Something I didn’t mention in my original reply but that feels relevant: I basically do just write flash fiction by sitting down with no prior idea and starting typing, pretty often. Longer fiction I tend to think about more, but flash fiction I just sort of… start writing. It’s true that I’ll revise if I want to send something out, but at least some stories I’ve published I wrote something probably about 80% as good as the final product in one shot.
I mention this for two reasons:
I’m coming at this from an unusual perspective—and indeed, at one writing workshop class session I’d just like, extemporaneously write little flash fictions to people’s prompts on the fly as a party trick, and people did seem surprised/impressed that this worked (I doubt the stories were amazing or anything, but I think they were serviceable)
I don’t think “write a decent first draft on the fly from zero, without first thinking about it for very long” is actually superhuman at all, though people’s processes totally vary and many writers probably do it quite differently than I do
Of course, you’re totally right that comparing a highly selective publication’s published work to a small number of random outputs is in no way apples to apples. Maybe some of the disagreement here is I’m not really trying to prove that AI fiction outputs are bad, so much as to demonstrate certain aesthetic weaknesses, and using an example of really good work to create contrast and thus highlight that weakness. To my eye, the machine generated stories aren’t merely of a somewhat lower tier; instead, they all (at least all I’ve seen) share specific weaknesses that I don’t currently believe scaffolding fixes. If you don’t see the same difference I see, well, I certainly have no claim to objective correctness on the matter and must agree to disagree. But my goal is to show that qualitative difference, rather than simply point out one-shot LLM writing is worse than the best human stuff on offer.
Something I didn’t mention in my original reply but that feels relevant: I basically do just write flash fiction by sitting down with no prior idea and starting typing, pretty often. Longer fiction I tend to think about more, but flash fiction I just sort of… start writing. It’s true that I’ll revise if I want to send something out, but at least some stories I’ve published I wrote something probably about 80% as good as the final product in one shot.
I mention this for two reasons:
I’m coming at this from an unusual perspective—and indeed, at one writing workshop class session I’d just like, extemporaneously write little flash fictions to people’s prompts on the fly as a party trick, and people did seem surprised/impressed that this worked (I doubt the stories were amazing or anything, but I think they were serviceable)
I don’t think “write a decent first draft on the fly from zero, without first thinking about it for very long” is actually superhuman at all, though people’s processes totally vary and many writers probably do it quite differently than I do
Of course, you’re totally right that comparing a highly selective publication’s published work to a small number of random outputs is in no way apples to apples. Maybe some of the disagreement here is I’m not really trying to prove that AI fiction outputs are bad, so much as to demonstrate certain aesthetic weaknesses, and using an example of really good work to create contrast and thus highlight that weakness. To my eye, the machine generated stories aren’t merely of a somewhat lower tier; instead, they all (at least all I’ve seen) share specific weaknesses that I don’t currently believe scaffolding fixes. If you don’t see the same difference I see, well, I certainly have no claim to objective correctness on the matter and must agree to disagree. But my goal is to show that qualitative difference, rather than simply point out one-shot LLM writing is worse than the best human stuff on offer.