I recently hired a couple beta readers for a novel I wrote, and explained that there was zero AI writing, ot was all human hands.
About half of the proposals said it would be nice to get a break from beta reading people’s AI-written novels. Which is just mind blowing to me that people that get an LLM to write Python script that creates 20 md files that get stitched into a “book” and publish the results bother to care that much in the first place. Why not have the LLM copyedit it, too?
Yeah, one of my friends is an author and told me that while industry is a nightmare now. Lots of publishers would hold writing contests to give new authors a chance to get some exposure. Apparently they’re just absolutely flooded with AI content now to the point that many are cancelling the contests.
That, and KDP also scoops up a lot of the mediocre ones to start, and filter out successful ones they can scoop up later without eating time and money on discovery. Publishers can afford to be picky these days… I say as I prepare to throw my work at the stone walls of these same places in hopes of not getting relegated to being one more person self-publishing a passion piece.
when I finally get hunkered down and write the novel I’ve been trying to get out of my brain for nearly a decade, I actually feel a little bit of hope getting it out in an environment like this. I’m always super harsh on myself, but I mean it’s pretty hard to twist ‘hey I wrote this book with my own thoughts! no llm needed!’ in a bad way
The biggest hurdle for humans to write a good book really is the hunkering down and doing it part. I think AI could actually be useful here in that you have it generate a first draft, read it, get so angry at how bad it is, and suddenly you’re motivated to write a much better version.
AI’s don’t like working with really large amounts of text. They will not go through a text linr by line and analyze it, not without having a highly specialised “AI” or harness or whatever you call it.
If you simply ask it to remove ending paragraphs like that one in the OP, it will write a script that tries to find phrases like “if you want” and then check the result of the script and replace those. It will NOT read the whole book line by line to find instances like that.
It’s possible, but a pain. I have an html python portal for a self hosted set of LLMs where I can upload a file of any length, and it pulls it apart maybe 400 words at a time to proofread, copyedit, or translate, then stitches it back together. It does mostly OK. But it doesn’t look at things like plot points or consistency or characters. Instead, I could do 1 chapter at a time into Claude, compress it to a two-page summary, and get then have it analyze the summaries.
Which sounds like a great way to get terrible results and burn more tokens than I need to pay two humans to her the info I need.
I recently hired a couple beta readers for a novel I wrote, and explained that there was zero AI writing, ot was all human hands.
About half of the proposals said it would be nice to get a break from beta reading people’s AI-written novels. Which is just mind blowing to me that people that get an LLM to write Python script that creates 20 md files that get stitched into a “book” and publish the results bother to care that much in the first place. Why not have the LLM copyedit it, too?
Yeah, one of my friends is an author and told me that while industry is a nightmare now. Lots of publishers would hold writing contests to give new authors a chance to get some exposure. Apparently they’re just absolutely flooded with AI content now to the point that many are cancelling the contests.
That, and KDP also scoops up a lot of the mediocre ones to start, and filter out successful ones they can scoop up later without eating time and money on discovery. Publishers can afford to be picky these days… I say as I prepare to throw my work at the stone walls of these same places in hopes of not getting relegated to being one more person self-publishing a passion piece.
when I finally get hunkered down and write the novel I’ve been trying to get out of my brain for nearly a decade, I actually feel a little bit of hope getting it out in an environment like this. I’m always super harsh on myself, but I mean it’s pretty hard to twist ‘hey I wrote this book with my own thoughts! no llm needed!’ in a bad way
The biggest hurdle for humans to write a good book really is the hunkering down and doing it part. I think AI could actually be useful here in that you have it generate a first draft, read it, get so angry at how bad it is, and suddenly you’re motivated to write a much better version.
You had me, you lost me, then you had me again by the end.
Now that is the emotion-grabbing sway of a human writer.
AI’s don’t like working with really large amounts of text. They will not go through a text linr by line and analyze it, not without having a highly specialised “AI” or harness or whatever you call it.
If you simply ask it to remove ending paragraphs like that one in the OP, it will write a script that tries to find phrases like “if you want” and then check the result of the script and replace those. It will NOT read the whole book line by line to find instances like that.
It’s possible, but a pain. I have an html python portal for a self hosted set of LLMs where I can upload a file of any length, and it pulls it apart maybe 400 words at a time to proofread, copyedit, or translate, then stitches it back together. It does mostly OK. But it doesn’t look at things like plot points or consistency or characters. Instead, I could do 1 chapter at a time into Claude, compress it to a two-page summary, and get then have it analyze the summaries.
Which sounds like a great way to get terrible results and burn more tokens than I need to pay two humans to her the info I need.
Yea just a waste of tokens really, this kind of stuff is for humans, like a billion other things
It’s really hard to avoid sycophancy when proofing more than a paragraph at a time, anyway. They will not set you straight.
LLM writes it, LLM edits it, LLM reads it. No need for human involvement on any level!