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I TAKE IT BACK, GO BACK TO FUCKING THE HOUSE!

(https://secretfanspace.dreamwidth.org/2511.html?thread=3560655#cmt3560655)

Welcome back! Chat fandom, weird internet stuff, creative work, games, books, anything! Meme listens, and sometimes even replies!

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From: (Anonymous)

Dan is curious about meme's views on a disagreement with danfriend!

We were talking about advances in LLMs for writing, particularly stuff like the Mistral SLMs designed to perform well at RPing, and whether you could potentially finetune a model and train it to finish WIPs or to write stuff.

Dan thinks you could really use it to churn productivity numbers for stuff like your typical Harlequin/M&B, some erotica. I'm of the view a lot of it is tropey and cookie cutter and that's actually not a bad thing, it's what people are looking out for. When I pick up these books, I definitely don't want to be surprised. I want it to just deliver what it says on the tin. It's like a comfort read.

Danfriend thinks it's misogynistic to suggest romance could be easily farmed out to a finetuned model. We both acknowledge I don't think it can be done wholesale, more as a way of simplifying the writing process, with the writer then editing what the model produces to make it better, more relevant, and so on.

There's a secondary issue about whether readers will hate it if they know it's AI. I don't really have a strong view on this one.

Is dan being a bit too dismissive of romances?

From: (Anonymous)

SD

I guess to contrast, I feel it doesn't work so well for SFF because it feels like there's a band of SFF readers who are in it for some degree of freshness/newness, and by definition, that's unlikely to come out of a finetuned model, though I guess you could maybe be really good at prompting. In general it just seems like what you want for this are 'by the numbers' reads that churn out cookie cutter, fun, competent comfort reads that people devour. That's not always SFF.

From: (Anonymous)

DD

Most books already read like they're written by AI, to me. You could absolutely churn them out. I don't know why anyone would want to or why anyone would read them, but if people will pay for the average nyt bestseller, they'll pay for some crap a computer coughed up. 99.9% of everything is shit. Every genre. The end.

From: (Anonymous)

DYRT

I guess that's what I was thinking - people kind of seem to want to? I've gone over the biblios of some M&B/Harlequin authors and they're basically so cookie cutter! It doesn't mean they're not done with effort because I'm sure they are but it feels like a niche where you know your audience just wants a particular set of things put together, executed reasonably well. It would help you accelerate production, or at least make it a less tiring side-hustle.

Thinking also here of the infamous authors who made so much writing dinosaur porn they quit their day jobs. Literally just formulaic "fucked by the T-rex" or whatever, insert new dinosaur.

From: (Anonymous)

For Harlequins that would probably work? They're shorter and follow a template more. And there's a lot of slop on kindle unlimited that they could probably match.

For longer, "non-genre" romances, I don't think it would work that well. The strength of the romance genre -- the aspect that got me hooked and that in my experience many fans are hypersensitive to -- is the emotionality of the characters. Very often one or both of the characters has a problem or trauma that they need to overcome, and because the plot is "these two goobers fall in love and get together" there is lots of space for developing their emotions. The voice of the characters is extremely important, and perfecting the relationship development with realistic back slips is key. The best books usually have characters taking actions spurred partly by their unconscious needs, and that's a harder for an AI to capture.

So could you have AI write a romance? Sure. But I think it's unlikely to write one that would be widely recommended or circulated by fans in the subgenre.

From: (Anonymous)

> So could you have AI write a romance? Sure. But I think it's unlikely to write one that would be widely recommended or circulated by fans in the subgenre.

Do you feel AI can't even do an initial draft that is edited? Because I don't think even Harlequins can take an AI draft off the bat. It'd need reworking. Or is the contention here that AI would be so bad at this you're better off just doing your draft yourself?

From: (Anonymous)

Yes, I think trying to add emotional arcs for your characters post-hoc is unlikely to be successful. And instructing AI to add them in the first draft would give results too unsubtle to improve.