J. Michael Straczynski on AI writing - part 2 added

[Rob_Royale]

Some may know him as the writer of Babylon 5. I know him as the writer of some of the best comic books I've ever read. If you don't know him, he's a successful writer in a few mediums.
Here's what he's got to say on AI writing and all the hand wringing that's gone on about it.
I'm still reading it myself. I'm just offering it as a talking point because we haven't really discussed AI very much.

https://jmichaelstraczynski.substack.com/p/silence-where-a-story-might-have

 

[AG31]

Some may know him as the writer of Babylon 5. I know him as the writer of some of the best comic books I've ever read. If you don't know him, he's a successful writer in a few mediums.
Here's what he's got to say on AI writing and all the hand wringing that's gone on about it.
I'm still reading it myself. I'm just offering it as a talking point because we haven't really discussed AI very much.

https://jmichaelstraczynski.substack.com/p/silence-where-a-story-might-have

Thanks! It was an excellent read. I hope you'll post part 2. I try to limit my subscriptions.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

As it's so often the case with these articles, the analysis is one-dimensional. We can all agree with most of his points, but he should show the other side of the coin as well.

The best AI clients of today are no great, or even good, writers. They can be decent ones, though. Mediocre. But they are also almost never truly bad or terrible writers, either. That space is reserved for humans.

And I think that's the truth about the writing capabilities of AI. The relatively narrow space around the center of the Gaussian, that's where AI has put its roots, and I believe it will stay there for a long while, sharing that space with a good deal of human writers. The brightest heights of literary art, but also its darkest depths, are exclusively human domains.

 

[Paul_Chance]

I'd agree with him. Thanks for the share, that was a bit of good reading.

 

[XerXesXu]

He's talking about what AI was, not what it's becoming.

A complete AI can now be embedded into humanoid robots. They are equipped with senses, can see, hear, understand, and speak, and learn from those experiences. The best days of AI lay ahead.

No Ai has produced a great book - yet. All AIs are more literate than most humans. Not only can few humans draft an office memo as well as AI, but few can write a trope as well as AI. Some humans can write them better. better.

He lists some defects, shadows in pictures etc, for which the cure has already been found.

In a fast-moving world, it's hard not to get left behind. This guy's already been left behind.

I don't care; I'll carry on carrying on. It must be awful to go to bed frightened by what tomorrow will bring.

 

[joy_of_cooking]

I'm going to guess that the hard reason AI can't produce good stories is that it's not allowed to sympathize with the villain. It's strongly trained to say bad things are bad. Thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not covet, thou shalt definitely not raise an army of the undead to seize for thyself the bloody Hammurabian justice that the powers that be are uninterested in providing more peacefully.

I actually wonder if AI could someday produce a fun puzzle novel like The Martian.

 

[Rob_Royale]

Part 2!
https://jmichaelstraczynski.substack.com/p/silence-where-a-story-would-have

 

[Paul_Chance]

Part 2!
https://jmichaelstraczynski.substack.com/p/silence-where-a-story-would-have

Another good essay, worth the read in my book. Once again, I tend to agreement with him. But than, I am a creature of curiosity.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Enjoyed it. At best, AI can give you a hodgepodge of scenes, undeveloped, overwritten, a mile wide in words, one layer of skin deep. Perhaps it might give a dreadful first draft. I see it every couple of months, and I'm expected to work it into a believable story in 15 to 20 days. Sometimes, I can do it without much trouble, but most times, it's hard work, and nothing else gets done writing-wise except this writer's work. It drifts off, now and again, into side issues that are supposed to be subplots. Those take a massive amount of effort to make them work. If it's one of their mysteries, the false clues don't work and have been written whole cloth. AI doesn't understand motivation and doesn't know how to write emotions using lines like "It felt like the world crashing in on him." If feeling the surface of something is written, "He ran his finger along the woodgrain, feeling the rough texture." Wouldn't it be more direct for AI to say, "Running his hand over the rough texture, a splinter shot into one finger,"?

I've said it before, I'll say it again, AI sucks big, green donkey dicks.

 

[astuffedshirt_perv]

Perhaps it might give a dreadful first draft.

Most first drafts are sub-par. The 'problem' is hopping from a first draft directly to a finished product without, you know, editing. However, that muddies the water even more--was it AI or human?

 

[XerXesXu]

Another good essay, worth the read in my book. Once again, I tend to agreement with him. But than, I am a creature of curiosity.

He asks whether AI can yet compete with a literary philosopher, not whether it can write commercial fiction better than 60/80/90/99% (choose your own bar) of human writers. The answer to the latter is - 'It's already happened' - to the former - 'not yet'.

 

[Paul_Chance]

He asks whether AI can yet compete with a literary philosopher, not whether it can write commercial fiction better than 60/80/90/99% (choose your own bar) of human writers. The answer to the latter is - 'It's already happened' - to the former - 'not yet'.

Do you have an example of a well-written piece of AI fiction?

 

[XerXesXu]

Do you have an example of a well-written piece of AI fiction?

Commercial fiction? The sort that people pay for and enjoy reading? Try Amazon, Smashwords, Lulu etc.

 

[StillStunned]

I've said it before, I'll say it again, AI sucks big, green donkey dicks.

As someone who's been editing many, many AI-"assisted" business texts for the past couple of years, I completely agree.

Also, thank you for bringing back the big green donkey dicks. It's been a while since we last saw them here.

 

[jsmiam]

Speaking of excellent articles: an MIT writing professor. (Yeah yeah, MIT & writing other than programs?) But nonetheless…

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/10/fiction-writing-professor-ai

 

[TheExperimentalist]

As someone who's been editing many, many AI-"assisted" business texts for the past couple of years, I completely agree.

Also, thank you for bringing back the big green donkey dicks. It's been a while since we last saw them here.

