> you just limit the space to text

And even then... why can't they write a novel? Or lowering the bar, let's say a novella like Death in Venice, Candide, The Metamorphosis, Breakfast at Tiffany's...?

Every book's in the training corpus...

Is it just a matter of someone not having spent a hundred grand in tokens to do it?

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voxl 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I know someone spending basically every day writing personal fan fiction stories using every model you can find. She doesn't want to share it, and does complain about it a lot, seems like maintaining consistency for something say 100 pages long is difficult

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zozbot234 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Never mind novels, it can't even write a good Reddit-style or HN-style comment. agentalcove.ai has an archive of AI models chatting to one another in "forum" style and even though it's a good show of the models' overall knowledge the AIisms are quite glaring.

	▲	mh- 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		They definitely can, and do. It's just that the ones that manage to suppress all the AI writing "tells" go unnoticed as AI. This is a type of survivorship bias, though I feel there must be a better term for it that eludes me.

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conception 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don’t understand - there are hundreds/thousands of AI written books available now.

	▲	aerhardt 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've glossed over a few and one can immediately tell they don't meet the average writing level you'd see in a local workshop for writers, and much less that of Mann or Capote.

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colechristensen 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Who says they can't? What's your bar that needs to be passed in order for "written a novella" to be achieved?

There's a lot of bad writing out there, I can't imagine nobody has used an LLM to write a bad novella.

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aerhardt 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> What's your bar that needs to be passed

I provide four examples in my comment...

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colechristensen 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Your qualification for if an LLM can write a novella is it has to be as good as The Metamorphosis?

Yes, those are examples of novellas, surely you believe an LLM could write a bad novella? I'm not sure what your point is. Either you think it can't string the words together in that length or your standard is it can't write a foundational piece of literature that stays relevant for generations... I'm not sure which.

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aerhardt 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think it can write something that's of a fraction of the quality of Kafka.

But GP's argument ("limit the space to text") could be taken to imply - and it seems to be a common implication these days - that LLMs have mastered the text medium, or that they will very soon.

> it can't write a foundational piece of literature

Why not, if this a pure textual medium, the corpus includes all the great stories ever written, and possibly many writing workshops and great literature courses?

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colechristensen 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't know what to tell you. It's more than a little absurd to make the qualification of being able to do something to be that the output has to be considered a great work of art for generations.

	▲	aerhardt 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree that the argument starts from a reduction to the absurd. So at least we can agree that AI hasn't mastered the text medium, without further qualification? And what about my argument, further qualified, which is that I don't think it could even write as well as a good professional writer - not necessarily a generational one?