Case in point: My best LLM-assisted short story is a straight-up transposition of an H. P. Lovecraft story to a different key. This is basically like buying into the S&P 500 of 20th century fiction. It is also among my best stories, period. For me, beating the S&P 500 of fiction is going to be hard. Doing passive++ investing in it is going to be easy though. With LLM-assistance, I can join the fiction-writing classes.

This means, as more people do stuff like this, we’ll cross a threshold into a period of genuine abundance. More of us will abandon our own crappy original story ideas and simply use LLMs to invest in proven good stories and character ideas. Like studio executives endlessly betting on reboots of known properties, we’ll all narrow our cultural ambitions, and enjoy more reliable returns. The history of printed media suggests this will be a good thing. For a while.

In fact, I suspect visionary owners of high-value IP will open up their properties to such “index investing.” Imagine if Marvel opened up all its IP for amateurs to make AI-generated short movies with, and even sell it. I suspect stuff like this will happen. I’d frankly enjoy a shot at writing a Mandalorian story and having it turned into a short TV episode that I can then try to sell to you guys for $1.

And of course, much more obscure and marginal IP might now be able to cheaply expand into textual and video extended universes. Instead of a big-money studio, it might only take a dozen index-fund type writers and Sora-wranglers to pool some money to create a proper extended universe.

I actually started sketching out such an experiment a few years ago, around the consulting short stories I used to write in my old Art of Gig newsletter (no longer online, or published, sorry), but the tech wasn’t there yet. It’s almost there. You just might see those stories brought to life on screen in the next few years. I need to find a way to load those stories (about 30k words worth) into a collaborative project AI thingie that can also pipeline into video generation easily.

Through developments like this, as in the case of index funds, the average story will improve, but the total amount of good original storytelling will shrink. Or not grow as fast, in relative terms.

Again, I want to emphasize, this is not new. The print revolution had a similar effect on 16th century literary/scholarly culture (what Eisenstein calls the Commonwealth of Learning, a phrase I identify with far more than the pompous Republic of Letters which came a little later).

A Random Walk Down Meme Street