I’m doing Nanogenmo this year, which involves using software to produce novels. I started out by seeing whether Claude could produce a book with very little guidance. It’s worked better than expected. The result is better than many of the human-written books I’ve read this year.
Move 37 refers to a particular moment in the Go match between Lee Sedol and Deepmind’s AlphaGo computer program, which was won by AlphaGo. After the match Sedol said “I thought AlphaGo was based on probability calculation and that it was merely a machine. But when I saw this move, I changed my mind. Surely, AlphaGo is creative.”
In 2024 I tried producing a book with OpenAI and the prose was bland, uninteresting. This time, I worked with Claude’s Opus model. It’s long been known that LLMs work best with fiction based on found documents, so I thought I would try that. I also wanted something that would entertain me. So I set out an initial basic prompt.
I want you to come up with a breakdown for a novel about the novel House of Leaves creating an incursion into our universe. The novel should be 50,000 words long, and work a little like World War Z, producing a set of characters and formats to describe a growing catastrophe caused by Danielewski’s novel. You can break it down into chapters as you think fit. Use lost media, information hazards and creepypasta as inspirations.
This is objectively not a very good prompt. I know this because I’ve done my Claude certification. But I was only playing at the start of NaNoGenMo, trying to produce something as a starting point. Claude came up with a plan, which I didn’t read beyond a few paragraphs. I tweaked it from being a little too close to World War Z, then asked the LLM to produce text. I was spectacularly lazy, and requested that Claude generate its own prompts. I sent the text-in-progress to my Kindle and set about reading.
Claude’s book, The Quarter Inch, certainly did a better job with this idea than I would have done. The model has also avoided upsetting itself over copyright because, in the world of its book, quoting from the original text is considered dangerous..
The novel is definitely derivative of other works, and intentionally so. “[-] of Leaves” (as the book refers to it) is one of my favourite novels, one I know well and find genuinely terrifying. The Quarter Inch builds on that terror by describing that book escaping into the real world.
The Quarter Inch describes the first few incidents, book groups who measure their flats as a joke. Slowly, the rumours spread and more people encounter the House from the original book – until 29th February 2032, when all the openings close, leaving people trapped on the other side. In the aftermath, the world’s governments do their best to manage an impossible crisis. Meanwhile, Eve Calloway, a records manager at Hereford Council moves into a round building and begins creating an archive about ‘the Interior Event’.
There are some clumsy moments but the prose is generally smooth and unflashy. It’s very readable. I spotted a couple of potential edits, but very few of them. I’m currently reading a professionally published music biography where actual humans left notes to the editor in the text – so the standard of Claude’s book is beyond that of some human ones I’ve paid money for.
It’s possible the scenes that impressed me last night are based on other stories. Although there’s a great section about an AI company who have illegally included “[-] of Leaves” in their training data, and face the consequences. That doesn’t sound like a pre-existing story. There’s a council leaflet about ‘Measuring Week’, where everyone is asked to check their interior spaces which has a Scarfolk vibe.
The bit that blew my mind this morning featured a copy of a printer’s invoice from Lagos, item number QI/2039/017. The letter accompanying the invoice began as follows:
Dear Mrs Calloway,
My father, Tunde Okafor, died in 2033. You asked whether he printed the book. Yes. Everybody in Lagos who had a press printed it in 2027 and 2028, and my father had three. I am sending you one invoice because you asked for one. There were more than four hundred.
You must understand how it was. Someone had said, in a newspaper first and then everywhere, that if you wrote in this book your flat would get bigger. In a city where a family of six lives in one room, people heard that and nothing else. They did not hear the rest. They came with money in their hands. My father was not a wicked man, but he was not a fool either, and he printed what people paid for.
That passage takes an angle on the concept I’ve not considered. I love the phrasing in that last sentence too. Adaeze Okafor’s letter gives me a feeling of her personality. It’s a passage that expands The Quarter Inch‘s world beautifully.
Overall, this book has been very entertaining. Yes, there are errors. Yes, there are issues with LLMs as a technology. None of that takes away from the fact that I asked one to write me a 50,000 word novel and it did a good job. It’s impressed me several times with a good phrase. There are bits I’d change (“She gave me tea in a front room with a piano and a clock that ticked loudly enough to be a third person” – that seems a little overwritten compared to the rest). But, broadly, this works.
I don’t think Claude is going to replace human writers. I asked it to produce a specific style of novel I knew it might be good at. The text is based on a massive sample of human writing. But the fact that it’s done a good job here is significant. No publisher is likely to produce a story about [-] of Leaves – but with a £20 Claude subscription I’ve produced a specific book that I wanted to read.
There are obviously significant ethical issues around whether I should be producing a work based on Danielewski’s book without his permission. The Quarter Inch is certainly not a book that works without House of Leaves, but it is about the reaction to it. And it doesn’t replace that book, but instead points to it as an important work that people enjoy obsessively.
I’m generating the last couple of chapters in the book in the background while I write this, and I’ll add the finished text to this post once I’ve read it myself. I’ve not discussed my views on the significant issues around AI here. I am aware of them, and I have thoughts on that. But, for this post I wanted to focus on this fact: Claude has produced me a bespoke novel that I’m enjoying reading.