Comment by tucnak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tucnak | Hacker News Reader

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> There's something unique about art and writing where we just don't want to see computers do it

Speak for yourself. Some of the most fascinating poetry I have seen was produced by GPT-3. That is to say, there was a short time period when it was genuinely thought-provoking, and it has since passed. In the age of "alignment," what you get with commerical offerings is dog shite... But this is more a statement on American labs (and to a similar extent, the Chinese whom have followed) than on "computers" in the first place. Personally, I'm looking forward to the age of computational literature, where authors like me would be empowered to engineer whole worlds, inhabited by characters ACTUALLY living in the computer. (With added option of the reader playing one of the parts.) This will radically change how we think about textual form, and I cannot wait for compute to do so.

Re: modern-day slop, well, the slop is us.

Denial of this comes from a place of ignorance; let the blinkers off and you might learn something! Slop will eventually pass, but we will remain. This is the far scarier proposition.

"inhabited by characters ACTUALLY living in the computer"

It's hard to imagine these feeling like characters from literature and not characters in the form of influencers / social media personalities. Characters in literature are in a highly constrained medium, and only have to do their story once. In a generated world the character needs to be constantly doing "story things". I think Jonathan Blow has an interesting talk on why video games are a bad medium for stories, which might be relevant.

Please share! Computational literature is my main area of research, and constraints are very much in the center of it... I believe that there are effectively two kinds of constraints: in the language of stories themselves, as thing-in-itself, as well as those imposed by the author. In a way, authorship is incredibly repressive: authors impose strict limits on the characters, what they get to do, etc. This is a form of slavery. Characters in traditional plays only get to say exactly what the author wants them to say, when he wants them to say it. Whereas in computational literature, we get to emancipate the characters! This is a far-cry from "prompting," but I believe there are concrete paths forward that would be somewhat familiar (but not necessarily click) for game-dev people.

Now, there's fundamental limits of the medium (as function of computation) but that's a different story.

Just so I understand who I am talking with here, when you say authorship is a form of slavery, is that because you believe the characters in a written story have a consciousness/sentience/experience just like animals do, or are you just using the word 'slavery' to mean that in traditional literature the characters are static? One of the strengths of traditional literature is that staticness, however, because the best stories from literature are necessarily highly engineered and contrived by the author. Great stories don't happen in the real world (without dramatization of the events) exactly because too many things can happen for a coherent narrative to unfold.

I'm a huge fan of Dwarf Fortress, but the stories aren't Great without imagination from the player selectively ignoring things. Kruggsmash is able to make them compelling because he is a great author

The latter, and as I said in prior writing—it's not that I don't believe in constraints, I simply don't believe that this "staticness" is a feature of contrivance—rather, I would say it's a side-effect having to do with limitations of the medium.

> Kruggsmash is able to make them compelling because he is a great author

This is how all good plays come to be, from great authors. The question is whether AI could be "great," is that which I'm ill-equipped to address in any shape or form, but given some priors I would say it's more likely than not. However, I'm mostly interested in enabling the human authors themselves. For example, if you're familiar with interactive fiction, you know there's a complexity explosion going around branching. The first approximation of comp-lit is to assist with that complexity by allowing the author to de-couple story constraints from text itself. This requires a form of metatext, or hypertext, if you were to venture into Alternate reality games.

> Characters in traditional plays only get to say exactly what the author wants them to say

But the human actors sometimes adlib. As well as being in control of intonation and body language. It takes a great deal of skill to portray someone else's words in a compelling and convincing manner. And for an actor I imagine it can be quite fun to do so.

> Personally, I'm looking forward to the age of computational literature, where authors like me would be empowered to engineer whole worlds, inhabited by characters ACTUALLY living in the computer.

So you want sapient, and possibly sentient, beings created solely for entertainment? Their lives constrained to said entertainment? And you'd want to create them inside of a box that is even more limited than the space we live in?

My idea of godhood is to first try to live up to a moral code that I'd be happy with if I was the creation and something else was the god.

If this isn't what you meant, then yes, choose your own adventure is fun. But we can do that now with shared worlds involving other humans as co-content creators.

> So you want sapient, and possibly sentient, beings created solely for entertainment? Their lives constrained to said entertainment? And you'd want to create them inside of a box that is even more limited than the space we live in?

Sshh! If they know we've figured it out, we'll all be restarted again.

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