Big green anthropomorphic donkey dicks. Let's be very clear here. We need to make sure we're all complying with the site rules, after all.

 

[Paul_Chance]

Speaking of excellent articles: an MIT writing professor. (Yeah yeah, MIT & writing other than programs?) But nonetheless…

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/10/fiction-writing-professor-ai

Another good article. Thanks for sharing that with us.

 

[astuffedshirt_perv]

And...then there's this. The Serpent in the Grove "In partnership with Commonwealth Foundation, Granta presents the regional winners of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Jamir Nazir’s story is the winning entry from the Caribbean."

I guess there's no accounting for taste.

 

[XerXesXu]

How 'AI type' commercial fiction was produced, when I was young:

 

[MillieDynamite]

I've never seen any fiction books branded on Amazon, written by AI. If I did, I certainly wouldn't waste my money on it. Word-search books are all I've seen labeled "AI-produced," plus one children's book. Post us the top ten fiction books of all time that claim to be written with AI! Don't say it's all over some place; post an example of fully crafted, well-written AI fiction. Name, the ASIN #, a link to a book proudly stating its AI written. Put up with the link or stop spouting about all over Amazon or anywhere else. But specifically Amazon, since they demand AI-produced work, say it's AI-written.

Commercial fiction? The sort that people pay for and enjoy reading? Try Amazon, Smashwords, Lulu etc.

 

[XerXesXu]

Write a literate post and I'll do my best to reply.

Amazon do not 'demand AI-produced work'. From personal experience, I know they also accept humans' work.

 

[nice90sguy]

I've posted in other threads about the inability of current LLM's to generate good fiction. Straczynski is along the right lines at one point, but doesn't really get to the bottom of the issue, which is that LLM's don't have more than a rudimentary Theory of Mind. I recommend that anyone seriously interested in this issue read this Wikipedia article, which is well-written: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

Personally, I found the piece showed a lack of real understanding of what LLMs can and can't do. OF COURSE LLM's can't feel anything, but that in itself has no bearing on their writing abilities. If all one needs is the ability to feel and empathise, then anyone could write fiction.

The other main reason that LLMs can't generate good fiction is that they're not designed to be surprising (which is technically possible) or to construct long-running, coherent narrative arcs (which is a memory/size limitation of Transformer architecture, the dominant architecture for current language models).

Straczynski leans heavily on his personal prejudices, and then chats with ChatGPT about it, achieving the confirmation bias so common with people using LLM's to help make a point.


His fixation on "curiosity" is interesting, and not one I have previously thought of as being a prerequisite of story-telling. But I can't see any reason to think that's particularly problematic to reproduce in silicon-based intelligence. The work of DeepMind shows that exploration of idea spaces and particular domains, including "how does this work", "what if I try this?", "I wonder if these are related?" -- the kind of thing necessary to scientific discovery , is something that AI (but NOT language models) can do well. That's pretty close to my definition of "curiosity".

 

[StillStunned]

I've never seen any fiction books branded on Amazon, written by AI. If I did, I certainly wouldn't waste my money on it. Word-search books are all I've seen labeled "AI-produced," plus one children's book. Post us the top ten fiction books of all time that claim to be written with AI! Don't say it's all over some place; post an example of fully crafted, well-written AI fiction. Name, the ASIN #, a link to a book proudly stating its AI written. Put up with the link or stop spouting about all over Amazon or anywhere else. But specifically Amazon, since they demand AI-produced work, say it's AI-written.

Last year I bought a couple of holiday guides on Amazon. I was surprised by how many titles matched the exact holiday I wanted to do.

When the books arrived, one was fairly useful - written by a club who did similar holidays in the area - but the other was a loose collection of random facts. Locations had maps, but generally on a scale that was too big or too small to be of any use. Entries about museums would list opening hours as "check Google for opening hours". One museum didn't even mention in what town it was.

It was so obviously a minimal effort job that it was insulting. And that, I think, is one of the big issues: the people writing AI books - fiction or non-fiction - aren't interested in putting something out there that's fit for purpose. At least not from the user's point of view. It's fit for purpose from their own perspective, which is to get money without actually doing anything for it.

 

[nice90sguy]

It's important to separate three aspects of good fiction writing :

The first is a purely technical one, analogous to how to apply paint with a paintbrush in a painting, or how to play a scale on the piano. AI as simple as Grammarly can help with that.

The second is one of tone and mood -- how word choice and sentence/paragraph structure affect the reader, analogous to color choice, style, or musical chord shapes and cadence, instrument choice, and all the techniques of music production. AI doesn't do well here.

And the last, and most important one (where LLM's fail most obviously), is the story itself -- what you're saying. AI is pretty much useless for that, producing bland, simplistic prose that has no surprising elements, passion, or subtlety.

 

[XerXesXu]

It was so obviously a minimal effort job that it was insulting. And that, I think, is one of the big issues: the people writing AI books - fiction or non-fiction - aren't interested in putting something out there that's fit for purpose. At least not from the user's point of view. It's fit for purpose from their own perspective, which is to get money without actually doing anything for it.

It's true that there's a mug born every minute and predators will prey on the gullible. That's humanity. I'm sorry to hear that you've fallen victim.

Whether AI can create tropes equally as well as, or better than, many humans, is a separate matter. AI is a tool; a tool wielded in the hand of a master craftsman produces something better than a pikey's pavement.
Micah is more of a journeyman. Not unsatisfactory, yet not satisfactory. The spelling is ok, as is the punctuation. His voice is constipated, forced out in short bursts after much indigestion. Too much redundancy, dialogue uncertain, altogether a feeling of having never been edited.

His work might be worth copying into a sophisticated AI agent for a final polish. The publishing industry seems to be moving in that direction.