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Fun video! Ideally be scientific and do blind tests of human-written work vs ai-written work. Further details in experiment design are likely worth working out.
I did post a short story recently on the community wall, only revealing it was AI at the very end to see how people liked it. My main focus is still on traditional writing and storytelling but here and there, I like to experiment and sprinkle a few things in :-)
@@TheTaleTinkerer Sounds interesting! Anyway, yeah, I agree that traditional writing is more interesting than AI. I was just thinking some about that was all.
I'd like to thank you for this video. When I was really young, I remember there was a program called "parrot" that shipped with creative labs soundblaster cards. It was basically a chatbot based on keywords, and was really limited to parroting (hence the name) what you've just said by reformulating it as a question. But that left me with a question I asked my father "do you think one day, we'll be able to talk to computers?". And I think this initial wonder drove me to artificial intelligence. Much later I got a PhD in machine learning, and I realized it felt quite lonely, because there was no one outside of the field I could really talk to about this. It was just too abstract and uninteresting for most people. But then, generative AI became popular. I was really happy, because I thought I could finally talk about it to many. But my hopes fell short when I realized that there is "hate" against AI. So, when I see AI used like you do, it kinda fills me with joy. Thank you.
The chatbot was called Dr. Sbaitso. Talking Parrot just recorded short audio clips and played them back to you (plus a few preset phrases and sounds). I loved playing with both of them when I was a kid. You can find online versions of Dr. Sbaitso (just Google the name) if you feel like wandering down memory lane and appreciating how far chatbots have come since then.
We will get used to have it with us, just like our phones, and Internet connection, wait until we can have our own each, tagging along all around the clock, and then comes the day we cannot imagine living without it. March of the history professor, nobody can stand the inevitable grind under the wheel of time...
Glad you enjoyed it! I just think it is a topic we cannot ignore, regardless of the one's personal stance toward it. At least knowing what's out there is important in my opinion 🙂
I love visiting your channel to check out these wonderfully assembled videos. Now, I've spent 8 months on my debut dark portal fantasy novel and it's been a blast writing it. I'm close to the end of my first draft, and I'm already working on the insert and cover illustrations. I couldn't have made this much progress in such a short amount of time if I hadn't used AI to help me keep track of things as I'm extremely disorganized and I've only written short stories and poetry before. I also used AI to help add feasibility to my scenes and technical explanations on the myriad of things I've been researching for my book. Although I'm concerned for when AI will be fully able to create its own limited parameters and execute stories excellently and consistently, I still think there's a lot of room in the next several years for us writers to use AI to make up for our shortcomings. Aside from end-results turning out much "better" as AI improves, I have a big feeling that writers will gradually have to do an even bigger job with marketing themselves and their works in order to distinguish and show how much personal care they put into their stories. It's disruptive and it inherently harms artists and writers, but the general vibe is hatred for AI, but using it as an assisting tool will slowly be more accepted. I don't think fully AI generated stories will be as popular as partly-AI and rawdogged stories. People will still create stories, but the methods will have to partly evolve.
I really appreciate the kind words, thank you. Glad to hear that for you personally, AI has proven to be a useful tool that helps you get your stories told 🙂
I'm experimenting with gpt, it certainly has a potential in idea creation, but it falls short of real creativity in the wider picture, one thing it is good at is creating road maps for detailed expansion of your initial ideas, i made it through few obstacles in hours working with it, for things that i had shelved for couple of years, and at the end of the day, i did almost the entire work, but the interaction was the factor that speeded the process, same experience i had with a much simpler ai that allowed me to create my first romance, and first first person story all in one, it is an interesting tool, so much the same debate is going on in design industry over the use of ai, over there also the answer is the same ,ai is a tool, just like using 3d software and photoshop to speed up your work, in writing ai is just a tool to make leaps and bounces ahead in much shorter windows, the actual creativity still requires that human touch, but the help is absolutely appreciated...
