humans creating stories with AI

I've spent the past month watching and listening to a LOT of media. I haven't played nearly as many computer games, because I've fed my brain this other media instead. Apparently the neuroscience suggests that listening to an audiobook affects the brain much the same as reading traditional text pages. Reading and listening are similar ways of transferring ideas between brains.

Click to read about audiobook and video tales...

One of the media types I've pursued is like an audiobook. It's a narration of a story, with AI providing still images or even short video animations appropriate to the story. Well, mostly appropriate. AI still generates hallucinations frequently, so visual backgrounds will be inappropriate or characters will suddenly change appearance. Nevertheless, it's an intriguing enhancement to storytelling. I've followed several stories in Pocket FM. There are 2 downsides to the platform that I'm using. 1) The app on Android consumes battery in unjustifiable quantities. It's so high that I suspect the app may be crunching cryptocurrency blockchains as another way to generate money for the owners. 2) Related, the cost of unlocking new chapters is prohibitively expensive. If I could pay the cost of a book to unlock massive chunks of stories, then I probably would. Instead, I wait daily for a few more segments of each story to unlock automatically and for free.

For the curious, these are the main stories I focused on. All of them are heterosexual stories, wherever romance might occur as a sub-plot.

• Weakest Beast Tamer is the Android advertisement that first prompted me to try the platform. It's an interesting fantasy world, and the main character is admirable, so it's my favorite so far.
• Shadow Slave is the other one that I follow consistently. It's a more violent world, but the characters are interesting despite their character flaws. It reads on some occasions like a video game, but only during rare narration sequences from a world-controller's perspective, which is fine for me.
• Supreme Magus is the 2nd one I tried. I stayed for over 100 audio segments, hoping that it would finally shed the impression that the main character (and perhaps the author) is a psychopath. It never did, so I finally abandoned it, despite its high ratings on the platform. Sorry, but I'm unwilling to participate in Ayn Rand intentional cruelty, even vicariously.

For video, I've stuck to YouTube, where a surprising amount of BL (boy love) content is available. I suspect that the surge of content recently is a direct result of the Heated Rivalry success, with many people hoping to capitalize on the newly recognized market for male-male romance.

• "Eldrin's Path" by Runeheart Studios - By far my favorite of the BL stories I've encountered. The world is interesting because it proposes a divine reason for the gods to punish homosexuality. The first humanoid mortals were the elves. From them, the gods first learned that these sentient creatures could worship, and worship increased the divine power of the gods. At that point, "creation stopped being an act of love and became a competition". Each god raced to create its own humanoid race, and among those humanoids, their purpose was to procreate to further increase divine power. Homosexuals (aka "sinners") are punished by death, so procreation can flourish undiminished. Very interesting premise. So what will happen to the main character, an elf male with an unusual magical power who will only ever love other males? There are a few ways this story could go, and I'm very invested in learning how it develops. The video episodes are incomplete, skipping details that would help the story, but they have convincing animations of too-handsome characters. In contrast, the audiobook version is more detailed and makes for better literature, although its progression lags significantly behind the video version of the story. There are also songs and other world lore episodes. The songs won't win any awards, but the best ones so far I think are "Glass on my tongue" (about lust) and "Criminal Heart" (about love). Somewhere along the line, a few weeks ago, I got the impression that the content creators are from South America somewhere... maybe Brazil?
• "Ivory of Magehold" by IvoryOasis - This one is from someone who seems more experienced with creating images and video. It's another world of magic, with young adults (not children) entering a school of magic for training. The video playlist here is currently shorter but probably better quality than Eldrin's Path. This channel is notable for its other non-playlist videos. The creator offers behind-the-scenes explanations of the technology and process being used in the AI creations. I find it fascinating. The author also follows distractions, creating unrelated content like "Chompy Parade", a music video based on a weird hamster creation within the main series. The creative journey is itself part of the appeal of this channel to me.
• "A Prince in Disguise" by TheFirelordsSaga - This one may end up having a more convoluted story than the others. On the surface level, there's a runaway man who may actually be a prince escaping some marriage he doesn't want to fulfill. There are suspicions in the fanbase, however, that even that princely background may itself be a disguise for something deeper. There are clearly dragons and magical potions in this world, but I haven't seen evidence yet of more traditional spellcasting. The video playlist so far is a bit short. Nevertheless, the main couple of a rogue and a prince is interesting enough so far to keep me watching.
• There are a surprising number of other channels on YouTube offering BL content. So many, in fact, that I haven't even watched many of them yet. None of what I have seen so far, though, has risen to the quality of those 3 mentioned above.

For any creatives out there, the Pocket FM platform invites people to write new stories, even offering rewards for certain genres worth a few thousand dollars. That's a different reward mechanism from YouTube, where video creators post their movies with no immediate financial compensation. I actually paid money to join the subscriber section of Runeheart Studios on YouTube, hoping to encourage further development of their BL video series, "Eldrin's Path". Given the opportunity, I'd also subscribe to IvoryOasis to encourage more of "Ivory of Magehold", where the creator has promised some BL storyline and a transsexual character.

Anyway, I just wanted to make the point that so-called AI slop is not all that's happening online. There are humans pushing their creative boundaries and learning new skills as a result of this new technology. It's not all bad, so I wish people would stop badmouthing anything created with AI. I intend to focus a post later on the obvious problems with AI technology, but human creative rot is absolutely not a guaranteed universal outcome of this developing change.