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Comment by Heterodox (hoyt-mueller) on Will LLMs supplant the field of creative writing? · 2025-02-20T23:45:42.575Z · LW · GW

The industry of portraiture dominated all painting. Photography destroyed the value proposition of portraiture by mostly invalidating talent and producing photographs in less time and more cheaply than an artist and the photograph preserved the fundamental elements that were actually desired.

A substantial fraction of artists had to shift their styles or find new work and it is one of the major causes of the shift towards styles like impressionism or surrealism.

While you're right that using AI to write your stories isn't writing - just as portrait photography isn't painting - it is still storytelling. Those who think of elaborate ways to dismiss that this still leaves the human in charge of directing, edits, rewriting, and ultimately inspiration the story invariably end up relitigating the old arguments of portrait artists painters and portrait photographers. The focus of both overlap, but they're also different. The photographer has additional concerns that the painter does not have and the same is true in reverse. This applies to literature and especially storytelling whether written by a human using a word processor, or by the long iterative process of outlining, prompting, editing, modifying, and pasting together a story.

In the end I'm certain that people will accept "AI-Assisted Writing Storytelling" and other similar artistic endeavors because they still require human input and more importantly preserve the fundamental elements that people actually desire. Another user mentioned they'd consider this something akin to making collages and that's a fair comparison, but just look up a collage on Wikipedia and it will say: Collage is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts.

Make a new word for creating stories out of artificially generated user directed word collections into well organized and edited collages that can be wholly unique and frequently indistinguishable from human writing if you want - you're right that it isn't the same art as writing but if you said it wasn't storytelling I'd have to disagree and I think history will vindicate me like it always does in these situations when artists are threatened by a new form of art assisted by technology that undercuts their value proposition. Maybe this will lead too a shift towards poetry with exotic and original structural forms and constraints (like House of Leaves) or maybe to stories that go beyond what LLM can imitate.