Showing people what AI can do with creative writing is literally what I'm doing! 😊 My little brother has moderate to severe autism, but he dreams of one day telling stories like the rest of us (I'm a published author and two of my sisters do webcomics). My goal is to find an AI-assisted process that can help him communicate through the written word despite his disability. So far, my prompt book is about 60 pages long, and I can name many specific ways my writing has improved since my all-organic days. ChatGPT is a lot better at hitting the right tone than I am, especially in dialogue/fight scenes. My themes and characters are much better developed, because it can take opportunities to develop them that I never thought of. Above all, it's made me faster. The fastest novel I've ever written on my own took 8 months (the last two were hell, by the way). With ChatGPT’s help, I've been writing a sci-fi since 10/25 and I'm 45,000 words into the first draft. I'm on track to finish on the 23rd and I'll have the entire rest of the month to revise. The best part is, nobody can tell. I've gotten a lot of feedback on AI-assisted work, and precisely zero people have called it out for being AI-generated. I've even fooled a handful of AI checking tools. It was especially fun when someone in my writing club praised one of my fight scenes in particular, and she ate her words when I said ChatGPT did most of it! 🤣
Sounds like a lot of effort went into this on your part already, congratulations on that. Always good to know what's out there, even if just for awareness. If it actually allows you (or others you teach) to create something that otherwise would have been impossible - even more valuable 🙂
@TheTaleTinkerer You know how refreshing it is to hear someone not stomp on my opinion? 🤣 Seriously, I love what you do man! Thanks for giving this topic the impartial, critical view that it needs. I love your work and can't wait to see where your career takes you next.
Prediction before I finish the video: AI loses track of details it implemented previously. AI fails to come up with concrete effects of the system on aspects and/or elements of the world. AI does correctly implements effects of the system on characters using the system.
What are your thoughts on the pride quality itself of a well prompted AI? I have heard consistently that it is a huge weak point but I’ve also been stunned at the quality of choice excerpts I have seen. So I don’t know if people are being simplistic when they say it’s all bad or if I just can’t recognize good prose vs bad prose 😂
Nah, AI can’t replace Authors out right because I have already messed with AI dungeon. I was writing a story about on little orphan boy getting adopted by a rich man and now he has to live in a mansion filled with the supernatural. The AI failed to see the whimsy and only saw key words like orphan, rich and mansion. Then try to force an eat the rich ended.
I haven't tried AI dungeon but I do want to say that the quality of output obviously is heavily affected by both the prompt and the exact model used. So AI isn't really just one thing in this case, you gotta look at what is used and how 🙂
Eventually it will as it gets better, if given enough computing power and time. If an AI can produce a book a second how many books will it have to produce before it creates a masterpiece. The question is how would you find that masterpiece in the pile of mediocre and terrible books.
I actually have a workflow that greatly reduces this very thing. It’s more costly to do it this way, but if you want good results it works. Basically, I’ll give it creative freedom and tweak the overall content with back and forth exchanges, but when I have a couple paragraphs or a scene I like I have it critique the prose against a well defined style guide and provide a bulleted list of improvements. Fixed nearly all the fluff and flowery language, and reduces metaphor use as well.
Yes, that is a common issue that I absolutely agree with from my testing so far. It can be heavily reduced with detailed prompting though. Even more so, if you feed it a large portion of your own writing, ask it to analyze it, and the mimic that style going forward 🙂
my experience is opposite, AI repeatedly prunes my sentences and scenes - which I want it to do - but it often over-simplifies the sentences to modern American standard while I prefer a somewhat more variable and intricate sentence structure like those from the 19th century. But the Claude model is clever, I once let it run over a fragment of my text, then took its edited version, edited that by adding some of my original variability back in, and pasted it back - and it responded "Thank you for providing that style adjustment. I see you're aiming for a more formal, archaic tone that better fits the fantasy setting. Let me continue the edit maintaining this elevated style" - so it recognized it correctly.
It will never happen. Human authors often can’t tell you where the ideas come from that lead to their best stories, so there’s no way a.i. could generate something as accomplished and human as, Fight Club, the Bluest Eye, A Christmas Memory, or even something as simple but poignant as, Charlotte’s Web. In addition, there is the element of densely atmospheric writing, as exemplified by the opening sentences of E.A. Poe’s the Fall of the House of Usher, or achingly poetic final sentences like, Gatsby’s, “So we beat on, boats against the current, bourn back ceaselessly into the past” There are many heights in literature that a.I. won’t ever reach simply because it cannot reach them. Those heights are the exclusive property of human story tellers.
