What exactly is the use case for "longform writing by AI"? Profiting from mass-produced zero-effort novels?
The OP is most excited about this ability to remember to create more structured longford outputs with internal consistency (e.g., asking questions about a fantasy universe that respects the characters that exist elsewhere in the story or universe).
Or you could build an AI girlfriend/conversation partner.
The main idea, of continuously feeding the model a summary of its generation (and its dialog with the user of course) sounds interesting, but it's still not a memory. At some point, the continuous summarisation will have to grow big enough that it again exceeds the system's buffer (its "short term memory"). Either that, or it will drop so much detail from the summary that it will lose the plot.
So while this may result in longer generations, it doesn't look like it will really solve the problem of "long term memory", or long-distance dependency. It's a smart trick, but that's not enough.
I'm afraid that, no matter what the engineers' original intention, if it works well enough, this is what it'll be remembered for.
You see no problem with flooding every market with junk products that cost nothing to produce so that non-junk products are crowded out and impossible to find? This is exactly the thing that everyone now hates Amazon for and why trying to find honest reviews of anything online is so horribly frustrating.
Some barrier to entry is always better than no barrier to entry.
Language-model AI can simulate texts, but it cannot simulate how reading such texts make humans feel. Only a human writer can do that and only that makes texts truly entertaining.
A good example would be, an AI generated auto-biography of a fake singer. It might actually be fun to read if it's well written (generated?), but I'd have to say, I'd have zero interest in reading it because one thing I like about auto-biographies is that I get to know the author in more depth.
Perhaps fun as a novelty but really I have no interest in pretending to "know" what a chatbot-AI "claims" what it "thinks" or "feels". That is of no relevance to anybody because it is far removed from reality. It is just randomly generated text. And it can't be good art because there is no real person with real message or real feelings behind it. The chatbots certainly have no "message" to the humankind.
I actually noticed this the more I play around with AI art, it's cool that we can do it, but I actually wonder if unlimited access to randomly generated art is actually useful? This becomes even more true when we're talking about novels, which are already hard to read (time constraints).
I was playing with DALL-E 2 today when I was bored and then it kind of hit me that there is almost no actual point to it all. Even if every time I clicked the button it painted a Van Gough, who cares?
I'm almost certain that there is more to like behind a painting then the painting itself, there is the story. For example my Dad is a painter so I like the painting because he painted it, yes it's a pleasant painting but that's not entirely the point. It's also that he painted it specifically for me with scenes that I actually know from my home town.
My cousin is an art collector, when we he shows me something new , we're 99% interested in the story behind the art. The tribe who carved a sculpture, it's age, previous owners etc.
I also own a painting which someone gave me because they ran out of cash when trying to start a company, so I accepted it as a payment for the work. It's valuable to me for what it represents. I think of the guys dreams and that I at least did my best to help him on his path even though that particular venture failed, it reminded me it pays to be kind and in the end he actually become quite successful doing something else so it represents a never give up attitude.
Maybe to say it another way, there was already pretty much unlimited access to good art, good photographs, hell probably even good code (through open source libraries). I guess the next step is actually figuring out what the point of having unlimited access to this stuff actually is?
I hate to say it but I'm actually starting to have similar concerns to others when we talk about "generated junk" polluting the information space. I actually think this is what will happen.
But there's also an element to it of writing a story we'd like to read that doesn't exist, and there AI tools might well end up replacing actually writing. Especially if it can riff off your feedback in more of an interactive fiction way.
As well as being able to get plausible expansions of the work of an author you like who is no longer writing (and that is where the most obvious commercial appeal for AI writing is - any given average book earns next to nothing, but even a third rate ghostwritten sequel in the name of a bestselling author can earn a fortune; expect publishers to start trying to sneak clauses about being allowed to generate sequels if/when the author fails to produce new works into contracts)
That said, there'll still be a space for human art for the reasons you give, and a lot of the market for content is similar - we pay for the stories behind the art as much as for the art.
> I hate to say it but I'm actually starting to have similar concerns to others when we talk about "generated junk" polluting the information space. I actually think this is what will happen.
Prior to AI, I was only familiar with procedural generation-- first Minecraft, then No Man's Sky.
While Minecraft was addicting in its grindiness for raw materials, I never felt attached to any of the worlds I was building. When survival became inconvenient, I spun up a new one.
No Man's Sky scaled this out to generate an infinite number of planets. So many planets to choose from, once again I found myself never becoming attached to any single one, no matter how much infrastructure I built. Once I got bored/irritated, I bailed and moved on.
I see similar behavior in people when it comes to relationships-- so many options to choose from, any single one is disposable. Your values are either going to align with mine 100%/you're going to do exactly what I want or I'm going to block you; reconciliation and negotiation is inconvenient. It's easier to just ditch old and make new.
So I can see the same happening with art. There's no toil, no Labor of Love. No connection to it from the artist (who invests nothing), and no connection by the consumer (who can get something equally impressive with no discovery effort). It's all technically impressive...but ultimately worthless.
