It has felt this way to me for years now, really. Somewhere in the last decade or so the top X of almost any genre I enjoy (which spans a large range of fiction) has been... lackluster. Not just in the hipster contrarian sense of "popular therefore bad" but also the lists of books touted as "critics adore this obscure gem" and crowd-sourced "most read/reviewed" and all in between. Certainly a few standouts here and there.
For me the primary issue has been the words, the lexicon, the cadence; it's flat. Seems like writers have learned to write and learned what's right, they've been writing and not reading. There's not much exploration of the form, it's all so grammatically correct. Maybe it's the fault of the editors or typesetters, if those still exist. It's boring, either way.
Secondly it's the themes. Struggle and oppression have always been plot drivers, but it seems like a vast majority of works published in the last decade are just slight variations on "oppressed person struggles to exist within the System, then finds a way to overcome; The End." The Hero's Journey highly compressed, lossily.
Luckily there are hundreds of years and countless intriguing novels written before all this, more than I could ever hope to read in my lifetime. Maybe this is what it is like to age: to recognize truly that nothing is new under the sun; so, go forth by going back, seek that which was once new in its time.
> ...the top X of almost any genre I enjoy (which spans a large range of fiction) has been... lackluster.
I read an article a few years ago from a literary editor complaining how MFA programs had made his job harder. He said his job used to be sorting a few gems out of a mountain of rubbish, but now he has the more time consuming task of sorting through a mountain of mediocre work. His point was that MFA programs can teach you how to not be awful, but not make you great.
I am relatively young (32) and I feel the same way, as an avid fiction reader, and consumer of movies/tv; I don't think this observation is merely a symptom of getting old.
I suspect it has something to do with a few factors (just speculation):
1. Publishers / writers taking the safe route to content creation: using formulaic storytelling to generate "likely" successes (the pop music effect). They're treating writing more as a product than art.
2. Creative writing as a medium no longer attracts the best and brightest, who instead go into other expressive forms that are more on trend / current (movies, tv, video games, digital art, music, programming, etc).
3. People's attention spans are shorter, and novelty is not perceived as being rewarded (this is related to the first point)
4. A culture that is increasingly trending toward narcissism due to the effects of social media, pop culture, and more broken homes. People aren't writing for the sake of expression or art so much as to get attention and win prizes.
5. (Ties in with 1 and 3) An increasingly garbage information landscape full of click-bait and vapid content optimized for algorithms and views. This information landscape creeps into the culture at every level, I believe (to varying degrees)
It is ironic, and a poignant observation, that AI writing is nearly indistinguishable from much of the existing user-written content. I tend to agree, and blame that on the fact that in the past ten years, people have become intellectually lazy (perhaps for the above reasons?) and are really just parrots and synthesizers themselves.
LitRPG category suffers a lot from this. A number of good series. Then tons of ones that are basically.
I wake up in a new world.
I punched a rabbit. I gained a level.
I walk 10 feet. Walking got a skill level.
Oh good I got that walking level just in time to not die to a snake. I gain a level in poison resist.
…
I punched a a dragon and gained a level.
Oh crap, umm a plot. Yeah. Let’s add one in last chapter so there is some reason to have a sequel.
Not OP but I've really enjoyed the He Who Fights Monsters series by Shirtaloon and Orconomics: A Satire by J. Zachary Pike.
First hour or so of HWFM was a little rough, but then it hit its stride and here I am 9 audible credits later, ready for the 10th to be out. Was entertained the whole way through.
IMO J. Zachary Pike has better writing technique, but hasn't released as much. I'm presuming the extra polish costs more time to author.
Avatar was cool. Heavy CGI looked fantastic at first. But then it became an often overused commodity. Still there are movies I like. Mostly well made sci-fi for kids. Avatar2 is not in the list.
There seems to be a singular style that most modern authors use. It’s probably to gain maximum readership. Also I wonder how often top selling authors use a ghost writer.
I would also add that even the odd writer with a great early book or books commonly slumps down to meh and then churns it out from there on, which is sad.
It's like the fiction publishing industry had this technology for 10-20 years already.
One day an AI will write a brilliant book. It will write something as good as the most competent and insightful human writer out there. And it will write a thousand more. The problem is that for every good book there will be a thousand bad books. What good is a good book if no one has time to discover it and read it? No one has time to get through all the good books written by humans, why are we worried about books written by AI?
Since the Gutenberg days there has never been a shortage of written material to be digested. For hundreds of years there has been way more written material than any one person could read in a lifetime. So the problem has been to pick out what is most worth reading out of the millions of books you could be reading instead. The situation now is no different, except that we should have stricter standards on what information we allow into our heads. There will always be value in a well-curated library (will AIs curate the libraries too?)
Who will curate though. Before the internet you'd read a book based on a recommendation from a friend, a sibling, a trusted figure. Now, in this increasingly isolating world, we get recommendations from small subreddits, maybe a HN post, and of course the subconscious prompting of adverts that seep through our filters.
