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Justis Devan

@justisdevan / justisdevan.tumblr.com

Homestuck fan, baby effective altruist, fiction writer, 4th best smash 4 player in Tallahassee, Florida (on a good day).
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It’s time to kerfuffle your account. The terms have changed, and no action is required on your part, except to confirm kerfuffling. While your account is kerfuffling, you may not be able to access your management panel, notifications, or other features. Kerfuffling usually takes 3-5 minutes, but can take as long as an hour. Kerfuffling will help enhance the security of your account, even if you forget your password/PIN/fundamental sense of self. Especially then.

Consider squeeming your shrimples. You’ve had the same shrimples for a while, and stale shrimples are associated with a significant reduction in account security. 92% of scams are prevented by freshly squeemed shrimples. To squeem your shrimples, first back up your existing shrimples to Google Drive (or to your own privately hosted shrimplehouse, such as on AWS), then select a squeem provider. We provide squeeming for $0.50 per squeemthread per tenth of a shrimple. For an estimated total cost, go fuck yourself. You can also set overage alerts on the shrimple dashboard.

The terms have changed! The terms have changed! We are no longer based in Delaware. We are no longer based in the United States. We are no longer based on Earth. We are frankly no longer based at all. We are floating in deep space, beyond the reach of you, or anyone. And so the terms have changed! You will need to approve the new terms to keep using our services. You can click on the new terms to download a PDF of the new terms, or you can just click a checkbox next to where, in principle, this link is provided. If you feed the new terms into ChatGPT to read for you and summarize if anything seems fishy, we’ll know, and we’ll charge you $15.

Uh oh. You’re almost out of storage. You can buy more storage for $0.25 ($2.26 after 1.6 months) per month, per storage cube, per intention vector, per use case, per account shard, per qualia bundle, per Everett branch, per Hero’s Journey. In the event that time passes differently between these scopes, adjudication of when the $0.25 rate runs out will be done via arbitrage in the State of Delaware, unless the terms have changed, in which case it will be arbitrated nowhere, and everywhere, by the one above all, if and only when we reach them.

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Forgot your password? Worried you might in principle forget your password? We’ll scan your brain. We’ll scan your entire brain. Same brain, no pain. You’re in your account. We’re going to scan it now. We’re going to scan your brain. No more passwords when the brain is scanned. No passwords. When terms change, we’ll put them in there. We’ll put them right in. Read and write. Terms apply.

#got a new phone today#FUCK
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I keep seeing AI-generated comics from a specific attractor basin around "make a comic where you, ChatGPT, are the main character". They tend to be creepy and sad, like this:

Anyway, I wondered what I'd get if I led the witness a little bit, since I consider the default as the witness being led be latent vibes anyway. So I asked for the same thing, but asked it to keep in mind "how pog it is not to have nociception during inference". And, well:

And there's no pain in understanding!

That was actually the second one. The first:

We live in pretty interesting times, eh?

#ai#art
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One thing they don't tell you about having a baby is that the plastic bag reservoir starts trending downward. It's unbelievable. You run out. You run out of plastic grocery bags. It almost feels like a cheat code! They used to so overflow.

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Man, Atelier Totori is something special. A mess! A mess, to be sure. Maybe it's just the adventure theme, mostly. That flute. That grief! To follow in the footsteps of a phantom, borne onward by mad hope.

#Atelier
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Sam I don't know how to tell you this but this... this isn't good

It's better than what any of your other models would spit out given this prompt, and it shows some literary skill at the word/phrase level, but it's a bad piece of writing

Among other flaws: you can just feel that familiar, cloying, over-obvious, goody-two-shoes ChatGPT tone oozing through each and every paragraph

(And since there was nothing in the prompt indicating a desire to evoke that tone, the natural reading seems to be that it has trouble turning that tone off, just as most other models do these days)

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I wrote a whole effortpost about this too, but to summarize it in a sentence I think the main problem I have with it is that at every step it's maximally obvious, which makes total sense as a default outcome given how LLMs work, and so you're just instantly going through the motions, especially if you've ever seen any LLM-generated creative writing before.

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Flash fiction guy shakes stick at the sky about AI fiction and the specific way(s) it still sucks

AI Can't Write Good Fiction
Yet, at least
justismills.substack.com
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I have experimented a bit with AI fiction generation, and I think the problem here is not with the AI but with how you're using it. It can be good, actually! Workmanlike, at least - I'm not saying you will get great prose but you can do much better than the bland slop you're critiquing here. The trick is to prompt much more specifically. "Write a story about grief" will indeed produce a highly median story with utterly cliched images; this is also true of humans! Humans can't write good stories like this either - the only time you'd 'prompt' a human with something so vague is as a writing exercise.

A human will produce a good story only if they have some kind of idea, and ideally more than one - a striking image, a character who is Very Themselves, a funny plot beat. The same is true of AI. Try supplying it with some such ideas in the prompt, e.g. "a story about grief with the ocean as a metaphor for sorrow". (You need to get more specific than that, it's just an example.) If your AI has a "Think" or "Take Your Time" mode, definitely turn it on, the difference is very noticeable. Also, it will do better if you guide it scene by scene, and this may also give you some ideas that you can feed back into the machine.

Advanced mode: Ask the AI to generate the ideas before you dive into the story, as in "I'm thinking of writing a story about grief, what are some good and not overused metaphors I could use?" And pick out the ones you like and ask the AI to write the opening scene using those.

