Erin Kissane jokingly suggested that ChatGPT’s writing style (“Suuuuuper heavy on the adjectives, dialogue especially wooden, lots of overtly charming touches.“) comes from being trained on fanfic. There is an important point here, that we are judging AI’s specific abilities based on ChatGPT’s massive, general purpose dataset.
Naomi Klein wrote about how all AI responses are hallucinations, not just the ones that are nonsense. While I diagree with some of the points, she’s absolutely right about how the term ‘hallucination’ frames the debate.
Language models have been trained on a massive range of text, and it seems that this includes some very specialist slash fiction.
Stephen Marche has spoken about how he approached writing with ChatGPT, asking for “a murder scene in the style of Chinese nature poetry” and applying some transformations to get something a little like Chandler – rather than asking for Chandler’s style directly.
“You are already an AI-assisted author,” Joanna Penn tells her students on the first day of her workshop. Do you use Amazon to shop? Do you use Google for research? “The question now is how can you be more AI-assisted, AI-enhanced, AI-extended.” (Link)
The Great Fiction of AI is a similar article, talking about the very fast cycles running in e-books, and how AI is helping with the production of very specific types of novel.
A Storefront for Robots talks about how online language is already distorted by AI, as people need to write both for search engine bots and for humans.