As a writer, people thinking about LLms writing a book-length story don’t realise it’s in the wrong problem space.
LLMs can solve equations and write code, like make a React web page.
So they assume “a story is just an equation, we just need to get the LLM to write an equation”. Wrong imo.
Storytelling is above language in the problem space. Storytelling can be done in multiple methods - visual (images), auditory (music), characters (letters and language) and gestural (using your body, such as a clown or a mime, Im thinking of Chaplin or Jacques Tati). That means storytelling exists above language, not as a function of it. If you agree with the Noah Harari vision of things, which I do, then storytelling is actually deeply connected somehow to our level of awareness and it seems to emerge with consciousness.
Which means that thinking that an LLM that can understand story because it understands language is… foolish.
Storytelling lives in a problem space above language. Thinking you can get an LLM to tell a story because you can get it to write a sentence is a misunderstanding of what problem space stories are in.
It’s the same as thinking that if an LLM can write a React web app it can invent brand new and groundbreaking computer science.
I agree. Language manipulation is a projection of something higher order. LLMs can shuffle the projection but they clearly cannot go over the gap to the higher order thinking.
LLMs can solve equations and write code, like make a React web page.
So they assume “a story is just an equation, we just need to get the LLM to write an equation”. Wrong imo.
Storytelling is above language in the problem space. Storytelling can be done in multiple methods - visual (images), auditory (music), characters (letters and language) and gestural (using your body, such as a clown or a mime, Im thinking of Chaplin or Jacques Tati). That means storytelling exists above language, not as a function of it. If you agree with the Noah Harari vision of things, which I do, then storytelling is actually deeply connected somehow to our level of awareness and it seems to emerge with consciousness.
Which means that thinking that an LLM that can understand story because it understands language is… foolish.
Storytelling lives in a problem space above language. Thinking you can get an LLM to tell a story because you can get it to write a sentence is a misunderstanding of what problem space stories are in.
It’s the same as thinking that if an LLM can write a React web app it can invent brand new and groundbreaking computer science.
It can’t. Not for now anyway.