In 2028, will an AI be able to generate a full high-quality novel to a prompt?
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IE "Write a distopian sci-fi book about an AI going rouge". It should be more or less comparable to a professional human writen-novel, although it doesn't have to pass a full Turing Test as long as it's pretty good. The AI doesn't have to be available to the public, as long as it's confirmed to exist. Has to be be at least 50,000 words.

I will not trade in this market.

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Related: https://manifold.markets/CDBiddulph/when-will-i-mistake-an-aigenerated-f3faadb1a460?r=Q0RCaWRkdWxwaA

The main difference is that it's about short stories rather than novels, and has more rigorous resolution criteria

predicts YES

Does anyone know if there are samples or people who have tried to use GPT-4 max context length for writing a novel? Or similar projects with other models more trained for creative writing? I’d love to read them

The NaNoGenMo project might end up creating something that would arguably fit this criteria: https://nanogenmo.github.io/

From some cursory browsing, it seems like all the projects are one-off experiments that aren't actually trying to be "high-quality" novels. So probably not yet.

@ASomewhatRudeParakeet good catch! Ya, nothing there seems to be an attempt at long-form AI-gen text, but it seems reasonable that someone might try to post something on there in the next year or two

I confirm that it exists, can we resolve it to YES now?

@a2bb What's the novel?

@Shump Any new novel will do. Since a decent novel would be profitable to have under someone's name, and (even if it's copyrightable) much less so when branded as "AI-generated" (because today (and at 2028 even more so) everyone knows that AI-generated means boring crap), that person would swear that it was written, not generated, so the "author"'s word is not an evidence.

predicts YES

@a2bb AI as ghostwriter service

@a2bb That's just speculation. This market will not resolve based on speculation.

I will clarify that books written before this market was created ARE eligible here, as opposed to my usual rule, as long as they are revlealed to be so after the market was created.

@Shump What is not speculation?

@a2bb A reasonable level of evidence. An admission by the writer, a check by AI detection software (if those actually became good), a high quality journalistic investigation. Think something like the level of evidence required here

I feel like this comes down to the evaluation far more than the technology

I was trying to follow the criteria of the question about an AI movie. Please let me know if there are any improvements you are interesting in seeing. I think there's also space to creating a version with more objective criteria such as appearing in the NYT best sellers list.

@Shump It's possible I'm misunderstanding the movie market, but I don't think that market is going to come down to "are these movies as emotionally compelling as generally well-regarded movies" or whatever. I think if it's not, like, clearly clearly far worse than the worst movies in theaters, then it'd probably count?

Basically, I think the movie market is asking for "be comparable to a human movie-making team", whereas with books... there's a whole lot of garbage literature out there, and determining whether a given piece is too garbage to count is pretty subjective?

I dunno. This is a first impression more than a considered opinion, so maybe take it with a grain of salt.

@April The movie market says it needs to be comparable in quality to a high budget movie. There are bad big studio movies, but they all at least have a relatively high level of production quality and effort put into them. I think there might be controversy in that market if you get a movie on the level of say, emoji movie. Similarly, professional writers sometimes produce hot garbage, but they do have standards, unlike just any random book you can buy. This market simply asks if the AI can approach the level of a professional human writer.

predicts YES

@Shump I think this will be a fair market fwiw and that shump will be a good judge

How general-purpose does the AI need to be? Obviously an AI that only accepts one exact prompt wouldn't count, but should it be able to write any type of novel? Is hard coding, say, non dialogue acceptable or does everything need to be written by the AI? What about hard coding plot structures or characters?

@ASomewhatRudeParakeet It should be able to generate multiple different books, with a level of novelty comparable to that of a single human author. It doesn't need to be able to generate any kind of book, but it needs to be able to have enough variety to be more than a one-trick pony.

a professional human writen-novel

Would you care to elaborate what yard stick you're choosing for the evaluation of this market?

predicts YES

@firstuserhere For I believe that an average professional human written novel is not widely sold nor is it one of spectacular quality. Perhaps there are a dime a dozen.

So, are you holding this market to the highest of the standards that even the best writers in the world fail to match often, or are you measuring the entry bar that an unpolished writer who writes his first novel crosses?

@firstuserhere Imagine a book that could become best-selling, given good marketing and market conditions (so controlling for the fact that AI books might flood the market or become controversial).

I don't mean a random, self-published, first-time writer. I mean it has to be comparable in quality to what a financially successful human writer could write. Plus the human editing, of course. It doesn't need to be perfect. Dan Brown level is fine.