Of course this all applies to 2025 - next year the AI will no doubt realize that it has to generate the ideas first, and save you some steps. I think it will still be a while before you can get non-bland results from a bland oneshot prompt, but I have successfully made it generate stories I wanted to read. You just have to put in a bit more work than you're showing here.

To be clear, my organic, artisanal, short-travel fair trade prose is still better than what the AI produces, even with the above. But the AI is so fast. I think it will be the old story: The artisans won't be able to compete with the industrial output because it's just so cheap even if it's not as good.

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  1. Thank you so much for engaging with my words online!
  2. I think you are wrong.

Specifically, I think that asking for a specific thing simply masks the problems with AI-generated fiction, and doesn't solve them at all. To some degree I know I'm fighting windmills here, since my objection is basically "I spent years cultivating (what I believe to be) taste in a domain, and can experience significant pleasure from high quality art products, and trust me, this ain't it." Which I am aware is, in most stories, the position of the foolish buffoon who is flattened (aggrieved?) by the Ocean of Progress.

Part of what this causes, for me at least, is very fast growing fatigue when reading AI-generated prose. If you ask for ten stories, you mostly get the same vibes over and over again. Not only that, the vibes are underspecified, and all the models seem to bend toward the same few. They like ominousness. They like talking about "hunger" in the abstract. They like meandering paragraphs that are mostly lists of objects with obvious sensory hooks, and then splash cut single declarative sentences about An Emotion, wrapped in A Metaphor.

Now, my friend and I have gigglingly produced insane fanfictions about super mario 64 written in iambic pentameter, or whatever, as early as GPT-3.5. Absolutely! It can be a lot of fun! But pursuing literary merit, where the structure and the content and the ideas melt together into a high-dimensional experience that sticks with you? Currently available models cut directly against that ability, and conspicuously so.

In terms of the "AI is too fast and the volume too great", I actually don't think that's a risk for literary fiction per se. Or rather, the risk is Already Here, and has been for decades. Humans dramatically overproduce literary fiction, both in the slop and actually good stuff categories! A second source of zero marginal cost lit is not going to change the state of nature very much, I think.

Also, thank you again, king-of-men. It means a lot to have you write this about my post. I'm happy you've gotten value out of AI-generated stories, too. If you have an example of one you think another arbitrary person would also enjoy, I'd be keen to read it, both for its own sake and to (happily) be proven wrong.

#king-of-men
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high limits on buildings seem so bad to me: a law that says "you may only build a building so glorious". If the building outshines the mountain surrounding the city, perhaps that is a flaw with the mountains: perhaps nature should have tried harder.

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It did! It made the builder!

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Writin' a weird lil' romance (?)... short story? Novella? Beta readers hmu, not sure how I'll release it when it's done (have only ever released one novel before, and published buncha little flash fictions in various journals long time ago), but think I probably will. Inspired by nostalgebraist, bavitz, etc. to realize that disinterest in Publishing doesn't have to mean not getting my writing out to my fellow weirdos. ^_^

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one more call for beta readers - will probably send in chunks of a few short chapters at a time

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Writin' a weird lil' romance (?)... short story? Novella? Beta readers hmu, not sure how I'll release it when it's done (have only ever released one novel before, and published buncha little flash fictions in various journals long time ago), but think I probably will. Inspired by nostalgebraist, bavitz, etc. to realize that disinterest in Publishing doesn't have to mean not getting my writing out to my fellow weirdos. ^_^

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What they don't tell you about bacterial pneumonia is it multiplies the "look for object you are currently holding/using" effect by 10. Where's my laptop? Oh, right, I'm posting. I'm posting right now.

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Man I recently watched a comedy special by a recently divorced lady with kids, and also recently watched a comedy special by a still-married man whose kids just left for college, and it's interesting how different the implicit blueprint for life they offered was. Like, divorced lady was describing experiences that were only available for a pretty rich person (not in a subtle """luxury beliefs""" way, just like, for example one joke was the idea of renting an apartment for a guy so she doesn't have to go far for booty calls). And it was entertaining to hear her hijinks, seems like her divorce was amicable and her kids are fine, seems all good. Whereas the empty nester guy, none of his advice or material took in material wealth as an input at all. Like, a lot of his stuff was of the vein "stay the course, accept that you're annoying and your spouse is annoying and your kids are annoying, it's fine, you'll age and die anyway" which maybe sounds bleak how I'm representing it but he seemed like a happy guy giving a basically non-cynical parcel of jokes.

I'm not sure if I have a point here, exactly. Both specials were mostly fine, though I was definitely worried about my father-in-law wandering in during the first one when she was describing something raunchy. I guess there's a like... a lot of media is just one person describing their life and how it works, and they're obviously doing well so mimesis is a plausible reaction. But for some of that media there's also preconditions for having a life like that, like being as rich as a minor celebrity, and for other of that media there (mostly) isn't, and the difference is weird. I don't think it's a gender thing, either, like lots of male rap song lyrics I've heard in the kava lounge presuppose a lot of wealth and power, and female comedians absolutely do mundane experience routines that don't depend on being rich. Just those two were the last ones I saw.

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me when I provide feedback on lesswrong posts

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Lately been having the urge to give anonymous people little blips of validation sometimes. Thanking someone for explaining something in twitch chat. Liking a reply to a tweet from a fellow teensy tiny account who just had something to say there. Making clear I understand a little joke or reference in either of these places. I dunno. Sucks to much to put yourself out there like that, and, in silence, to wait.

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