Ninja Turtles, Sweet Valley High, and why AI isn't (yet) a threat to writers
ChatGPT could NEVER create Jessica Wakefield, guys
AI is going to eat fiction! The next generation of LLMs will churn out novels that will win everything from the Hugo to the Booker Prize! Everybody panic!
I don’t know what’s going to happen in 10 years, or 25, or 50.
But in the immediate future, I’m not at all frightened of ChatGPT, or of other large language model-style1 software taking over from actual human writers.
The thing that makes me optimistic? It’s not the greatest writing in the canon of English literature, it’s not the wild leaps of science fiction, it’s not Twain or Shakespeare or Dickens or the Brontes or Austen or Joyce.
Nope. The person who gives me hope is “Kate William.”
“William” was the in-house pseudonym for all 143 main series Sweet Valley High novels, plus dozens of Super Editions, Super Thrillers, and various special offshoots.2 There were several dozen ghostwriters involved with the series over its 20-year run, which took it from 1983 to 2003. Yeah, you think of Sweet Valley High as being an ’80s phenomenon, but the last books were set in a post-9/11 world.3
These ghostwriters were often young, just starting out. Many of them were university students or recent grads, and they were handed an outline with an A plot, and had to spin that and a B plot of their choosing into about 120 to 150 pages of book, in a hurry. They were written to be slotted into a monthly release schedule, for a company that did not seem to have a high opinion of the intelligence or taste of its target market of 10-to 14-year-old girls.
But the more I mess around with ChatGPT, the more I read of the stuff that’s starting to be pumped out as “AI-written novels”4 the more I realize the current crop of LLMs could never replicate even the corporate-created extruded book product of something like SVH.
For all their general badness, Sweet Valley High novels are distinctive in a way that AI-written prose seems unlikely to be able to duplicate, certainly not now, and maybe not ever.
These are books that were written on week-long caffeine jags, and sometimes it really shows. Pacing is wretched, motivations flip-flop wildly, characters do incredibly stupid things to serve the plot. Characters frequently break down crying (and then run away). They are consumed with jealousy. They shriek. They hatch elaborate schemes and do terrible things and then duck responsibility for their actions because, hey, it’s time for the party/dance at the end of the book! There are plane crashes and hostage takings and mad bombers and love triangles and video dating and psychosomatic paralysis and a royal doppelganger and mysterious orphans and false rape accusations and bears attack and boats sink and people go to mysterious clinics in Switzerland and teenagers try to get married multiple times and people find gold in the desert only to have it stolen by an eagle and there’s an actual goddamn vampire and he sort of has sex with one of the main characters in the form of a giant raven and also the twins impersonate each other a lot.5
People often imagine AI-writing engines as eating away at this market first: middle-grade or YA-oriented series books, written to a formula. Teen romances, coming-of-age fantasy adventures, kid detectives, and so on.
But the current writing tools seem woefully ill-equipped to manage even this level of writing.
Consider this passage from Echoes of Atlantis, which was an experiment in getting GPT-4 to write an entire novel6:
A mutual acquaintance introduced Aria to Alex Mercer, a skilled adventurer with a mysterious past. Though initially skeptical of his abilities, Aria was quickly won over when he saved her from a dangerous situation.
The encounter happened in a crowded marketplace, where a group of thieves had tried to steal Aria's bag, which contained her research notes and the ancient map. Alex, who happened to be nearby, had noticed the commotion and stepped in to help her. With his agile movements and quick thinking, he managed to retrieve her bag and scare off the thieves.
"I don't know how to thank you," Aria said, still shaken from the ordeal.
"No need for thanks," Alex replied with a charming smile. "Just doing what I do best."
This is pretty typical GPT-generated prose – it has the blunt, front-loaded exposition (“a skilled adventurer with a mysterious past”), it elides action, it embraces cliché (“a crowded marketplace,” “agile movements and quick thinking”) and it skims over or avoids confrontation. It evades specificity, and it prefers summarizing to setting a scene. It strives to resolve all conflicts in under a page.
I picked up a Sweet Valley High novel7 and opened it at random twice8, here’s a sample scene:
Elizabeth stared at her sister. “Jay? But he’s taken,” she objected. Suddenly an expression of horror crossed her face. “Jessica,” she said threateningly, “I don’t suppose those letters in your column last week had anything to do with this latest crush of yours, did they?”
Jessica popped the last bite of toast into her mouth. “Liz,” she said reprovingly, “how could you possibly suspect me of something so altogether low and conniving? Don’t you think I have any respect for the honourable world of journalism?”