I could finally find movies and shows that aren't complete garbage.
Also, Kickstarter won't stop working for books.
"Computer, write me a good Fantasy novel" is science fiction.
Current text transformers are horrendous in writing long form stories (ie, longer than 1 page).
Because they don't have a concept of long-term memory. It has to keep everything in its short term memory (the context window), which is at most 2k words right now. Everything else is discarded, so the AI is unable to keep track of past events.
This AI probably tries to summarise past events into short summaries. Sort of like how humans don't remember details of past events (What did you eat last week), only tracking important or unusual events. This helps massively optimize the memory of the AI
Novels are probably the grand challenge in text-AIs, because they require multiple things.
1. Long term memory
2. Multi-party state tracking (What happened to whom, how is relationship graph between multiple characters changing, what is happening in the background, or the world, despite not being mentioned in the text explicitly)
3. Multi-party theory of mind (The AI must infer the internal mental state of characters despite not being explicit in text)
4. Accurate understanding of human motivations/desires, which are the driving force behind stories.
As such, AIs that can write long fictional stories is also capable of: 1. Deception (Plot twist/surprises) 2. Emotional manipulation (Pulling your heart strings) 3. Long term planning (The simulated characters need to plan long term, with an effect on the world-state)
Needless to say, it will be extremely dangerous. But that AI will also master therapy, sales, supervising children, customer service etc, as it now has an strong understanding of human behaviour.
Still, all of that is quite a few years away. In the meantime, AIs that can assist human fiction writers is very possible, humans do the long term tracking and comprehension, the AI can help fill in dialogue, polish up writing styles, describe scenery or objects etc.
Novel writers are a great testing ground despite limited economic value, because novel writing AIs are risk-free and error-tolerant. Novel writers are generally also extremely excited about AIs, unlike artists.
Let's say this or some future AI system writes better novels than any human author at a fraction of the cost. Novel writing is solved.
What will we have achieved?
I wish I could opt out of this world you want to create, where if you achieve your vision, I will be utterly useless and obsolete.
Novel writing is like the training ground for emotional intelligence in AIs. Fiction writing itself is not economically important, but the skills learnt from it is.
As a passionate hobby writer myself. I say you should actually go and try the writing tools, sudowrite/verb.ai are examples. Once you start using them, you start realizing how much they suck at writing stories, and your worries will go away. Unlike art AI, fiction writing AI has not really improved significantly. The core challenges are unsolved since the days of GPT-2.
There's also little research money coming in. Having a truthful, helpful, inoffensive AI is the polar opposite of what you want in a story AI, which should be deceitful, aggressive, and offensive.
It's impressive it can even do that, and it'll improve, but anyone looking to these tools to generate good fiction at this point will be disappointed.
Many authors are already "obsolete" in that they're not paid a living wage for the job of writing creative fiction. It's understandable to prefer being paid for it, and in an ideal world being obsolete would just mean you get to do it for fun and fulfillment and not worry about the money.
If you as a writer use a paid editor and cover designers, odds are it'll take you several years to break even today.
Unless you're "discovered" by a traditional publisher and they think they have the next Harry Potter on their hands, even being traditionally published means next to no sales for a large majority.
So it's already about fun and fulfillment for most authors. I went into writing (so far two) novels knowing the above, and did it anyway. That said, some do go into it thinking they'll make lots of money, or desperately looking for another income source.
Well, if it was "an AI" like Lt Cdr Data, then we would want it to be able to write novels, among other things, just because humans can, and we presumably want to create artificial humans, no?
Maybe not, I think it's a very bad idea to create artificial humans. But the systems we're talking about are not artificial humans, they're the kind of system that everyone on the net has started calling "an AI" in the last few months (I know because it bugs me no end when people do that, but now it's everywhere so I can suck it up, it won't change). Those are only "AIs" in the very specific sense that everyone calls them "AIs", and not because of any of their real capabilities.
And the point is that those "AIs" that we have right now are not capable of writing novels. They are capable though of producing lots and lots of spam spam Spam SPAM.
And they will. There's already so many novels, short stories, novellas, novelletes, flash fiction stories etc etc written by humans, that a human lifetime is not enough to read them all. What is the "AI" going to add to all that? Another human lifetime's worth of spam?
Maybe that's not such a big problem. If I already couldn't read all the books written by humans up 'till now, then I can spend the rest of my life reading only books written by humans, simply by checking the publication date and rejecting any book written after the creation of book-writing "AI" (which we don't have yet).
I'm trying to say, we can avoid reading spam, nowadays, it mostly just clutters our inboxes. We can avoid reading "AI" spam, and it doesn't matter if it will get bigger and bigger or not.
Maybe the future web will be divided into a wastebasket for "AI" spam, and the rest. That's a bit of a bummer, but the web is already divided into shit (99%) and not shit (1%). Yeah.
So I don't know. Maybe this will turn out to not be as bad as it seems.