An AI could be the writer and recommender in all those modern scenarios. Will this mean we revert back to listening to our friends and family over online opinion? Probably not, because they're no less exposed than we are to online recomendation creep.
The situation now is different, in that AIs are capable of flooding the market with more exponentially more material than human beings could possibly ever produce or sort through. Also that AI provides a market incentive to prefer machine generated content over human generated content, as the presence of humans in the loop at all reduces profit margins (this includes having AIs curate the libraries,) as humans can't work 24/7/365 for free.
So the inevitable end result of this will be that all content will be AI generated as soon as the quality becomes - not great, competent or insightful, but just good enough to make money in the immediate short term. And this will be the case for all forms of media.
> The situation now is different, in that AIs are capable of flooding the market with more exponentially more material than human beings could possibly ever produce or sort through.
The situation is exactly the same as it was before as far as you or I are concerned.
More books are released every day than any of us can keep up with. More books have been published (and lost to time) than we can even account for.
There's more competition now, but the amount of attention you or I have to give to discovery has not changed. Like when competing restaurants open across the street from yours, it just means authors need to work harder to entice people to buy from them instead of Jimmy Pesto.
(In the case of Amazon, they're doing it through astroturfed reviews...)
There was a recent episode of the "The Last Leg" here in the UK where they announced they would be slipping in an AI produced joke in to the show, and revealed it at the end.
This is DAY ONE of the content explosion. People will soon learn they can skip the middlemen and generate yourself any niche theme at all. The story gen a.i. are only going to get better day by day.
If you must have new published books (allegedly human authored, edited, and curated for cultural relevancy) you will almost have to use your own a.i. anyway. You'll need to trust it to summarize the work or "human" reviews, detect/fix repulsive flaws, and get/generate any recommendations according to your satisfaction.
> People will soon learn they can skip the middlemen and generate yourself any niche theme at all.
It's funny to see early Stable Diffusion threads go from "lol we have the power to see EVERYBODY naked" to "ok this is boring now" over the course of just two years.
A sandwich you make yourself never tastes as good as one made by someone else. When you know exactly how it was constructed, by the time you take a bite you already know what to expect. Nothing is left to the imagination. There's no thrill of having your expectations challenged and discovering new flavors.
(The best tasting sandwich is the one you steal from the workplace refrigerator. Then, the thrill is in the chase.)
True if you are fiddling with the whole work. No one would expect to find that entertaining immediately after generation - maybe a year out after you forget it.
For now the prompts are deliberate creations of mind but in due time they could be largely auto generated (perhaps even blurred from the user) like feathers in a cap you collect and never have to look at. They will learn how to surprise us to a delightful degree with levers that don't reveal all the magic.
Seems to me like it's the listening bots that are the problem, rather than the AI-generated music? And presumably, fraudulent listening bots were a problem well before now. I suppose there's a case for removal if the only listeners were bots...
The flood began years ago with low-priced ghostwriting services.
I'd venture to say that most of the non-fiction ebooks, and especially the best-sellers for Kindle, are published by multi-nom-de-plume "grindset" publishers.
In 2017, a 10,000-word "booklet" on any non-fiction topic cost $200. That usually took about ten days from order to completion. The content was pretty much the same you'd now get via LLMs.
Pondering an AI book blurb expander/review reverse engineerer
Take the blurb and some reviews of a book you're interested in, feed it to an AI, and let it write your own version.
Could be fun.
Of, course a lot of blurbs and reviews have nothing to to with the book in question...
That is going to be the new threat. There will be bots that can sign-up for new accounts and pass the 'are you human' test. The only defense left is credit card or government ID verification.
Maybe it means books weren't all that important and they should indeed have been blog posts all along, like on substack. For example as Sam Bankman-Fried has said: "I think, if you wrote a book, you f---ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post."
> I think, if you wrote a book, you f---ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.
pardon my french but this is one of the dumbest fucking things i've ever read which makes complete sense given where it's coming from but christ almighty nobody should be taking this crap to heart.
Though I have read a few non-fiction books that probably could have been condensed into a single chapter. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much of a market for mini-books like that.
For that matter, I've also read fantasy novels that were longer than the entire Lord of the Rings and might have been better as a shorter novella.
I cannot tell if I'm the victim of Poe's law right now. If this is satire, it is brilliant. If it's not, I highly suggest taking a long hard look in the mirror.
For me the primary issue has been the words, the lexicon, the cadence; it's flat. Seems like writers have learned to write and learned what's right, they've been writing and not reading. There's not much exploration of the form, it's all so grammatically correct. Maybe it's the fault of the editors or typesetters, if those still exist. It's boring, either way.
Secondly it's the themes. Struggle and oppression have always been plot drivers, but it seems like a vast majority of works published in the last decade are just slight variations on "oppressed person struggles to exist within the System, then finds a way to overcome; The End." The Hero's Journey highly compressed, lossily.
Luckily there are hundreds of years and countless intriguing novels written before all this, more than I could ever hope to read in my lifetime. Maybe this is what it is like to age: to recognize truly that nothing is new under the sun; so, go forth by going back, seek that which was once new in its time.