may be useful to figure which AI versions were available then.
The challenge is length and the context window. I had to own the plot since once it compacts, it has already lost the plot :)
I will give it pointers and tell where to go next. It will do it but either 1) stop after 3-4 paragraphs, or 2) write in a totally different direction than I expected. So I will nudge it to course correct, and it will do it. And then you keep iterating.
It was a good experiment for a couple of days. It saved me typing and it sometimes gave me lines of thinking that were interesting. But nothing that could be published.
But now that I think about it, I found a use case. If only GRRM could use its help :)
My point was, LLMs always generate fiction (bad fiction, but fiction nonetheless); what they generate is plausible, grammatical text that may have many points of congruence with the truth, but are not in any way constrained to do so. In short, fiction.
If they could reliably generate high quality non-fiction, that would be news.
You're not reading someone else's RP, though. Not with the applications that support this.
There are things like the character(s) you interact with, the initial setting, and some background information predefined, but the responses/evolution of the RP vary depending on things like the model used and the user's interactions.
It's somewhat like taking a D&D setting/scenario. Each group plays it differently.
As someone with extensive experience with this: no, you don't.
As much as it's nice to know another shares my interests (and will partake in them with me), I can't always get that.
When I can't get that, LLMs are not a worthless substitute, especially if what I actually want is just to play out a situation.
I want to act and then get back a description of reaction. LLMs can describe reaction, therefore I find value in them.
Like how in D&D you go to do whatever and the dungeon master tells you what happened in response. LLMs fit there for me.
They don't fill the void of social interaction or anything like that, but I don't strictly need that.
Take a look at services like AI Dungeon to see the kind of thing I'm talking about. It doesn't really replace social anything, but it's kind of just like text adventure. It's plenty interactive enough.
I think I probably did 12 whole books before I realized no one else would read them, or that if they did, I would feel guilty. some of them are really good though even knowing they are purely plan-based expression!
I had a sci-fi plot sketched out in my head, I had Codex give a whack at it. It was "ok" - not the worst content I've ever read, not the best. It was "sufficient."
my speculation is that not having written the original text means you don't have a mental history of all the decisions that went into writing it, and the context from being immersed in the work, making it a lot harder and less motivating to go write the next draft.
It's a very fun to go on an exploration of a theme! I had one where the technology was that people could go to sleep for free, but they had to pay to wake up, and when, and the economics and how society got rebuilt around that, and of course the hero trying to break the system.
So fans have fan fiction because they love certain worlds and characters and want more of it, or to riff on the base to take stories in new directions. We have things like TV tropes so it is no small stretch to, say, generate sitcom-type stories from Harry Potter or GoT that can continue forever. But where does all of this lead?
Music has sinilar issues, but I think of this like the compression/loudness issue in music production. Everything gets amplified so the range of everything is compressed. And then it gets boring and people slowly jump ship for something else.
I think there will be a wave of AI slop that improves and might actually be exciting on some vector, but we will get bored eventually. Humans crave newness, even if that new thing is worse in exactly the ways that defined good previously, like punk in response to complex rock albums.
AI can combine ideas in interesting ways, but it is by design a predictor of what is most likely. This is directly odds with the concept of newness (and arguably, human-ness) which is baked in to what we consider interesting and relevant.
This is interesting. We have seen the internet change many fields and democratize them. For instance, only a few media outlets produced news stories and analysis, the rest of us consumed it. Blogging changed that.
Only a few studios produced shows. With Youtube etc., many of the consumers could become producers themselves.
If I read this correctly, books and fiction are headed in the same direction.
I'm not sure about that comparison. For news and television your analogues of blogs and YouTube overcome a distribution bottleneck. Books have for a long time had a low barrier to entry for distribution and that fell further with the internet. There are mountains of amateur fiction and fanfiction online, requiring only an internet-connected device to produce and consume.
LLM-written fiction as explored in the study is generally not published at all. It's treated more like an externalized imagination, a loop of general ideas fed into and expanded on or filled in by the machine with statistical averages. It more closely resembles a sandbox game in my view, a type of media distinct from anything before it in form, and even more distinct in function in that media is generally understood to be a vector of communication between people, and this is instead highly individual.
