john_amend_all

lurking_latinist wondered who the AI-generated companions Duncan, Lloyd and Stardust might be.

I created some prompt text for the generator (basically, taking the companions' names and capsule biographies from TV Tropes, for Susan up to Harry). Then I'd add the requested character's name and hit the Big Blue Button.

While I'm still on the subject of AI, I recall seeing a Spectator article along 'Journalists are all doomed, we'll be replaced by AI text generators' lines. What caught my eye was the prediction that fanfic would be one of the first areas of writing to succumb to the robot hordes. I can certainly see a place for robot-generated fanfic (particularly for someone whose interest was in a niche pairing *cough* Jamie/Sam *cough*), but since fanfic is a hobby that scratches a writer's itch I find it hard to believe that there wouldn't still be humans doing it the old-fashioned way.

(I did once try to get an AI to generate Lucie/Karen, priming it with the text of Professional Development. It just output more bickering, except that each time Karen insulted Lucie she'd conclude her remark with a kiss).

"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."

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.

So how did these generators perform as smut subcontractors?