by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
The only reason why I didn’t endup a billionaire as part of the Internet / Web revolution is I’m writer of words not of code. But for that, I would be living a life of hookers and blow to this day.
So, with the advent of the LLM revolution, I find myself in a similar situation because I’m becoming a regular fucking “prompt engineer” because of how I’m using LLMs in the context of developing my novel.
As I’ve said before, I usually flesh out scenes before I write them in the guise of a Scene Summary. Using LLMs, I’ve managed to reduce the time working on a scene summary from a few hours to a few minutes. Of course, I had to get over my natural inclination to just obsess over making the scene summary perfect. I’ve generally decided that when the scenes summary is just good enough to get the job done, I move on to the next thing.
But I think any advantage I have because of developing a novel via LLMs will be brief and ultimately moot. I think in the end the entire notion of professional writing is going to be so revolutionized that it will be like the transition from horse and buggy to cars.
There may still be writers, but probably any professional writers will be artisanal in nature. They probably will be playwrights. Every other form of writer will be mooted by the eventual rise of Her-like technology. Actors, director and writers in any form of *recorded* media will be mooted pretty soon, the way things are going.
There may be some entropy in the system that slows this down, but given how the DGA gave up so easily and the the Hollywood Suits have the high ground when it comes to the WGA — things aren’t looking so great.
But I am known for my “hysterical doom shit” and it’s possible that I’m wrong. I’m wrong all the time, afterall.
Yet, I do think we need to realize that if LLMs are helping some dumbass like me be a much better novelist by helping me develop faster, that a lot of people a lot lazier than me are just going to shrug and let LLMs do all their writing for them and, in the end, Netflix will be more a database of actor body scans hooked up to Her-like technology than it is a studio.
Anyway. Enjoy these waning days of Hollywood while you can.
