If the book is actually good, then what is interesting about it is that it would still be about something that humans find important and relevant, due to the LLM being trained on human cultural data.

Good question! It'd be really cool, but there are already more high quality books out than I'll be able to read in my lifetime.

They are interactive. What AI is doing with story generation is a text version of the holodeck, not just a plain old book. You can interact with the story, change its direction, explore characters and locations beyond what is provided by just a linear text. And of course you can create stories instantly about absolutely anything you want. You just throw some random ingredients at the AI and it will cook a coherent story out of them. Throw in some image generation and it'll provide you pictures of characters and locations as well. The possibilities are quite endless here. This goes way beyond just generating plain old static books.

I mean, if it is a genuinely good book, I don't care about authorship. Death of the author etc.

"I want <my favorite novel> rewritten in the style of <favorite author> but please focus more on <interesting theme>." I see so many possibilities. Passionate readers could become more like curators, sharing interesting prompts and creations.

Because someone mentioned Kafka: I'd like to know what Kafka's The Trial written in the style of a PKD novel would be like.

What if I'm a huge fan of Jules Verne or Arthur Conan Doyle. I want new books from them, but the problem is that they're long dead.

AI that's trained on their style could give me what I want.

GRRM fans also should probably think of the ways to feed ASOIF to the AI if they want to know how it ends.

Does it bring them back from the dead? Is writing in the style of Jules Verne, giving us something Jules Verne would create? Ask ChatGPT to make a work of Shakespeare and it does a really bad job of it, it produces puffery but not something like a Shakespeare.

Stable Diffusion does a really good job of imitating a particular artist. See all the drama regarding Greg Rutkowski, for example.

LLMs will reach the same level sooner or later.

That’s just a question of when, not if.

It's a case of never. No machine will ever create a new 'work of Shakespeare' and it's ridiculous to think otherwise.

I would be pretty interested already in a work containing typical tropes of Shakespeare, stylistically Shakespearean, but still original enough to be not a rehash of any of his existing works. I guess I would not be the only one to find that exciting or at least mildy interesting.

But your point is of course valid, it would not be a 'work of Shakespeare'.

Ok, so as I understand it, you're considering having a living human write a new play and then put it through an LLM such as GPT to rewrite it in 'the style of Shakespeare'.

That is possible yes, but only within a limited interpretation of 'the style of Shakespeare'. It could only draw from the lexicon used in the existing body of Shakespeare works, and perhaps some other contemporary Elizabethan playwrights. It wouldn't include any neologisms, as Shakespeare himself invariably included in each new play. It couldn't be a further development of his style, as Shakespeare himself developed his style in each new play. So it would be a shallow mimicry and not something that Shakespeare would have produced himself if he had written a new play (based on a 21st century authors plot).

I personally wouldn't find that interesting. I acknowledge that you wrote only 'mildly interesting' and yes, it could be mildly interesting in the way of what an LLM can produce. But not interesting in the sense of literature, to my mind. Frankly, I'd prefer just to read the original new play written by the living human, if it was good. (I also prefer to not ride on touristic paddle-wheel boats powered by a diesel engine but with fake smokestacks.)

Well, if you choose to interpret “a work of Shakespeare” literally, then obviously. But that’s not what people mean.

It's frankly stupid to interpret it as anything else.

Sorry for the strong language but this is a ridiculous line to take. A 'work of Shakespeare' is not even remotely open to interpretation as being something produced in the 21st century.