Will AI Make Novelists Extinct?
GPT-4 wrote an entire book in 10 days... Plus, thoughts on the potential Writers Guild of America strike and whether Hollywood will be allowed to use AI to generate screenplays.
Hello there, my brilliant writer friends!
This week, reddit user ChiaraStellata taught GPT-4 how to write a novel. The post itself is a bit technical, so I’ll summarize the process and findings below, but this is the gist of what was accomplished, and it had me (as a novelist) quaking in my boots:
The goal of this project was to have GPT-4 generate an entire novel from scratch, including the title, genre, story, characters, settings, and all the writing, with no human input. It is impossible currently to do this using a single prompt, but what is possible is to supply a series of prompts that give structure to the process and allow it to complete this large task, one step at a time. However, in order to ensure that all the creative work is done by GPT-4, prompts are not allowed to make specific references to the content of the book, only the book’s structure. The intention is that the process should be simple, mechanical and possible (in principle) to fully automate. Each time the process is repeated from the beginning, it should create another entirely new book, based solely on GPT-4’s independent creative choices.
The result: Echoes of Atlantis, a fantasy adventure novel with 12 chapters and 115 pages, written over 10 days, from the day GPT-4 was released until now.
My first observation was that 115 pages is awfully short and not actually a full length novel. But that’s not necessarily a reason for relief, because this is just early days, and if AI can already write a novella completely from scratch without any human input of creativity… Oh, god.
I’m sure all of you are also wondering—is the book any good?
And third—how was this accomplished, and if it’s replicable, then are all novelists out of a job?
Let’s delve into this morass.
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1. A fully automated process for GPT-4 to write a novel now exists and is available to the public for free
{the sound of hundreds of thousands of writers crying}
Ok, I promised you a non-technical overview of what reddit user ChiaraStellata did:
Taught GPT-4 this process:
come up with a concept for the book
write a basic outline
flesh out that outline with more details for each chapter
write a draft of each chapter
go back and expand the chapters with more detail
(This sounds exactly like the foundational steps that human writers use to write a novel)
Chat GPT-4 was also taught to:
continue updating the outline as the writing of the story progressed
maintain a log of details, for continuity’s sake (what novelists will often call a Continuity Bible)
And remember, the intent is to create a fully automated process that requires no human input to write a novel.
2. Some of the problems
This particular effort required ChiaraStellata to manage Chat GPT-4 a lot, re-steering it when it would go in the wrong direction. But this was just a trial run to see if having AI write a novel was even possible.
And not surprisingly, the answer is Yes, AI can write a novel, and it can do it faster than you can.
But it’s worth noting some of the issues that occurred, because it shows us where AI is today:
Structure: The AI writes like a robot. All the scenes were roughly the same number of pages, and each chapter generally contained the same number of scenes.
Pacing: A section of the AI-generated book took place in a labyrinth. The scenes were not varied and became boring. This version of AI-generated writing doesn’t seem capable of understanding what it takes to stoke and keep up human attention.
as a side note, this really resonated for me, because I had to deal with this exact problem when writing Damsel. A large part of the novel involves Elodie stuck inside the dragon’s lair. It was a challenge to keep the story fresh and exciting when (a) she was in the same setting for days, (b) she was the only character (there was no one to talk to or interact with), and (c) the problem she faced was always the same—not being eaten by the dragon.
Forgetting details
sometimes the AI would reference something it hadn’t introduced yet
other times, AI would describe an object in great detail, then never bring it up again in the book
Does any of this make me feel better yet about the fact that GPT-4 wrote a book in 10 days? No, not really, because these are small problems that can easily be fixed with a little more refinement of the prompts that are given to GPT-4.
(For more technical details about the actual prompts and process of teaching GPT-4 how to write a book, you can read the full reddit post here.)
3. But is the book any good?
I was talking to my husband about this (Tom works in tech and has been intently keeping apprised of the recent developments in AI. In fact, hat tip to him for telling me about the reddit post). Anyway, Tom pointed out something important that the media (and us laypeople) forget about AI:
AI does not understand human thought and emotions. It is only mimicking them, based on materials it has been trained on.
This is where I can finally let out a sigh of relief. The book is not good. There are certainly moments of excitement in the plot, but in general, the novel is too short, and it’s quite predictable. Human storytelling is still more complex, thank goodness.
If we anthropomorphize AI, we risk forgetting the difference between humans and technological tools.
Which brings me to:
4. The potential Writers Guild of America strike
The WGA (screenwriter’s union) is currently in negotiations with the powers-that-be in Hollywood over a number of issues, including whether studios are allowed to use AI to generate film treatments (a sort of outline of a movie) and screenplays.
You would think that the WGA’s position is a harsh NO. After all, the union exists to protect screenwriters and make sure they are paid for writing.
However, the WGA seems to have realized that AI is coming whether we like it or not, and instead of fighting it, the union is trying to get ahead of the technology by embracing it but setting the terms by which film studios and streamers can use it.
Basically, WGA is proposing that AI can be used, but it doesn’t count as a “writer.” It’s just a tool, and therefore human screenwriters still
get full credit for writing the script, even if AI was used to generate a first draft, and
must be paid the full amount for the screenplay, as if the screenwriter had done all the work (i.e., the AI is not a “co-writer” or anything similar, which would deduct from the amount of money the human screenwriter is entitled to.)
5. AI as a tool for all writers
So where does that leave us novelists?
I’m not saying that AI is not a threat at all. I believe that within a year or two, AI will be capable of writing cookie-cutter fiction at novel-length. If you write formulaic fiction, then yeah… I’d be worried.
However, I think the real lesson is for all of us to step up to the challenge of being human.
It remains to be seen where the book publishing world comes out on using AI. Will they follow WGA’s lead and allow authors to use AI to generate outlines? First drafts? And do we want that to happen?
But in the meantime, don’t despair. No one else can be you. AI doesn’t understand how you feel when you fall in love, when you’re consumed by grief, or when your adrenaline spikes for a new adventure. Sure, it can paste together a bunch of words that say that, but it cannot truly convey them with human emotion.
AI also doesn’t have an imagination that is alive. It is too logical. Whereas, the human brain is a marvel of a thing, full of completely illogical tangents and impossible dreams.
That is what you want to tap into—the essence of your unique YOU, and the humanness of your soul.
And then write that. AI’s got nothing on you.