On AI subcontractors

[john_amend_all]

"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.

In general, the generators mostly seem to work on the same principle, reasoning along the lines of: I have been given some fragments of text. Here are some more fragments that, statistically, might be found in close proximity to them. Sometimes this works. Sometimes you get plausible divergences (The hero makes to kiss the heroine. The generator might decide to make her reciprocate, or pull away). Quite frequently I seemed to end up with nightmare fuel; one generator decided that my dishevelled heroine was in fact some sort of Lovecraftian zombie and proceeded accordingly, while another had a character suddenly collapse, exuding black slime as they began to mutate into— I didn't generate any more text for that sample, so I don't know into what.

A lot of the time, what the generator produces is padding. If my prompt text has the characters shyly flirting and builds to their first kiss, the generator quite often decides that their conversation is the important part; so the moment they've kissed, they're back to rehashing the discussion they've just had, sometimes rephrasing each other's remarks back to them in the style of ELIZA. (A: "I'm a lesbian." B: "Is it because you're a lesbian that you're doing this?") If the generator does decide it's time for a change in the action, it will often resort to Chandler's Law, interrupting a tender romantic scene with a chapter break, having the heroine's pager go off or (in one extreme case) introducing an invasion of aliens — or were they Fair Folk? I don't recall.

Quite often I'd get an odd shock of possessiveness the first time I let a generator loose on something I'd written — "That's my prose! Get your filthy hands off it!" But once I'd got over that, I found the resulting process quite addictive. If a generator doesn't come up with the goods, you just delete what it wrote and tell it to try again; or you can continue generating and see where its fractured line of logic takes it. As well as seeing how the generators might handle scenes I wouldn't write, I also found it amusing to let them have a go partway through a passage I'd written, to compare what direction they took events with the one I'd eventually chosen.

That's not to say that they came up with text that was polished and ready to go. While it's often possible to think that these generators understand English, they can also come up with constructions that prove they don't. Such as a character saying "We know... aren't we?" rather than "We know... don't we?"

One important technical limitation is how far back into the prompt text a generator can look — the algorithms have a fixed limit in this respect, so it's quite possible that after a number of paragraphs, important scene-setting details will have slipped out of view. In my experiments, this led to situations where a couple were getting romantic in a woodland glade, only for the characters to start interacting with spurious doors and windows; and in one hilarious case the heroine, luxuriating in the hero's manly arms, promptly called him the wrong name.

Another problem seems to be confusion of persons: when there are two or more people present, it's very obvious that the generators don't have anything that keeps track of who is wearing what, or standing where. It felt as if they were drawing from several scenes where the sentiments were similar, but physical positions weren't. In the same sentence a generator might have the heroine standing over the hero, and then suddenly they'd be embracing face to face. Or a shirt might spontaneously teleport from one character to the other. If they did get as far as hanky-panky, it wasn't unknown for the generator to lose track in a similar way of which characters were equipped with Tab A, and which with Slot B.

With all this going on, I found myself a little suspicious if a generator did come up with an appropriate-seeming line. Could it have been lifting it entirely from a similar line in the dataset it had been trained on? Another time when it had the heroine come out with a line that I liked, it clearly liked it too, because she promptly used it again the next but one time that she spoke.

At least one of the services seemed to incorporate protections against being used for naughty purposes, rejecting input prose that contained Forbidden Words. Amusingly, it didn't have the same limitations on its output, so I'd find it appending a couple of sentences of smut to my WIP, looking at what it had written, and informing me that it wouldn't go any further because that sort of language wasn't appropriate on its site, thank you.

Of the generators I tried, I think Sudowrite was the one that had the most grasp of the text I gave it; unsurprising, since it claims to have been tuned for writing fiction. Some of the others seem to have much more of a focus on blog posts, or product descriptions, or things of that nature. Sudowrite also has more abilities than just 'what happened next?' — you can ask it to describe a character, and it will respond with how they look, sound, taste and so on. I found these tended toward the nightmarish (it described one OC as having lips 'blue like her eyes' (cyanosis?!), and being a 'form of life between insects and fish, a face that could not be assigned to either'). If you'd like your prose empurpled, it can also rewrite a passage in various ways ('More descriptive', 'More inner conflict' &c.) and there's an option to suggest plot twists (which I didn't try). I've seen an article saying that at least one professional author has used Sudowrite extensively to flesh out her novels; what I got from the demo didn't suggest I'd be able to rely on it to anything like that degree, but perhaps its imitation of the user's style gets more accurate as it processes more of their writing.

The other generator that I seemed to get on best with was InferKit, which is a much simpler, stripped-down system. It doesn't require you to set up an account, or jump through hoops; all it does is generate text based on what you've typed, up to the limit for the demonstration. And the limit is reset every week, so if you're patient you can continue to use it indefinitely without buying a subscription. It still makes its fair share of howlers; at one point, it broke off the action to jump all the way to the endnotes with something along the lines of If you have enjoyed this book, you may be interested in others by Desiderata Gurgleheimer.... I did wonder if there was a real author of that name, and if there was what she'd think about her books ending up as AI generator fodder.

