Veteran journalists Nicholas Gage, 84, and Nicholas Basbanes, 81, who live near each other in the same Massachusetts town, each devoted decades to reporting, writing and book authorship.
Gage poured his tragic family story and search for the truth about his mother’s death into a bestselling memoir that led John Malkovich to play him in the 1985 film “Eleni.” Basbanes transitioned his skills as a daily newspaper reporter into writing widely-read books about literary culture.
Basbanes was the first of the duo to try fiddling with AI chatbots, finding them impressive but prone to falsehoods and lack of attribution. The friends commiserated and filed their lawsuit earlier this year, seeking to represent a class of writers whose copyrighted work they allege “has been systematically pilfered by” OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft.
“It’s highway robbery,” Gage said in an interview in his office next to the 18th-century farmhouse where he lives in central Massachusetts.
With ever-growing context windows, I have a feeling that it will only be a matter of time before it forces us to adapt. ChatGPT-4o is somewhat intimidating already, though I haven’t used it as extensively as you have.
But at the same time, I really would prefer to be wrong about that.
I’ve used it a fair bit. The extra context helps with things like getting facts straight, but it doesn’t help with coming back to themes or the things that really make a story hit, you know? Even with the extra context, I still find the stories get worse and worse as they get longer.
I do think that a skilled author (better than me - I’m not awful but I’m no professional) could get a better output, but that doesn’t cut the author out of the loop there.
That sort of thing can be handled by the framework outside of the AI’s literal context window. I did some tinkering with some automated story-writing stuff a while back, just to get some experience with LLM APIs, and even working with an AI that had only a few thousand tokens’ context I was able to get some pretty decent large-scale story structure. The key is to have the AI work in the same way that some human authors do; have them first generate an outline for the story, write up some character biographies, do revisions of those things, and only once a bunch of that stuff is done should it start writing actual prose.
I’m familiar with that. Not in quite that way because our app is for roleplaying where there isn’t a prewritten story but we use a database to pull relevant info into context. You can definitely help it, but you need author chops to do it well.
Which means maybe this is a tool that could help good writers write faster, but it won’t make a poor writer into a good one. If for no reason other than you need to know how to steer and correct the output.