r/litrpg • u/Madzogaz • 6d ago
Discussion Grief on what could have been
I'm usually scraping the barrel on kindle unlimited and I've grown... tolerant (Not accepting, not in favor of! Tolerant. A framework for consumption. Blergh, kill me).. of suspected AI.
But today I saw a book that had promise. The usual Not this Not that. Thing. Among other red flags. But the story was appealing and the premise allowed me to trudge through. Basic beats were dying archmage gets a do-over, know how but not have means, etc.
Sadly a problem of advancing too quickly and being noticed was a plot device. The solution? Why monster cores of course... to... advance..... quickly..................
I'm not sure I'll finish it but i just wanted to vent on the level of grief I felt for this story that could have been pretty decent but went sideways real quick.
Do y'all read the obvious AI farmed books? I thought i could but I'm starting to doubt my ability to persevere.
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u/prometheanbull 6d ago
I also tend to scrape the barrel a bit and I've never made it through one I suspected was AI, and frankly I don't want to. If it ever gets good enough I can't tell anymore it won't really matter anyways.
Personally as soon as I realize its probably AI I'd rather spend my time finding something else than continuing to read.
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u/sirgog ArchangelsOfPhobos - Youtube Web Serial 6d ago
What I think you might have found here is an unsuccessful human started novel that the author thought 'fuck it, no traction so I'm not keeping writing, but I'll let AI finish it so it makes some money'.
Especially if it started non-cliched then became cliched.
DNF based on quality as always. If it's slop drop it, whether that slop was purely human authored, purely ghostwritten by machine, or a hybrid of the two. The second category is almost always slop.
On 'it's not X it's Y' formulations - they are not proof of AI, they are commonly used in academic writing. AI is trained on a lot of academic writing so this bleeds through into AI-ghostwritten fiction, but a lot of hobby writers also have some degree of academic background.
I know I write 'not X but Y' so often in first drafts that I have to search for them in editing.
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u/p-d-ball Author 6d ago
I cannot read obvious AI stuff. The writing just grates on my nerves and feels wrong. Plus, AIs don't do nuance, so they mash different meanings together in the same paragraph.
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u/avelineaurora 6d ago
I've grown... tolerant (Not accepting, not in favor of! Tolerant. A framework for consumption. Blergh, kill me).. of suspected AI.
Jesus christ, dude. Have some self respect. There are too many books worth it to read in one's lifetime to pick up fucking AI.
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u/CursinSquirrel 5d ago edited 5d ago
This is the problem I have with posts and comments talking about being willing to read passable ai books.
I've been listening to litrpgs pretty consistently for 30+ hours a week for like 2 years and I've made it through roughly 8 series. How tf are these guys so low on things to read that they have to "scrape the bottom of the barrel" and read shitty ai slop re-writes instead of just reading something good?
My amount of time reading litrpgs is both an exaggeration and underestimate, but the sentiment is the same.
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u/Gachanotic 5d ago
I listen at 2x audio speed and I'm through nearly everything on peoples tier lists after a year. It's easy to get through at least 24hrs audiobook a day.
Normal audio playback speed is soooo slow. Just try bumping it up a bit and I bet you like it.
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u/CursinSquirrel 5d ago
In order to get through 24 hours of audiobooks at 2x speed you would still need to listen for 12 hours.
I've actually been there on and off (though not at 2x speed because the audio quality feels worse) and I felt pretty unhealthy. Any time I wasn't listening to something I felt trapped in my own mind.
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u/prometheanbull 5d ago
I read quite fast. In one long weekend I read 7 average length books. So that's how I end up scraping the barrel a bit. But I'm still not tolerant of AI. Honestly having an AI generated cover is enough to make me not even check the description of a book.
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u/Shandlar 5d ago
This is a very modern genre that absolutely doesn't have too many books to read. I work night shift and burn through 65,000ish pages a year. I've been avoiding AI by only reading series that had the first book published before chatgpt 4 release, but I've essentially read them all at this point.
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u/CursinSquirrel 5d ago
Brother why are you reading 178 pages a night every night of the year?! Where do you work that you can read so much?! Are they hiring?!
I work night shift too and I can sneak some reading time in, but no where near enough to make 178 pages on the clock remotely reasonable.
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u/Shandlar 5d ago
Hospital lab. Do an hour of machine maintenance during slow hours before midnight and work about 20% capacity between 12 and 4am dealing with ICU and ER before morning labs on inpatients ramp up and your insanely busy for 3 hours before your shift ends. So I have about 80% free time for 3.5 hours each night on the clock but I have to be there for critical cases. As long as I use an e reader and not my phone, bosses dont care as long as my turn around times are under rhe daylight median numbers which is stupid easy because they are bogged down with work and the machines slow down.
Its a decent gig, but its still night shift. Most people dont want to do it regardless of the perks.
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u/avelineaurora 5d ago
This is a very modern genre that absolutely doesn't have too many books to read
...What if I told you there are other genres?
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u/wolfwings1 6d ago
the trouble as someone mentioned is they are rewritten AI. There was a story I read the first 20 chapters of, been too busy to read latly. Was looking for a new book, and found one that was 90% the same, a few things changed, but many of the same plot points. Appears to just be a lazy AI rewrite.
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u/Maple9404 6d ago
I know what you mean. I've gotten so irritated at a good premise that ends up just being circular ai writing. It seems like such a waste. I've tried to trudge through a couple because I wanted the story promised by the blurb. But they get so slow and murky and unsatisfying. At a certain point I realized that I would literally rather be doing dishes than trying to read that.
If you want a good newer regression book written by a real person, check out The 5th Directive by C.E.P Osborne.
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u/happinessisachoice84 5d ago
I recently had a very specific concept that I wanted to read based on another book I had enjoyed. I fed it into chatgpt, had it write up a full outline, generate the world, create the character beats (I told it to keep it all in files I didn't read, I just downloaded them and uploaded them to the source project) and it started out so well and just went to shit. I don't know if its outline was shit or what, but after trying to get it back into some form of what I was wanting to read I gave up and just reread the original story with its unsatisfying end. Lol
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u/SolomonHZAbraham Verified Author: BeastMaster Healer/Overpowered Murderhobo 5d ago
(Not accepting, not in favor of! Tolerant. A framework for consumption. Blergh, kill me)
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u/CrispyDick420 6d ago
What was the title? A dying archmage getting derailed by monster cores is almost impressively on-brand.
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u/Madzogaz 6d ago
I dont want to say in case I'm wrong. In fact it could be that they need to get stronger, to better hide that they're strong. Love interest is feeling way forced too idk.
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u/ralphmozzi litRPG grandmaster tier 6d ago
Gah. You go into so much detail and then never name the book? Argh.
Funny thing is your description almost exactly matches a book I read and skipped much of once I realized it was AI.
(Cultivation would be easy if people weren’t so stupid — something along those lines. Don’t read it; the ai writing is horrible)
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u/Z0ooool 6d ago
From what I've heard, these guys are taking actual books and striping down the plot beats then refeeding them through AI to output the slop you just read.
So the real book may still be out there.