On AI subcontractors

"The museums are full of paintings done by robots under the 'direction' of the nominal human painter. Novelists dictate the broad outlines of their books to robotic 'assistants' who return with complete manuscripts, having 'amplified' certain sections."

— Isaac Asimov's Caliban by Roger McBride Allen (published 1993)

I remember saying, a few years ago:

Also, it would be nice now and again to find a subcontractor to write sex scenes rather than fading to black.

For that particular scenario, it seems 2023 could be my lucky year. There are now a number of online services (seemingly based on variants of the GPT-3 AI model) where you give them a passage of text, click a button, and the computer will generate a few sentences saying what happened next. Click again, and another few sentences emerge, and so on. Most of them operate on a subscription model where you get the first hit (or a certain number of outputs) free, but after that you have to hand over regular cash payments, the amount corresponding to how many words you want per month. I suppose at least you get the words delivered, rather than having to send a large, muscular Goon round to collect them.

So, get your characters ready for smooching, hand your manuscript over to the generator, and sit back as it appends the perfect love scene? I decided to sample the delights of some of these services, and found it wasn't quite that straightforward.

( Adventures in AI )

So how did these generators perform as smut subcontractors?

( This bit is reasonably safe for work )

( cut for ?smut )

( back to sanity )

( here we go again )

( conclusion )