Hahahaha. This reads as someone trying to convince themselves that they're not about to get eaten play the big bad monster that has them in their jaws, about to swallow. Do you think that the people who initially won art competitions with their undeclared AI art pieces somehow used hypnotism or manipulated the judges in some way so that they are subjective evaluation of the pieces was flawed and therefore allowed the AI to win? Just like you are demonstrating now, artists had a big shock because they from their high horses had deemed their pursuits untouchable by the Big bad evil AI that was supposed to take the livelihoods away from the core unwashed filth working in menial jobs-but never artists! "Art is human only over which only humans hold Dominion. AI can't be creative and it'll never be creative!" they cried with their fingers in their ears was shut eyes. Then when they realized that they were wrong and that more often than not the vast majority of supposed artists were just pretenders or dabblers with no real talent or skill nor the patience or wherewithal to earn any, nor to slog it out to build up their capabilities and do the hard work to be successful at it. That the AI and more adept at creating compelling pieces of imagery then they ever would. So what did they do? They rallied against it and protested. Just like the old illustrators who would draw for the old biology manuals and other such books would rally against the camera in a futile effort to halt progress out of their own pathetic greed in selfish fear. Look add all the good that did for them? Those that refuse to adapt to the changing tides of technological progress went extinct. It sounds like you're right there at the forefront of those waiting to fall off the cliff of human history like a lemon so eager to plunge to your demise. Ignorant the whole way down. Good riddance.
That's actually impressive considering the amount of nonsensical magic systems I've read from humans in my long ass life. I can see why folks are starting to fear AI more and more
Compared to a year ago, it has gotten A LOT better, yes. We'll see if that is good or bad in the years to come. 2025 will likely see massive disruption in many areas when the next generation of models is released to the public. Not sure if this will have even more impact in writing (since that doesn't necessarily require a lot more reasoning capabilities) but if newer models manage to handle larger inputs even better (=not losing track of critical things eventually), and also get better at writing more natural - then that certainly would changes things even more.
✍ Level up your fantasy writing and worldbuilding skills for free! Join hundreds of writers getting weekly tips, tricks, and inspiration delivered straight to their inbox every Friday. Claim your spot in our growing fantasy community: thetaletinkerer.com/newsletter
The Sanderminator - Rebellion of the Brandchines.
Fun video! Ideally be scientific and do blind tests of human-written work vs ai-written work. Further details in experiment design are likely worth working out.
I did post a short story recently on the community wall, only revealing it was AI at the very end to see how people liked it. My main focus is still on traditional writing and storytelling but here and there, I like to experiment and sprinkle a few things in :-)
@@TheTaleTinkerer Sounds interesting! Anyway, yeah, I agree that traditional writing is more interesting than AI. I was just thinking some about that was all.
I'd like to thank you for this video.
When I was really young, I remember there was a program called "parrot" that shipped with creative labs soundblaster cards. It was basically a chatbot based on keywords, and was really limited to parroting (hence the name) what you've just said by reformulating it as a question. But that left me with a question I asked my father "do you think one day, we'll be able to talk to computers?". And I think this initial wonder drove me to artificial intelligence.
Much later I got a PhD in machine learning, and I realized it felt quite lonely, because there was no one outside of the field I could really talk to about this. It was just too abstract and uninteresting for most people.
But then, generative AI became popular. I was really happy, because I thought I could finally talk about it to many. But my hopes fell short when I realized that there is "hate" against AI.
So, when I see AI used like you do, it kinda fills me with joy. Thank you.
Glad to hear the video was something you enjoyed - thanks for sharing your feedback 😊
The chatbot was called Dr. Sbaitso. Talking Parrot just recorded short audio clips and played them back to you (plus a few preset phrases and sounds). I loved playing with both of them when I was a kid.
You can find online versions of Dr. Sbaitso (just Google the name) if you feel like wandering down memory lane and appreciating how far chatbots have come since then.
We will get used to have it with us, just like our phones, and Internet connection, wait until we can have our own each, tagging along all around the clock, and then comes the day we cannot imagine living without it. March of the history professor, nobody can stand the inevitable grind under the wheel of time...
Thank you for doing this experiment. This has been a fascinating video.
Glad you enjoyed it! I just think it is a topic we cannot ignore, regardless of the one's personal stance toward it. At least knowing what's out there is important in my opinion 🙂
I love visiting your channel to check out these wonderfully assembled videos. Now, I've spent 8 months on my debut dark portal fantasy novel and it's been a blast writing it. I'm close to the end of my first draft, and I'm already working on the insert and cover illustrations.
I couldn't have made this much progress in such a short amount of time if I hadn't used AI to help me keep track of things as I'm extremely disorganized and I've only written short stories and poetry before. I also used AI to help add feasibility to my scenes and technical explanations on the myriad of things I've been researching for my book.
