It reads like a synopsis, not a story. Like somebody wrote a book about a book.

I think AI is going to have a much harder time with words than with images. Humans are meaning-making machines. You show us an image and we’ll jam meaning on top of it. But words are trickier, and you don’t get meaning for free out of them.

It’s coherent, but it’s also pretty bad.

I went to the google doc linked here and I really wouldn't call this a book, its only about 33k. It's a Novella.

I read the first few pages. It's what I'd expected. It's a lot of telling, basic character information and a lack of what makes a character unique and human. It's a outline of an outline of a vague idea.

And likely the more specific parts were given to the AI and not created by the AI.

I think it really highlighted why AI can't really replicate literature, at least at this point.

Honestly, ChatGPT is great with words. It's not as good as a professional author. I would say it's not even as good as me now, but it's better than me in high school and maybe even college. And this is without OpenAI really even trying (it's not like they went out of their way to only train on good writing and avoid bad writing). "Words" is an entirely solved problem.

There are some minor problems with it. It has no sense of style or voice, so things all tend to take the same tone. It's bad at jokes. It's also really lazy, in that when you tell it to do something it does it in the most lackadaisical fashion. Its answers tend to read like a college student who is doing homework in a class they don't really care about, but they're trying to bullshit their way through. But it could just be all of these could be fixed if you just give it the right instructions when you use it.

Where the current AIs break down is that they have no mental model of the world, and they don't do any long-term planning. They would never get how an event in chapter 3 foreshadows an event in chapter 23. It's these subtle elements of writing, rather than just words, that they're bad at. At least for now.

Yeah, you are mostly right here. But, what if a good writer would to use AI, and give it the right inputs. They could probably do a lot of work in much shorter time. They need to have the right idea, and the right inputs to give AI.

Again, not defending AI here, I am just impressed how somehow, 'over night' (not really, but really fast), they got from those awful chat AI's that answer your questions on sites, but never answer anything while you are waiting for support, to this.

A good writer wouldn't need an AI to write their story for them and it would likely negatively impact the overall story they're attempting to make.

Using an AI to create writing prompts I could see. Using it to write a piece of literature I can't.

Well, I could mostly agree, but you do have some at most average book series, with like tens of books, they just publish the faster they can. Well, this makes it even faster.

But, probably more importantly, after I have seen this, I believe AI will be able to do much more then ordinary human, especially with guidance from someone who knows something about writing and has good ideas.

FFS we need the Butlerian Jihad already.

It would be interesting to make an AI write a sci-fi book from the POV of a robot, instead of a human.

[removed]