Can AI generate a book length thriller?

[AG31]

Over the last decade or two I've identified situations where long-standing authors have been silently replaced. You can tell because the quality of the writing plumets. Richard Wilbur was the first I'd noticed. It makes sense because of the age of the author. I've seen this maybe a half dozen to a dozen times.

Today, however, I came upon a book in a series that I'd liked that was so awful I wondered if AI had done it? It was klunky and painfully predictable. I stopped reading at page 30. I also noticed that the releases had suddenly jumped to one a year, not the same rhythm as before.

Is AI capable (yet?) of generating a book length thriller?

 

[Bramblethorn]

I doubt any of the current "AI"s are capable of writing a vaguely coherent novel-length work unaided, but it's certainly possible to use them as part of the process.

That said, quality drop is possible even without replacing the author. It's hard to quantify things like "predictability" but somebody did an analysis of Agatha Christie's novels. She is believed to have developed dementia late in life, and her later works have a smaller vocabulary, more repetition of phrases, and more reliance on vague words like "thing": https://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/gh/Lancashire+Hirst-extabs-2009.pdf

It's not always caused by illness. Some authors lose enthusiasm for a series but need to keep writing books to pay the rent, and that can lead to a "turn the handle" attitude.

Without insider knowledge, hard to tell what's going on in any given case.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Is AI capable (yet?) of generating a book length thriller?

AI content loses coherence after fifty words or so. Anything longer would need multiple prompts, so it would be much easier to write it yourself.

I'd say you're just reading crap ghost writers.

 

[OffNSFW]

Yeah, there's a whole subpopulation of career novelists whose job is basically to bash out content either as ghostwriters, part of a team of writers working on sprawling extended franchises, or what have you. Their work tends to be uninspired at best--stock plots with characters and situations slotted in wherever they'll fit.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

I think the key word in the question is ‘yet’.

Edit. I’ve read some thoroughly dismal stuff guaranteed written by human beings. It’s hard to see AI doing worse, especially in the long run.

 

[TheLobster]

I think the key word in the question is ‘yet’.

Not really. It would require a breakthrough in the very fundamentals of how LLMs are designed, to include a kind of long-term context memory in their output.

Right now, context is basically carried implicitly in the numeric values of embeddings (numerical vectors that represent "words"), and there is only so many dimensions of them you can store, and so much computing power you can scrounge to process them. To simplify a bit, if you want to maintain context over a 50k word novel, it means you'd need enough dimensions to distinguish an occurrence of every possible word in every possible position in that novel. (Not quite because what matters is relative arrangement of words here but it's the same order of magnitude).

To do that, the computational requirements grow exponentially and quickly outstrip what's physically possible. And I don't mean that you just need a better CPU/GPU technology; I mean that even if you could make every atom in the universe perform your calculations (up to the theoretical physical limits), it would fall short by many, many, many orders of magnitude.

 

[mildlyaroused]

Not really. It would require a breakthrough in the very fundamentals of how LLMs are designed, to include a kind of long-term context memory in their output.

Right now, context is basically carried implicitly in the numeric values of embeddings (numerical vectors that represent "words"), and there is only so many dimensions of them you can store, and so much computing power you can scrounge to process them. To simplify a bit, if you want to maintain context over a 50k word novel, it means you'd need enough dimensions to distinguish an occurrence of every possible word in every possible position in that novel. (Not quite because what matters is relative arrangement of words here but it's the same order of magnitude).

To do that, the computational requirements grow exponentially and quickly outstrip what's physically possible. And I don't mean that you just need a better CPU/GPU technology; I mean that even if you could make every atom in the universe perform your calculations (up to the theoretical physical limits), it would fall short by many, many, many orders of magnitude.

So... we, as Writers, possess more creative brainpower than the collective ability of every atom in the universe put together?

 

[astuffedshirt_perv]

AI content loses coherence after fifty words or so. Anything longer would need multiple prompts, so it would be much easier to write it yourself.

So you're saying people who use AI to write long stories are putting in more work than regular authors?

 

[OffNSFW]

So you're saying people who use AI to write long stories are putting in more work than regular authors?

I did see a meme the other day where guy was trying to come up with the right prompt to ask an AI chatbot, and it was taking so long that he ended up figuring it out for himself in the middle of it. Bro reinvented "thinking."