Actually, it might be closer to say this is similar to a child playing pretend alone with their toys, except perhaps a bit less challenging in that creative roadblocks or narrative building is instantly abdicatable to the machine.
> Actually, it might be closer to say this is similar to a child playing pretend alone with their toys, except perhaps a bit less challenging in that creative roadblocks or narrative building is instantly abdicatable to the machine.
Wouldn't the obvious analogue be a video game? Especially one where you can edit the asset files (making your weapons super-strong, for instance?)
No, actually. In a video game the rules of engagement and the content you're engaging with are authored by other people. It's interactive media, but it's still a form of communication with boundaries and intent behind it. You can break those bounds with cheats or tools in the same way you can mark up a novel and write in your own ending with whiteout and a pen, but you're still fundamentally engaging with someone's creation.
An LLM-authored interactive fiction is a sandbox with no author, with no boundaries and no intent. It's a canvas, and all limitations on content are self-imposed. It's closer to making a game than to playing one, but there is no game in the end that you can share. You're left with a transcript that only really appeals to you. It is not the game. The game fundamentally lives in the player's imagination, and the LLM is there to ease the realization of that imagination and, if I'm being uncharitable, do the hard part of synthesizing ideas and impulses into something semi-coherent, limiting the potential for the player to grow and develop creative skills.
Web fiction, freely produced and distributed by "consumers" already existed prior to 2019. There are thousands of novels you can read that people produced for their own enjoyment, some even managed to make money off of it via patreon or Amazon's Kindle direct publishing.
This is slightly different than web fiction. Text generation is arguably the cheapest and most “ready” medium for content production in the current AI wave.
You can speak a world into existence, entirely customized to you’re preferences, and interact with it.
> I don't really see how AI 'democratizes' fiction and book writing?
When people say "AI will democratise $FOO" they don't mean it the way it is usually understood: people with skill and motivation can now produce $FOO.
What they mean is that people with no skill and no motivation can now pretend that they produced $FOO.
Remember the "I'm the ideas guy" people who would ask you to build a complete system and offer 1% equity because "the ideas are the hard part"? Well, the future is going to be filled with "ideas guys", making it even harder to find signal in the noise.
You need to learn to be able to say no to people as a life skill, first off, but if the ideas guy has vibecoded a mountain of code that they're trying to ship, but has hit the vibe wall, and has money to pay you to fix it, say yes.
Yes, they are. People have to find ways to make money to pay rent, bills and eat, particularly when their resumes are not as densely packed as others. This is one way to do it. Wish I could do it, too :)
LLMs suck at creative writing, all their edges get smoothed the fuck out of with RLHF for (brand) safety, so they write like they have a HR lady in the room with them, scrutinizing every sentence for adherence to the set of values very few people honestly hold. if you feed Claude/GPT/Gemini 100 chapters of ASOIAF and prompt it to continue, the story and the prose will degenerate into sterile purple slop within a few pages.
Why am i not surprised its primarily porn
It’s also, on the whole, a much more ethical and engaging form of smut. I don’t really have an issue with the choices of consenting adults, but the (video and image) pornography industry is so seldom that.
- Plenty of people are into very niche things. Sometimes almost nothing exists (or is discoverable) that exactly hits the spot. Generative AI lets you hit the spot that nothing else has
- AI is less complex than managing a real friendship. Even if people exist who can help you out with this, it can be difficult to arrange, or you lose access to them etc. AI doesn't lose interest in you, get busy with life stuff or decide you don't deserve a second chance.
Also sharing is still a huge benefit if you can manage it. Sometimes you will only find other people share your spot once you start posting the type of content they've been looking for. (Woe is me that FurAffinity unconditionally bans any LLM assistance now)
Why not? Journalists, lawyers and pundits of various stripes are already doing it. Why shouldn't readers?
The big differences:
- fiction tends to be longer, AI struggles with making a satisfying coherent plot structure after a certain length.
- fiction tends to be subtler. You want characters to have nuance, shades of grey, symbolism, etc. Not everything should be shouted in your face. This is the opposite of writing persusaive literature where you are trying to convince someone of something.
There's money in copywriting, there's money in writing code, but long form creative writing? Almost an opposite of money.