Elizabeth glared at her. “I’m not kidding Jess,” she fumed. “If you’ve been using The Oracle in one of your schemes to get between two perfectly happy people—”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Liz,” Jessica said sweetly. “Denise and Jay are not perfectly happy together. Even a total stranger could see that.”
This is not great writing. It hits multiple pitfalls of beginning writers – the excessive and obvious adverbs, the weird bits of business (Mmm, toast), the double-sinking with dialogue and facial expressions.
It’s also got character (Jessica is, as usual, a scheming psychopath, Liz is the boring voice of morality) and conflict, and it’s a weird mix of soap-opera luridness and kid-sitcom “wacky scheme” plotting. It’s not exactly like anything else.
But AI writing is never, ever, not exactly like anything else. It’s a little bit like everything else, but with all the sharp edges sanded off, all the colours muddied, and the resolution turned down. Because it’s trained on everything, it isn’t really anything.
(Except marketing copy. Its voice always sounds faintly like marketing copy.)
Let’s take a break from talking about Sweet Valley High and talk about turtles who are also ninjas.
TMNT famously started with a doodle. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were aspiring comics creators, and one night Eastman doodled an anthropomorphic turtle wielding a pair of nunchuks and wearing a mask. Because that’s the kind of weird stuff that pops out of your brain, so why not? And Laird added “teenage mutant” and they drew inspiration from the zeitgeist of early-1980s comics – Daredevil’s origin story and his ninja opponents, the many teen superhero teams of the era, the popularity of The X-Men – and tossed it back and forth until they had a story and characters.
I don’t think anyone can say why that particular idea took off the way it did, first as a black and white indie comic, then as a Saturday morning cartoon, a toy line, a series of live-action movies, video games, TTRPGs, more cartoons, more comics, and now an actually-pretty-decent animated movie.
And again, this is not high art. Some of the comics and movies are fun, but a lot of TMNT stuff over the years has been pretty cheesy. You need to mainline a lot of nostalgia to think Vanilla Ice in Secret of the Ooze is any variety of good.
But it’s also, all of it, weird and unique, its failures and oddities as well as its charms the product of the way humans think, the byways their creativity wanders through en route to a finished product. Even the toy designs include lots of weirdly specific little details – someone human worked on those, and their artistic style comes through, even through the medium of injection molded plastic.
There is no prompt in the world that is going to give you anything like TMNT. If you’re far enough down the road to coming up with an idea like that, you’re already creative enough to take a crack at writing or drawing it yourself.
Activate the Bland-O-Tron 9000
We have to acknowledge that when it comes to fiction, the current output of LLMs is not even bad. It can only aspire to true badness. Even if can be upgraded, to reliably extrude novel-length works with mostly-coherent plots, it still won’t be capable of being interestingly bad. It’ll be blandly, generically bad.
You can probably find some customers for bland stories – official, authorized fanfiction, in essence. Continuations of series or stories that are already out there. Customized Star Wars or Marvel superhero books, or extruded fantasy adventures with your favourite tropes plugged in (Enemies to lovers + merfolk + dark academia), each one moving through the same rote plots. LLMs will only ever be able to do even that much because thousands of humans have already written variations on those themes.
But there won’t be anything excitingly strange to grab hold of readers. It’s never going to generate sparkly romance vampires, or alien space cats with magic swords, or animal-transforming teens fighting aliens. Sure, you could plug in ideas like that, but the output will lack the jagged edges, the fervent commitment to the idea, the sweaty, 3 a.m., I-have-to-finish-this-by-deadline intensity of actual bad human art.
We underestimate bad books at our peril, and so do the apostles of LLM. After all, most of them don’t read much, or write anything.
Recent reading
Just finished up Ann Leckie’s Translation State, which had a decent amount of space opera/body horror, and generally enjoyed it. Now halfway through Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Silver Nitrate. A sort of slow-burn-horror story, really enjoying that too.
No self-promo this time, since I just did that in the last newsletter.
So remember, never like, subscribe, or follow anything! The internet was an occult ritual designed to capture people’s souls. If you follow 666 newsletters, demons burst from the floor and drag you to the netherworld, and make you actually read all those damn things that have been building up in your inbox!
“Artificial intelligence”
“Laurie John” wrote the Sweet Valley University spin-off series, while “Jamie Suzanne” was the name on the Sweet Valley Twins run. The Senior Year series couldn’t even be arsed to bother with a fake author name.
The Gossip Girl book series was created by the book packager to replace Sweet Valley High.
Almost all of which are short story to novella length at best.
None of these is made up.
It’s just under 40,000 words, so it’s more of a novella.
Sweet Valley High vol. 29, Bitter Rivals
The first page I opened it to was literally teenaged girls body shaming each other. The '80s, everybody!