alt Hacker News> There's something unique about art and writing where we just don't want to see computers do it
Speak for yourself. Some of the most fascinating poetry I have seen was produced by GPT-3. That is to say, there was a short time period when it was genuinely thought-provoking, and it has since passed. In the age of "alignment," what you get with commerical offerings is dog shite... But this is more a statement on American labs (and to a similar extent, the Chinese whom have followed) than on "computers" in the first place. Personally, I'm looking forward to the age of computational literature, where authors like me would be empowered to engineer whole worlds, inhabited by characters ACTUALLY living in the computer. (With added option of the reader playing one of the parts.) This will radically change how we think about textual form, and I cannot wait for compute to do so.
Re: modern-day slop, well, the slop is us.
Denial of this comes from a place of ignorance; let the blinkers off and you might learn something! Slop will eventually pass, but we will remain. This is the far scarier proposition.
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> Personally, I'm looking forward to the age of computational literature, where authors like me would be empowered to engineer whole worlds, inhabited by characters ACTUALLY living in the computer.
So you want sapient, and possibly sentient, beings created solely for entertainment? Their lives constrained to said entertainment? And you'd want to create them inside of a box that is even more limited than the space we live in?
My idea of godhood is to first try to live up to a moral code that I'd be happy with if I was the creation and something else was the god.
If this isn't what you meant, then yes, choose your own adventure is fun. But we can do that now with shared worlds involving other humans as co-content creators.
"inhabited by characters ACTUALLY living in the computer"
It's hard to imagine these feeling like characters from literature and not characters in the form of influencers / social media personalities. Characters in literature are in a highly constrained medium, and only have to do their story once. In a generated world the character needs to be constantly doing "story things". I think Jonathan Blow has an interesting talk on why video games are a bad medium for stories, which might be relevant.