 

[TadOverdon]

AI doesn't generate much usable prose. I've seen people generating plot outlines with it, which might be a timesaver if you're being paid to churn out formulaic stories or books. I don't know how much of that goes on in the current marketplace, since I'm not a writer-under-contract, but such work predominated on the paperback shelves when my Dad worked in publishing.

 

[mrs_mackenzie]

I've seen in publishing news that sometimes, especially for formulaic thrillers or crime novels, the 'best-selling' author will essentially do a plot outline and character details, then hand that to a ghost writer who'll fill in the actual prose to turn it into a book. That way the best-seller's name can be on the front and used to shift copies, the author themselves can spend a minimum of time on it and the cheap ghost writer will accept probably just a one-off payment for the words themselves. That might explain why the 'quality of the prose' is low, as that belongs to the ghost writer, even if the plot and characters seem more sophisticated at first glance.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I've seen in publishing news that sometimes, especially for formulaic thrillers or crime novels, the 'best-selling' author will essentially do a plot outline and character details, then hand that to a ghost writer who'll fill in the actual prose to turn it into a book. That way the best-seller's name can be on the front and used to shift copies, the author themselves can spend a minimum of time on it and the cheap ghost writer will accept probably just a one-off payment for the words themselves. That might explain why the 'quality of the prose' is low, as that belongs to the ghost writer, even if the plot and characters seem more sophisticated at first glance.

There was a case a few years back where an author (Cristiane Serruya) was found to have ripped off large chunks from other people's books, and claimed the plagiarism had been done by her ghost writer without her knowledge. Very likely that was just an excuse, but it certainly is a risk of going with the cheapies. OTOH these days those ones would probably be using LLMs instead.

 

[Otto26]

Yes, AI can write a short book. There are tricks to doing it but once you've figured those out (or Googled them) you can create a rough draft which can be edited to correct the mistakes that creep in. You can even use AI to smooth out the rough transitions.

Is it a good book? No. The one I experimented with was pretty bad. But it was 100K words that could be edited to produce a book. It wasn't erotica, though.

 

[Jmanchu]

Over the last decade or two I've identified situations where long-standing authors have been silently replaced. You can tell because the quality of the writing plumets. Richard Wilbur was the first I'd noticed. It makes sense because of the age of the author. I've seen this maybe a half dozen to a dozen times.

Today, however, I came upon a book in a series that I'd liked that was so awful I wondered if AI had done it? It was klunky and painfully predictable. I stopped reading at page 30. I also noticed that the releases had suddenly jumped to one a year, not the same rhythm as before.

Is AI capable (yet?) of generating a book length thriller?

You'd have to be pretty heavy handed in your prompt work to pull something like that off. As someone who has some basic understanding of this subject(Computer Science guy getting a Bachelor's in software engineering with an interest in AI), I can tell you a few things about AI. Currently AI, while the latest ones are capable of much higher logic and memory than just a couple years ago (higher context token lengths, which words— whole words, and parts of words— can be measured and broken down into "tokens") they might not be able to remember all details about character, plot, settings, 100%. And that issue will get worse the more of that memory gets used up in a "chat" which is taken up both in the input of the user and the output of the AI.

Some of the latest AI are supposedly capable of incredibly high context token limits(100k+ some apparently even higher), but they still struggle with staying properly coherent and maintaining all details, especially for something incredibly complicated like a book length story after a certain amount of the tokens it has to keep track of being used up in a session. With a little bit of coding, proper AI fine tuning and training, and good prompt engineering you can pull off some amazing things for sure with some of the latest AI models like ChatGPT 4o and Claude 3.5 as they have far better capacity for memory and logic, but I don't think it's replacing authors entirely just yet. Certainly not for an entire book without some very heavy-handed guidance and carefully engineered sets of instructions by a human trained and knowledgeable in using AI. And having writing and editing skills on your part to smoothen certain details up wouldn't hurt but then it wouldn't be fully AI anymore, now would it.

 

[MillieDynamite]

AI can barely write a short story without a lot of prompts. But if you write decent beats for it to follow and generate chapters with enough scenes outlined and specific beats, you can get something that can be (with a lot of work) edited into something that is readable. I'd recommend spending the time to create the chapter outlines, screen outlines, and individual beats and writing the damn thing yourself. AI can't compare to what a good writer can do. You tell it to write in the style of Erle Stanley Gardner if you want, but Erle Stanley Gardner would never read like what AI creates.

Just my humble opinion.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Here's an example of AI generating novel length dialogue though.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Here's an example of AI generating novel length dialogue though.

oh god they trained it on my teenage phone calls with my girlfriend