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.
zabriel_goss•27m ago
Books and fiction were some of the first to be democratized as a result of the internet.
webstrand•27m ago
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.
idle_zealot•18m ago
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.
ctoth•16m ago
> 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?)
plastic-enjoyer•6m ago
> 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?
_matt_•10m ago
Interesting analysis, but data "was collected between April 2023 and May 2024", so this predates even the release of GPT 4o.
MarkusQ•9m ago
> Are readers generating fiction with AI models?
Why not? Journalists, lawyers and pundits of various stripes are already doing it. Why shouldn't readers?
sriramgopalan•33m ago
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.
zabriel_goss•27m ago
webstrand•27m ago
ctoth•19m ago
I recommend Super Supportive[0].
[0]: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/63759/super-supportive
r3trohack3r•18m ago
You can speak a world into existence, entirely customized to you’re preferences, and interact with it.
idle_zealot•18m ago
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.
ctoth•16m ago
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?)
plastic-enjoyer•6m ago
I don't really see how AI 'democratizes' fiction and book writing?