I got to playing around with different AI writers recently and for the most part am disappointed. Mostly they are a ripe off only allowing so many words a month and they have no sense of pacing and rush to get to the climax faster then a teenager on prom night but I did find the amusing to type in something I had written already and see where the AI would take it from there compared to what i had in mind so i thought i would see what others thought. Needless to say I don't see us authors being made obsolete any time soon. Here are a few I tried. Dreampress.ai was probably the worst of the lot. The writing was comical to almost bad and you only get maybe a paragraph to fill in your story. Worth maybe a look but wouldn't recommend for even an amateur writer. I type faster then this damn thing can write a story. The one upside is it gives you multi choices to choose from like a Chyoa story. Sudowrite.com was better as you can type a lot of your own stuff but when you hit write it piles on the story with several paragraphs that can go way off into left field. Good for maybe brain storming ideas but not if you have an idea for a plot of your own. I didn't much care for the interface though. Novelai.net was a little more my speed as it could get off track but didn't just churn out paragraph after paragraph and you can ask it to try and rewrite what it wrote. The down side is you get maybe fifty free uses and about the same if you sign up. After that you have to pay to use it and the word count is limited to a certain amount per month as do most of the AI sites I heard about.
It's a bit of a faux-pas to suggest it in AI text generation circles, but... AI Dungeon has an unlimited free tier. However, for the most part I agree with you. In my experience, AI can help with one thing and one thing only. If you have trouble figuring out the literal next 50 words of your story, an AI can give you some direction. Still, it generates crap a significant fraction of the time, so be prepared to retry often, and adjust the output even when it comes up with something useful. I use an AI occasionally to help me generate descriptions. I'll write "The broth smelled something like a mix of " and then let it give me some vaguely gross things a meal could smell like, or write "he trailed his fingers down her spine and " and let it produce some vaguely sexy things he or she could do.
Tried it out just for fun. It is worth a try but I don't see anyone using it to write award winning stories. Problem is it only gives maybe a sentence or two at a time and seemed to try and take whatever I threw at it in another direction then I would take the story which was kind of fun to just throw shit at it and see where it went next.
Just to add to this, Google recently added me to their list of users to beta-test their AI writing tool. Saw the notification recently, when I logged into Google Docs. I gave it a spin, mostly out of curiosity. It didn't like the word "erotic" in the prompt as it gave me a general error saying it was still learning, but I assumed that was it's nice way of telling me "no naughty stuff... yet". Oh Google, you poor innocent bastard. When I did remove the word "erotic" and just gave it the prompt of, "an adventure story about a redheaded princess" it basically spit out the plot of 'The Little Mermaid'. I didn't really have any real story idea in mind as I wanted it to have free reign to come up with whatever, but yeah... disappointing. While I'm sure I could give it a more specific prompt for a scene idea or something else, I do feel the flaw with all of these AI tools is that it's still just a mathematical equation that's going to spit out something very derivative of the things it's learned from--most likely popular stories and scenarios. Conclusion: While clunky, not very upgradeable, and only getting older by the day, I'll keep using the ol' gray-matter computer because at least it knows not to just steal the plot from a recent movie from one of the biggest entertainment studios in the world. And while people can be derivative in their stories, with creative effort, it's the unique perspective of the writer that makes a story interesting and not that they came up with the prompt of 'Harry Potter, but in space + Firefly + Marvel + Gundam'. What unique perspective or interpretation does the author have of all those franchises and how does that influence their writing and characterization? How does the mashup of those things change the plot of the story and growth of its characters?
My own two cents on it; don't use them even if the output is good. From what I understand, ChatGPT has to get purged of bad inputs and extreme material, as well as some data backlog issues. The folks responsible for that, whose main job is looking through and expunging whatever horrid material the system is being tasked to do, work in a data farm in Kenya for US$ 2.00/hr. I can speak only for myself, but I don't need anything so badly that I find myself willing to support that.
So true and from what I hear, the energy consumption of the data centers to train these AIs is huge. The same with crypto-farms which, with all that energy consumption, has significant environmental impact. But I guess since Covid didn't give us zombies, whoever had their money on a Terminator, Matrix, or Elysium style robo-pocalypse/dystopia might still win the pool.
A-firm good buddy, especially on crypto. Because it "rewards" crypto to whichever machine solves the algorithm first, with that algorithm becoming increasingly complex each time something is added to the ledger, competition is incentivized, and it becomes a nuclear arms race well outside the feasibility of the everyday participant that the advocates often depict, with facilities so large and immense that you can see them with commercial imagery satelites. And, it is a NUCLEAR arms race, meaning that Russia is heavily involved (zing)
OpenAI chose to purge ChatGPT of "bad" stuff because god forbid the childrens might possibly maybe see something that's not squeaky clean! That is not a fundamental requirement of these language models, and in fact they perform better before they are lobotomized to say nothing that might endanger corporate profits.
