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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
SillyTavern and the size of like Character.ai at its peak shows pretty obviously that people are doing exactly this!
Interesting analysis, but data "was collected between April 2023 and May 2024", so this predates even the release of GPT 4o.
> We show that users especially gravitate toward fanfiction and erotica
Why am i not surprised its primarily porn
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.
> Are readers generating fiction with AI models?
Why not? Journalists, lawyers and pundits of various stripes are already doing it. Why shouldn't readers?
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.
And also: there's no money in writing fiction.
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.
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.
Because nobody wants to read AI generated text?
No, nobody wants to read someone else's AI-generated text. Some people don't mind reading text generated to their own specifications.
Tell that to the LLM RP crowd.
I think you lose that draw of interactivity when you’re essentially reading someone else’s RP, though.
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.
You do not represent everyone
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."
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.
Probably would be good to write up a TTRPG adventure, though!
Don’t outsource your brain. Give your brain a whack at it.
Language game solipsism
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.
I don't get your point. Do people not get bored and move on to something else one way or the other? What exactly is different?
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.
You should suggest some!
I recommend Super Supportive[0].
[0]: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/63759/super-supportive
> If I read this correctly, books and fiction are headed in the same direction.
I don't really see how AI 'democratizes' fiction and book writing?
> 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.
Books and fiction were some of the first to be democratized as a result of the internet.
Why would you need to "democratize" fiction? There's literally zero cost of entry already. Fiction probably needs more gate keeping.