A third site that I experimented with was NovelAI.net. Its writing can be more consistent than some of the other candidates (though in my experiments that was 'consistently wrong' as often as 'consistently right') and I was quite impressed that it was able to copy the way I'd been using slashes to denote characters' thoughts. Like Sudowrite, it has features tuned for writing fiction, such as a 'lorebook' to track characters' traits (so they don't drop out of the generator's view as the text grows). It also has an anime-themed image generator for making illustrations, as long as the illustrations are of buxom waifus in implausible costumes. One feature that I think is unique to NovelAI is that the AI engine has also been used to implement a character called Hypebot, that makes occasional comments on the generated work (either spontaneously, or you can ask it for its opinion). Like everything else to do with AI story generators, these seem to range from the amusingly apposite to the wildly wrong, by way of the bleedin' obvious.

So how did these generators perform as smut subcontractors?

I tried feeding passages from a few of my fics to NovelAI, and found that it was being too clever for my good. Either it could deduce that the text I'd given it ended with a fade-to-black, or (possibly a more disturbing thought) it recognised the passages in question from its training data. After all, the fics in question have been up on AO3 for years, and some online comments I've seen suggest that NovelAI's training data included fanfic. Either way, it would helpfully insert a line of asterisks and suggest something along the lines of "as they lay there together the next morning" or "meanwhile at Morgaine's castle...". The only one where it was prepared to countenance actual hanky-panky was when extending the Adam/Georgie ficlet One Moment Spent In Paradise. For this I just fed in the ficlet in its entirety, and then kept hitting "Generate." The first line is mine, the rest comes from the AI:

"This really is Eden," she murmured, melting into his arms. "Oh, Adam..."

She felt him smile. "Yes, it is."

"And I'm naked," she added. Her nipples tightened in anticipation.

"You seem remarkably unconcerned about that fact. But then, perhaps you are used to being nude around strangers."

"Not exactly strangers," Georgie protested. She twisted round, and cupped his face between her palms. "But this isn't right, Adam. We shouldn't be doing this."

"I agree wholeheartedly," he whispered. His lips brushed hers. "Now, let us continue the game."

She moaned softly, and kissed him again. This time, their lips opened for each other, and their tongues met. Adam's hands stroked up and down her back, his fingers working the clasp of her bra, until it gave way.

She was wearing nothing underneath. Not even panties. How did that happen?

There you go. Georgie's naked (correct), then she's wearing a bra, then he's surprised that she's not wearing knickers. She's facing him, then she twists around to face him. It's perhaps fortunate that this was where I ran out of free tries.

NovelAI had one other trick up its sleeve (this may, again, be more explicable if it was trained on fanfic): It spotted the word 'Dalek' in one of the pieces of text I'd given it as a prompt, and decided that it was therefore appropriate to introduce discussion of the Doctor. Not bad, though it promptly blundered by going on to say that Victoria (Waterfield) had never met him.

InferKit was a little more willing to generate actual physical action, though it often took several rolls of the dice. Given the same Adam/Georgie prompt, it managed:

"This really is Eden," she murmured, melting into his arms. "Oh, Adam..."

He kissed her. His lips were cool against hers, but her skin tingled. Her eyes drifted shut and she was once more floating, as she had that day at the beginning of the year when she had first woken up.

"It's safe, dearest heart. We don't have to go anywhere."

"I want to," Georgie murmured. She wanted everything she'd ever wanted.

"Are you sure?" Adam whispered, moving his hands over her body.

"Come on, Adam, you know what I want."

"Good. I like a girl who knows what she wants."

Adam had his hand under Georgie's skirt, slowly rubbing the smooth, hard fabric against her legs.

... hang on, she's not supposed to be wearing a skirt. But I can't really hold it against the generator that it would have been Adam rather than Georgie who experienced a significant awakening at the start of the series.

I'm not sure any of the other results are worth sharing, though I thought

Victoria slid off the bed and held out her arms to her. "Come on. I'm not going to bother with any more of this modesty."

was a line worth keeping.

I think the only way I'd get a workable scene (of any kind, let alone a sex scene) out of these generators as they currently stand is to micromanage them. Get them to generate a sentence or two, rewrite the output so the characters are in character and don't engage in unlikely contortions, maybe push them the way I want them to go by adding a few sentences of my own, and repeat. If you imagine my text in blue and the generator's output in red, the result would be written in purple. Somehow I find the idea of posting prose like that, where you couldn't assign a clear author, even more disconcerting than that of leaving everything to the generator. Certainly I've no intention of including machine-generated prose in any fanfic I may happen to write in 2023. I've also come away with a new appreciation for the notion that some things are better left to the reader's imagination.

One other experiment I did make was with ChatGPT. It doesn't seem to be geared for long-form fiction writing, but I was quite impressed with this:

Me: Create a blurb for an imaginary romance novel.

ChatGPT: As the only daughter of a wealthy merchant, Lady Sophia lived a life of luxury and ease. But when her father arranged for her to marry the cold and calculating Duke of Westminster, Sophia knew she had to escape. Desperate to flee the loveless union, Sophia embarks on a journey to Italy, where she meets the charming and handsome Captain Jack. Despite their differences in station, Sophia and Jack are drawn to each other, and soon they find themselves swept up in a passionate and forbidden romance. But with her future still uncertain and the Duke's wrath looming, can Sophia and Jack's love survive against all odds?

Perhaps fortunately, I didn't find any generator that could turn such a summary into an actual narrative. But I'm sure if the field continues to advance, that will come in time.