AI Novels Are Coming

It's about to get a lot easier to write a decent novel. I'd guess that within 1-3 years, being an "author" of a novel is going to become AI prompting combined with verbal narration.

You'll start with an outline and then have long sessions talking to an AI where you describe the details of what you want. Things like:

• Historical context
• Character pasts
• Character interactions
• Setting specifics
• Vibes you want to convey
• Big ideas you want to explore
• Etc.

A new way to write ​

As an author, you'll set up the outline of the story in an AI prompt structure, and that structure alone will be good enough for the new AIs to fill in the blanks and ship a decent novel.

But the best authors will only start with that as scaffolding, and then they'll spend hours upon hours describing settings, environments, aesthetics, and—most importantly—key character components and interactions between the characters.

The AI will then take all that custom narrative and description you've provided, which could be tens of thousands of words, and it'll weave that into the scaffolding you provided in the beginning.

People are going to be able to put out novels like Game of Thrones in a matter of hours or days instead of years or decades. Good authors will be able to put out high-quality, cohesive content around a set of loved characters in a couple of days by just narrating to the AI the different events and different interactions that they want to highlight.

Existing obstacles ​

We almost have the tech for this now, but the creativity isn’t quite there yet. And most importantly the context size isn't there yet.

The key limitation that we have right now is the inability for an AI to hold an entire multi-book novel or series in its brain all at once, and keep all the character detail and plot lines in context as it’s creating new scenes.

Once AI can do that and actually write in a halfway compelling way, we will see an absolute explosion of good novels. And of course this also applies to other types of creative work like screenplays, scripts, etc.

It’s about to be an extra extraordinary time to be an author, but also a reader.

AI Outlines + Verbal Narration -> Complete Novels.