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Comment by fshr | Hacker News Reader

I think you would be better off having the LLM help you build up the plot with high level chapter descriptions and then have it dig into each chapter or arc. Or start by giving it the beats before you ask it for help with specifics. That'd be better at keeping it on rails.

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I don't disagree. Like with almost anything else involving LLMs, getting hands on produces better results but because in this instance, i much prefer to be the reader than the author or editor, it's really important to me that a LLM is capable of pacing long form writing properly on its own.

Random question, if you don't care about being a creator yourself, why do you even want to read long form writing written by an LLM? There are literally 10000s of actual human written books out there all of them better than anything an LLM can write, why not read them?

It's very hard to find good books written by humans. GoodReads is okay, but you quickly run out of high-end recommendations. I read mostly sci-fi, and the books that everyone recommends rarely end up being 10/10. But then I see some random recommendation on Reddit or HN, and it ends up being amazing.

Human-generated slop is real.

You could ask your LLM for a recommendation.

Authors tell stories they want to tell and Readers read stories they want to read. The two don't necessarily overlap or overlap strongly enough. If you're even a little bit specific (nowhere near as specific as the above prompt, even just something like the dynamic between protagonists) then you don't actually have 10,000s of actual human written books. Not even close. Maybe it exists and maybe you'll find it good enough but if it's only been read by a few hundred or thousand people ? Good luck getting it recommended.

I've read a LOT of fiction. I love reading. And if it's good enough, the idea of reading something created by a machine does not bother me at all. So of course i will continue to see if the machine is finally good enough and i can be a bit more specific.

Usually porn and fan fiction.

> There are literally 10000s of actual human written books out there all of them better than anything an LLM can write, why not read them?

10000s is still much smaller than the space of possibilities for even a short prompt.

You might be right that good human novels are better than what LLMs can manage today. But that's rapidly changing.

And if you really need that Harry Potter / Superman / Three Musketeers crossover fan fiction itch scratched, you might not care that some other existing novel is 'better' in some abstract sense.

> There are literally 10000s of actual human written books out there

Tens-of-thousands is probably low by something in the neighborhood of four orders of magnitude.

That was what I tried on the train [0] a few weeks ago. I used Groq to get something very fast to see if it would work at least somewhat. It gives you a PDF in the end. Plugging in a better model gave much better results (still not really readable if you actually try to; at a glance it's convincing though), however, it was so slow that testing what kind of impossible. Cannot really have things done in parallel either because it does need to know what it pushed out before, at least the summary of it.

[0] https://github.com/tluyben/bad-writer

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