Although I'm concerned for when AI will be fully able to create its own limited parameters and execute stories excellently and consistently, I still think there's a lot of room in the next several years for us writers to use AI to make up for our shortcomings.
Aside from end-results turning out much "better" as AI improves, I have a big feeling that writers will gradually have to do an even bigger job with marketing themselves and their works in order to distinguish and show how much personal care they put into their stories. It's disruptive and it inherently harms artists and writers, but the general vibe is hatred for AI, but using it as an assisting tool will slowly be more accepted. I don't think fully AI generated stories will be as popular as partly-AI and rawdogged stories. People will still create stories, but the methods will have to partly evolve.
I really appreciate the kind words, thank you. Glad to hear that for you personally, AI has proven to be a useful tool that helps you get your stories told 🙂
I'm experimenting with gpt, it certainly has a potential in idea creation, but it falls short of real creativity in the wider picture, one thing it is good at is creating road maps for detailed expansion of your initial ideas, i made it through few obstacles in hours working with it, for things that i had shelved for couple of years, and at the end of the day, i did almost the entire work, but the interaction was the factor that speeded the process, same experience i had with a much simpler ai that allowed me to create my first romance, and first first person story all in one, it is an interesting tool, so much the same debate is going on in design industry over the use of ai, over there also the answer is the same ,ai is a tool, just like using 3d software and photoshop to speed up your work, in writing ai is just a tool to make leaps and bounces ahead in much shorter windows, the actual creativity still requires that human touch, but the help is absolutely appreciated...
Showing people what AI can do with creative writing is literally what I'm doing! 😊
My little brother has moderate to severe autism, but he dreams of one day telling stories like the rest of us (I'm a published author and two of my sisters do webcomics). My goal is to find an AI-assisted process that can help him communicate through the written word despite his disability.
So far, my prompt book is about 60 pages long, and I can name many specific ways my writing has improved since my all-organic days. ChatGPT is a lot better at hitting the right tone than I am, especially in dialogue/fight scenes. My themes and characters are much better developed, because it can take opportunities to develop them that I never thought of. Above all, it's made me faster. The fastest novel I've ever written on my own took 8 months (the last two were hell, by the way). With ChatGPT’s help, I've been writing a sci-fi since 10/25 and I'm 45,000 words into the first draft. I'm on track to finish on the 23rd and I'll have the entire rest of the month to revise.
The best part is, nobody can tell. I've gotten a lot of feedback on AI-assisted work, and precisely zero people have called it out for being AI-generated. I've even fooled a handful of AI checking tools. It was especially fun when someone in my writing club praised one of my fight scenes in particular, and she ate her words when I said ChatGPT did most of it! 🤣
Sounds like a lot of effort went into this on your part already, congratulations on that. Always good to know what's out there, even if just for awareness. If it actually allows you (or others you teach) to create something that otherwise would have been impossible - even more valuable 🙂
@TheTaleTinkerer You know how refreshing it is to hear someone not stomp on my opinion? 🤣
Seriously, I love what you do man! Thanks for giving this topic the impartial, critical view that it needs. I love your work and can't wait to see where your career takes you next.
Relevant and Supportive Comment to feed the Algorangim
Prediction before I finish the video:
AI loses track of details it implemented previously.
AI fails to come up with concrete effects of the system on aspects and/or elements of the world.
AI does correctly implements effects of the system on characters using the system.
What are your thoughts on the pride quality itself of a well prompted AI? I have heard consistently that it is a huge weak point but I’ve also been stunned at the quality of choice excerpts I have seen. So I don’t know if people are being simplistic when they say it’s all bad or if I just can’t recognize good prose vs bad prose 😂
Nah, AI can’t replace Authors out right because I have already messed with AI dungeon. I was writing a story about on little orphan boy getting adopted by a rich man and now he has to live in a mansion filled with the supernatural. The AI failed to see the whimsy and only saw key words like orphan, rich and mansion. Then try to force an eat the rich ended.
I haven't tried AI dungeon but I do want to say that the quality of output obviously is heavily affected by both the prompt and the exact model used. So AI isn't really just one thing in this case, you gotta look at what is used and how 🙂
Just a question, as we talk about Brandon Sanderson: Is the channel profile image supposed to be Kaladin Stormblessed, from the Stormlight Archive?
