There has been major kickback in the indie music scene. Ampwall completely banned it ages ago, and Bandcamp have finally followed suit. It hasn't reached the streaming services yet though. I hope the kickback against it in publishing will intensify. A number of indie publishers, and one or two big ones, have clarified their policies of not publishing AI crap, and even prohibiting authors who submit it from ever submitting to them again. I think it is happening.
It's always kind of shocking to me that people want to use AI to replace the fun stuff and not the tedious stuff. Also John, I like your nonfiction style!
Thank you. I've gotten a lot of practice writing nonfiction. My byline has appeared in quite a few newspapers and magazines over the years. Still write for the Associated Press.
Another thing we humans should do is just write better stories than AI, which isn't hard.
Unfortunately, visibility remains a problem. And Anthropic running an account (Claude's Corner) right here on Substack doesn't help, either. But at least there's honest about it.
Humans already write better than AI. Stories created through AI are without a soul. They can never successfully imitate the life experiences and emotions of a human being.
Thing is, I have a couple of students working on something I call interactive storytelling. One is majoring in CS and the other is majoring in literature. Interactive storytelling is not the same as AI writing, in the sense that it’s not a person trying to write a story by prompting AI. It’s more like a video game where you, as an author, first craft a very good story and world, but the way the reader consumes the story is by interacting with it instead of reading it.
It involves a lot of generative AI because you have characters that have to like respond in several ways and plot points that can be triggered in different moments, etc. It doesn't have to be a linear story; it can be more or less constrained.
I am interested in it mostly for the scientific part, but I think it can be interesting from an artistic point of view because it’s a hybrid between writing a book and making a video game. As the creator, you have a lot of creative freedom to make the world as rich as you want, but it is still an interactive experience where the reader, player, or consumer, however you want to call them, will not always have the same experience so to speak when reading it.
It’s like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, but instead of five different endings, you can have like. an infinite amount of them. The technical difficulty for me lies in how to give the author the capacity to make the world, story, and plot as flexible as they want to allow the player to end the story in different ways, while still providing tools to constrain it so that it does exactly what they want to achieve their vision.
It’s still very much a work in progress, but I'd really like your opinion on this kind of medium.
I've been mulling over this for the past couple of days. The concept of interactive storytelling is intriguing. I enjoyed reading Choose Your Own Adventure stories back when I was in middle school and high school. If it's possible to do a digital version of these types of stories where author and reader can create a story together, it might be fun to bring that concept to life.
That being said, I am strongly against using generative AI in any form to write a story or even a part of a story. Generative AI has largely been trained using material outright stolen from works protected by copyright. So anything AI-written carries the taint of using words stolen from other authors and repacking them into generic story material. I know I would be furious if my copyrighted stories were being used without my permission to create one of these interactive stories elsewhere.
Ultimately, I would only be supportive of interactive storytelling that comes with proof that it does not use any generative AI programming in story creation.
That's a very strong position and I respect it, though I fear most people will favor convenience here and use the strongest models even if they come with the copyright and ethical concerns. There is a silver lining tho, some academic projects like Salamandra in Spain are painstakingly tracing training data to ensure their models are only trained on public domain or properly attributed data, but these models will always lag behind commercial models.
Absolutely right on the money. I could not agree more.
It's sad, honestly, to see how many people are embracing AI like it's no big deal. Hopefully, the push back against it will grow stronger.
There has been major kickback in the indie music scene. Ampwall completely banned it ages ago, and Bandcamp have finally followed suit. It hasn't reached the streaming services yet though. I hope the kickback against it in publishing will intensify. A number of indie publishers, and one or two big ones, have clarified their policies of not publishing AI crap, and even prohibiting authors who submit it from ever submitting to them again. I think it is happening.
It's always kind of shocking to me that people want to use AI to replace the fun stuff and not the tedious stuff. Also John, I like your nonfiction style!
Thank you. I've gotten a lot of practice writing nonfiction. My byline has appeared in quite a few newspapers and magazines over the years. Still write for the Associated Press.
It's really all I do, though I've snuck a couple of fiction pieces in there as well. I like it when you pop up for stuff like this here.
Another thing we humans should do is just write better stories than AI, which isn't hard.
Unfortunately, visibility remains a problem. And Anthropic running an account (Claude's Corner) right here on Substack doesn't help, either. But at least there's honest about it.
Humans already write better than AI. Stories created through AI are without a soul. They can never successfully imitate the life experiences and emotions of a human being.
Yes!
Hey John, I'd like to pass some thoughts by you.
Thing is, I have a couple of students working on something I call interactive storytelling. One is majoring in CS and the other is majoring in literature. Interactive storytelling is not the same as AI writing, in the sense that it’s not a person trying to write a story by prompting AI. It’s more like a video game where you, as an author, first craft a very good story and world, but the way the reader consumes the story is by interacting with it instead of reading it.
It involves a lot of generative AI because you have characters that have to like respond in several ways and plot points that can be triggered in different moments, etc. It doesn't have to be a linear story; it can be more or less constrained.
I am interested in it mostly for the scientific part, but I think it can be interesting from an artistic point of view because it’s a hybrid between writing a book and making a video game. As the creator, you have a lot of creative freedom to make the world as rich as you want, but it is still an interactive experience where the reader, player, or consumer, however you want to call them, will not always have the same experience so to speak when reading it.
It’s like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, but instead of five different endings, you can have like. an infinite amount of them. The technical difficulty for me lies in how to give the author the capacity to make the world, story, and plot as flexible as they want to allow the player to end the story in different ways, while still providing tools to constrain it so that it does exactly what they want to achieve their vision.
It’s still very much a work in progress, but I'd really like your opinion on this kind of medium.
I've been mulling over this for the past couple of days. The concept of interactive storytelling is intriguing. I enjoyed reading Choose Your Own Adventure stories back when I was in middle school and high school. If it's possible to do a digital version of these types of stories where author and reader can create a story together, it might be fun to bring that concept to life.
That being said, I am strongly against using generative AI in any form to write a story or even a part of a story. Generative AI has largely been trained using material outright stolen from works protected by copyright. So anything AI-written carries the taint of using words stolen from other authors and repacking them into generic story material. I know I would be furious if my copyrighted stories were being used without my permission to create one of these interactive stories elsewhere.
Ultimately, I would only be supportive of interactive storytelling that comes with proof that it does not use any generative AI programming in story creation.
That's a very strong position and I respect it, though I fear most people will favor convenience here and use the strongest models even if they come with the copyright and ethical concerns. There is a silver lining tho, some academic projects like Salamandra in Spain are painstakingly tracing training data to ensure their models are only trained on public domain or properly attributed data, but these models will always lag behind commercial models.