An interesting use case for LLMs: on-demand cozy schlock novels.

  • An interesting use case for LLMs: on-demand cozy schlock novels.
    • For example, fan fiction or formulaic romance novels.
    • These novels already aren't great literature, they're formulaic and basic.
      • What character growth happens is not novel and interesting but formulaic and predictable.
    • These schlock novels are read mostly because they are comfortable.
      • For example, reading cozy gay romance schlock novels is the way I turn my brain off and help me get ready for sleep.
    • But if you could come up with a paragraph describing what you wanted the book to be about, and could get an on-demand custom schlock novel produced, that would be fun and empowering.
    • It shouldn't be that hard, if you aren't aiming for high art but cozy schlock.
    • Last week I spent a few nights trying to get Claude to write the short story concept I sketched out as an experiment.
      • I made much more progress than I would have thought I would.
        • My strategy was to iterate with it to pick a story synopsis I liked, and then iterate on a number of options for story outlines, and then finally have it generate pages using other stories of mine as a style guide.
      • In the end I wasn't able to wrestle the model to the ground to make enough details consistent; every so often at a given stage (e.g. when converting the story outline to actual pages) it would get a little bit off and would need to be re-steered.
      • But I imagine that just very lightweight scaffolding to allow a tree of prompts, the ability to regenerate a few options for each node and pin the ones I like would get me surprisingly far.

More on this topic

From other episodes