Not a new sentiment. This is over two thousand years old:

https://www.anthologialitt.com/post/the-god-thoth-and-the-in...

Every invention is a Faustian pact. It amplifies certain things and atrophies others.

Personally I think the approach I'll take with literature is the same as other things: I'll evaluate it in its merit and not try to guess on its origin. We're already awash in people accusing actual human writing of being "AI" while meanwhile AI writing slips under the radar. It's pointless. It is what it is when it arrives at my eyeballs.

If I wrote a book I would not use the AI to craft prose, not from AI-hate but because to me it kind of defeats the purpose. I would, however, use it as a first pass proofreader and editor, and maybe as a brainstorming "rubber duck that talks back." It's pretty good at those things.

-- From the link:

“This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.”

But Thamus replied,

“Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.

For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

Here's a question. Tangential I know. "Digression!"

If you had a kid, let's say 6 years old, and they had a "super hero" they wrote stories about.

What would it mean, if you took away their creative process and replaced it with this.

Does that child have a lesser "life-experience?" Or not?

What about you?

I suppose I am sympathetic to the feeling of having weird tastes uncatered to by the market. But in that instance, why not actually try and write such stories yourself? And as a reader, what is the appeal of reading stories regurgitated by a stochastic algorithm when the possibility is there instead of connecting to another human soul?

What's the point of that? I mean, as you invent the story, you already know what happens next, even with your tree system, you're choosing what happens before the AI writes it. So what exactly do you get out of the AI writing it? The handful of sloppy details and stereotypical character traits the AI synthesizes without your explicit input? Sounds horrible. It seems like you're pivoting to "this tool is just a twist on roleplaying by yourself haha" due to the backlash in the comments and the intent has always been to write slop for others, not just yourself. The whole idea behind this makes no sense otherwise. And you know, it could have been a decent tool without the AI crap because story crafting surely can be tedious, because yes, multiple branches naturally grow from developing any creative idea really.

Yeah that's why I spend time on discords to share. You can very quickly fall into this llm psychosis adjacent place where you just go round and round

Sure, if you don't actually want to do the work of, you know, making something

I have decided that I don't want an LLM, or Joe at the bar, to write anything for me. What I do use them for, at different times, is feedback. "Here's a draft of X; where is it weak, and where is it strong?" Or, "Give me your best counterargument." I read or listen to what comes, accepting some parts, defending against others, and dismissing the rest. And then close the tab or walk away. There's time and space between those exchanges and the next time I so much as look at the draft.

This is really cool. Like a q/a system you can plug on top of your own files. I starred and will be trying it on some of markdown files. Thanks of the tip

We're setting ourselves up to the be the humans on the ship Axiom from WALL-E

I know it's easier said than done, but don't let the anti-AI crowd get to you. Would love to exchange ideas (and be emotional support if the mean comments are taking their toll)! Definitely reach out (I'm scott@ (the domain in my profile))

Yeah, I'm aware, I just think it's an unusual default for a harness to use

Yeah, I started off with looms too, and got frustrated with them.

My current hunch is that it requires a Z axis. Google Earth, for example, manages to convey quite a lot of interesting variables simply (and has maybe been underutilised as a type of UI):

- Longitude

- Latitude

- Granularity / altitude ("the same, but different")

- Paths between destinations

- On Msoft Flight Sim, a slider can amend the time (to change weather, the sun, etc). This gives you another variable to work with.

I haven't tested implementing UIs from this hunch yet, but that's where I'm at currently. It feels like there's a lot of useful parallels.

I also built a webui but it's not very fleshed out.

After all this hate I'm thinking about stripping out the ai parts of the webui and making it a manual writing tool maybe. Keep the branching and tree visualizations

sorry i'm a writer who edits... this project is genuinely interesting and i'm curious to see where it goes. i would try to market it as ML instead of AI, given the current temperature of AI in publishing and writing circles. if somebody can improve upon track changes in a git-like, narrative-tree way, then that might be super useful tool!

I just fundamentally disagree with this. On one hand, sure, you can argue that there is no direct harm caused by using LLMs to generate fiction for personal consumption. But on the other hand, I feel like there is a deep spiritual deadening that arises when we no longer must engage with the works of others to find fiction that satisfies our tastes. You have niche interests? What you want to read doesn't exist in a meaningful quantity or even at all? Great! You should write it! But you should do so yourself rather than asking a computer to regress your great idea to the mean.

As for the hate I think it's because I called it AI writing tool that brings is a crowd that I really didn't want to address or ever envision as users.

I like seeing what people create, and you've created something with some interesting features, particularly around the path map and keeping all drafts. I'm forever duplicating a paragraph and rewording it 6 or 7 times, then deleting the rest - and the next day think "no try #2 was better than the one I kept".

Ignore the haters, they're a HN rite of passage. Good luck with your writing!

Don't worry, the west coast comes online in a couple hours -- they will be positive.

I'm sorry you're getting the lash end of the whip. The rage against the (literal) machine is very high right now. I appreciate you sharing your creativity, and frankly, I am taking notes on what you've built for a related but different project.

Don't forget Hacker News is known for amazing commentary like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

> many HN users take issue with that.

It seems that the only people who are hating on this aren't even writers themselves.

But very grumpy programmers on HN who probably don't write (except probably documentation) and probably AI anyway in their READMEs and even their docs.

I think that many who are angry on here are angry on behalf of writers, I've seen a writer who is actually interested in this tool, myself included.