No, the channel profile image is just me playing with Midjourney to make a fantasy/sci-fi hero out of myself 😊
Eventually it will as it gets better, if given enough computing power and time.
If an AI can produce a book a second how many books will it have to produce before it creates a masterpiece.
The question is how would you find that masterpiece in the pile of mediocre and terrible books.
Searching has to be redefined as well then, absolutely, yes. Who knows how that will look like.
My issue with AI is that it becomes too flowery and too exaggerated for a scene’s description. It’s often too obvious that it’s AI generated.
I actually have a workflow that greatly reduces this very thing. It’s more costly to do it this way, but if you want good results it works.
Basically, I’ll give it creative freedom and tweak the overall content with back and forth exchanges, but when I have a couple paragraphs or a scene I like I have it critique the prose against a well defined style guide and provide a bulleted list of improvements. Fixed nearly all the fluff and flowery language, and reduces metaphor use as well.
Yes, that is a common issue that I absolutely agree with from my testing so far. It can be heavily reduced with detailed prompting though. Even more so, if you feed it a large portion of your own writing, ask it to analyze it, and the mimic that style going forward 🙂
my experience is opposite, AI repeatedly prunes my sentences and scenes - which I want it to do - but it often over-simplifies the sentences to modern American standard while I prefer a somewhat more variable and intricate sentence structure like those from the 19th century. But the Claude model is clever, I once let it run over a fragment of my text, then took its edited version, edited that by adding some of my original variability back in, and pasted it back - and it responded "Thank you for providing that style adjustment. I see you're aiming for a more formal, archaic tone that better fits the fantasy setting. Let me continue the edit maintaining this elevated style" - so it recognized it correctly.
It will never happen.
Human authors often can’t tell you where the ideas come from that lead to their best stories, so there’s no way a.i. could generate something as accomplished and human as, Fight Club, the Bluest Eye, A Christmas Memory, or even something as simple but poignant as, Charlotte’s Web.
In addition, there is the element of densely atmospheric writing, as exemplified by the opening sentences of E.A. Poe’s the Fall of the House of Usher, or achingly poetic final sentences like, Gatsby’s, “So we beat on, boats against the current, bourn back ceaselessly into the past”
There are many heights in literature that a.I. won’t ever reach simply because it cannot reach them. Those heights are the exclusive property of human story tellers.
Hahahaha. This reads as someone trying to convince themselves that they're not about to get eaten play the big bad monster that has them in their jaws, about to swallow. Do you think that the people who initially won art competitions with their undeclared AI art pieces somehow used hypnotism or manipulated the judges in some way so that they are subjective evaluation of the pieces was flawed and therefore allowed the AI to win? Just like you are demonstrating now, artists had a big shock because they from their high horses had deemed their pursuits untouchable by the Big bad evil AI that was supposed to take the livelihoods away from the core unwashed filth working in menial jobs-but never artists! "Art is human only over which only humans hold Dominion. AI can't be creative and it'll never be creative!" they cried with their fingers in their ears was shut eyes. Then when they realized that they were wrong and that more often than not the vast majority of supposed artists were just pretenders or dabblers with no real talent or skill nor the patience or wherewithal to earn any, nor to slog it out to build up their capabilities and do the hard work to be successful at it. That the AI and more adept at creating compelling pieces of imagery then they ever would. So what did they do? They rallied against it and protested. Just like the old illustrators who would draw for the old biology manuals and other such books would rally against the camera in a futile effort to halt progress out of their own pathetic greed in selfish fear. Look add all the good that did for them? Those that refuse to adapt to the changing tides of technological progress went extinct. It sounds like you're right there at the forefront of those waiting to fall off the cliff of human history like a lemon so eager to plunge to your demise. Ignorant the whole way down.
Good riddance.
That's actually impressive considering the amount of nonsensical magic systems I've read from humans in my long ass life.
I can see why folks are starting to fear AI more and more
Compared to a year ago, it has gotten A LOT better, yes. We'll see if that is good or bad in the years to come.
2025 will likely see massive disruption in many areas when the next generation of models is released to the public. Not sure if this will have even more impact in writing (since that doesn't necessarily require a lot more reasoning capabilities) but if newer models manage to handle larger inputs even better (=not losing track of critical things eventually), and also get better at writing more natural - then that certainly would changes things even more.
Can't do worse...so...
Not one of the Sanderson fan group, I take? :-)
@@TheTaleTinkerer nope, his prose literally cause me pain.