On LLM-generated fiction

From Why I Won't Read LLM Authored Fiction by Chris McCormick:

I don't want to read a novel where most of the words are written by an LLM, even if a human designed the novel at a high level. It feels gross. I think this is the reason. The statistical profile of LLM writing is close to the normal. That's literally how LLMs work. They sample from a distribution that captures a median way of writing. I simply don't want my mind pushed towards the statistically normal when I am reading fiction. That's the exact opposite of what I want from the experience.

I may finally read The End of Average, now that LLMs have given us The Revenge of Average. Average output is acceptable for computer code, for which the purpose is to get a computer to operate in a specific way, but the human central processor works differently. We tend to ignore sameness and remember novelty. That's the root of a lot of our cognitive biases.

I've used LLMs as research assistants for fiction, and sometimes they can break me out of my self-imposed mental boxes, but any time I've accepted their offer to write a sample for a story, I've been profoundly bored by the result. Possibly my prompts could be better. I learned a little about writing from asking an LLM to write a simple scene in the styles of various authors, in order to learn more about pacing narrative prose, and while the scenes were readable, they weren't interesting. Same for a couple vignettes I've generated to entertain my kids with a scene of a Muppet exploring space or under the ocean. LLMs are competent language calculators, but they can't intrigue. They have no personality. They can nerd out about anything, and thus can't obsess over something to the exclusion of everything else.

Chris's post gives me a much better appreciation for how much writing is, at heart, about connecting with another human. We want to know that a person thought it was worth putting these words together, was willing to spend the time creating this story, sharing these characters, composing this sentence, and that when challenged about what they've written will defend it and maybe, in so doing, teach us something valuable. Reading fiction isn't about assembling information; it's about gaining understanding. Sometimes wisdom comes from juxtaposing information, but more often it comes from the enigmatic other, the person across the table or at the other end of the fiber optic cable. It comes from someone who's had skin in the game and had to make difficult choices.

My hope in the era of LLMs is that we as humans learn to find each other more fascinating.