Thus, very little incentive for AI labs to spend any effort on improving long form creative writing performance.
Most of tunes on this generation of AI systems are basic RLAF, and aimed at something like "punchy short form writing". The potential is largely unexplored.
The challenge is length and the context window. I had to own the plot since once it compacts, it has already lost the plot :)
I will give it pointers and tell where to go next. It will do it but either 1) stop after 3-4 paragraphs, or 2) write in a totally different direction than I expected. So I will nudge it to course correct, and it will do it. And then you keep iterating.
It was a good experiment for a couple of days. It saved me typing and it sometimes gave me lines of thinking that were interesting. But nothing that could be published.
But now that I think about it, I found a use case. If only GRRM could use its help :)
If they could reliably generate high quality non-fiction, that would be news.
"non-fiction" doesn't mean "correct".
There are things like the character(s) you interact with, the initial setting, and some background information predefined, but the responses/evolution of the RP vary depending on things like the model used and the user's interactions.
It's somewhat like taking a D&D setting/scenario. Each group plays it differently.
As much as it's nice to know another shares my interests (and will partake in them with me), I can't always get that.
When I can't get that, LLMs are not a worthless substitute, especially if what I actually want is just to play out a situation.
I want to act and then get back a description of reaction. LLMs can describe reaction, therefore I find value in them.
Like how in D&D you go to do whatever and the dungeon master tells you what happened in response. LLMs fit there for me.
They don't fill the void of social interaction or anything like that, but I don't strictly need that.
Take a look at services like AI Dungeon to see the kind of thing I'm talking about. It doesn't really replace social anything, but it's kind of just like text adventure. It's plenty interactive enough.
Music has sinilar issues, but I think of this like the compression/loudness issue in music production. Everything gets amplified so the range of everything is compressed. And then it gets boring and people slowly jump ship for something else.
I think there will be a wave of AI slop that improves and might actually be exciting on some vector, but we will get bored eventually. Humans crave newness, even if that new thing is worse in exactly the ways that defined good previously, like punk in response to complex rock albums.
AI can combine ideas in interesting ways, but it is by design a predictor of what is most likely. This is directly odds with the concept of newness (and arguably, human-ness) which is baked in to what we consider interesting and relevant.
Only a few studios produced shows. With Youtube etc., many of the consumers could become producers themselves.
If I read this correctly, books and fiction are headed in the same direction.
LLM-written fiction as explored in the study is generally not published at all. It's treated more like an externalized imagination, a loop of general ideas fed into and expanded on or filled in by the machine with statistical averages. It more closely resembles a sandbox game in my view, a type of media distinct from anything before it in form, and even more distinct in function in that media is generally understood to be a vector of communication between people, and this is instead highly individual.
Actually, it might be closer to say this is similar to a child playing pretend alone with their toys, except perhaps a bit less challenging in that creative roadblocks or narrative building is instantly abdicatable to the machine.
Wouldn't the obvious analogue be a video game? Especially one where you can edit the asset files (making your weapons super-strong, for instance?)
An LLM-authored interactive fiction is a sandbox with no author, with no boundaries and no intent. It's a canvas, and all limitations on content are self-imposed. It's closer to making a game than to playing one, but there is no game in the end that you can share. You're left with a transcript that only really appeals to you. It is not the game. The game fundamentally lives in the player's imagination, and the LLM is there to ease the realization of that imagination and, if I'm being uncharitable, do the hard part of synthesizing ideas and impulses into something semi-coherent, limiting the potential for the player to grow and develop creative skills.
You can speak a world into existence, entirely customized to you’re preferences, and interact with it.
I recommend Super Supportive[0].
[0]: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/63759/super-supportive
I don't really see how AI 'democratizes' fiction and book writing?
When people say "AI will democratise $FOO" they don't mean it the way it is usually understood: people with skill and motivation can now produce $FOO.
What they mean is that people with no skill and no motivation can now pretend that they produced $FOO.
Remember the "I'm the ideas guy" people who would ask you to build a complete system and offer 1% equity because "the ideas are the hard part"? Well, the future is going to be filled with "ideas guys", making it even harder to find signal in the noise.