I watched an AI write a whole novel in 10 minutes last week and it felt wrong

Last Tuesday I was at the public library downtown, just browsing, and my friend who works there showed me this new AI writing tool they were testing. She typed in a basic prompt about a detective in a rainy city, and within 10 minutes it had spit out a 300 page story with characters and plot twists. It even had proper chapter breaks and dialogue that sounded real. I sat there reading a few pages and honestly, it creeped me out a bit. I've been reading novels for 40 years, and the idea that a machine can just produce something like that in the time it takes me to drink a cup of coffee feels like cheating. My friend said it's just a tool, like a typewriter, but I'm not sure I buy that. Has anyone else seen what these writing AIs can do and felt the same way?

3 comments

3 Comments

baker.christopher18d ago

...and that detective story probably had the detective drinking whiskey alone in his office by page two, right? That's the thing that gets me about these AIs. They can copy the shape of a story but they don't really know what it means. I was at a bookstore last month and saw a whole shelf of romance novels that were clearly written by some algorithm, same cover design with the shirtless guy and the same beats on every page. My wife reads those things and she said they all feel like they were written by someone who read a description of human love but never felt it. I don't think a typewriter ever pretended to be a person, that's the difference.

pat_murray5318d ago

You're sitting in a library reading a machine-written detective story and feeling creeped out, meanwhile publishers have been putting out ghostwritten celebrity novels and nobody bats an eye. I get that it feels weird seeing a computer crank out 300 pages in the time it takes you to read the newspaper, but is it really that different from using spellcheck or having Grammarly clean up your sentences? At the end of the day it's just pattern recognition, not some magic. You could have fed an AI 5000 cheesy detective novels and it would spit back the same rainy city cliches.

lucast8118d ago

Didn't you hear about that writer who fed his old manuscripts into an AI and it started copying his style so well his editor couldn't tell the difference? Feels different than Grammarly when it's basically cloning someone's voice.