This website was birthed by a series written to help explore the use of large language models (LLMs). If you want to build your own library of unwritten books, tweaking how the books are made, you should check out this blog post.
The Library of Unwritten Books creates "novel novellas" on-demand. Unlike text-adventure games with fixed texts, these stories are an open-ended exercise in collaborative storytelling. You are a reader-author. Large language models (LLMs) mediate your collaboration, re-shaping and reflecting your words and those of authors past. I'm reminded of these words from Carl Sagan.
What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
This Library is a different sort of magic, for instead of transporting its readers into the mind of a single author it places us somewhere in the zeitgeist. LLMs, as we know, are machines for completing sentences. They work by predicting the next plausible string of words. As Ted Chiang observed, they are blurry JPEGs of the Web. We harness this fact to produce something novel based on the input of our reader-authors, the "compressed" writings used to train the LLM, and random chance.
It's worth noting that some folks have equated the training of these models with theft, but I don't think that's right. What they offer is something much stranger than copies. In a real sense, they are mathematical distillations of a zeitgeist found in their training data. A rebuttal of "scraping is stealing" is beyond the scope of this post. So, I'll point you to the words of Cory Doctorow who makes clear such a framing is not only ahistorical but also a trap! As for model outputs, that is a different matter. In the end, I suspect the real answer to the fears sparked by AI isn't copyright. It's antitrust and labor law. Unions. The answer involves unions. You really should read the Doctorow piece. FWIW, folks are also working on training models entirely on licensed or public domain works. Now, back to The Library.
Remember this: as a reader-author what you read is a reflection of what you write. If you respond passively, providing short replies or taking only the road presented, your journey will stay safe and predictable. If, however, you embrace your role as an author, there is much to explore for you are exploring the shadows cast by the cultural artifacts upon which the model was trained. Be warned, you might not like what you find. Then again, you may discover something beautiful. Afterall, we and our artifacts contain multitudes. For some additional suggestions on how to get what you want out of your stories, check out the Tips page.
If you examine the prompts that power The Library, you'll see they are asked to lean into genre convention. You'll also discover that the action is driven by mechanics similar to that of many popular role playing games. As the reader-author you are asked what actions you want to take. The LLM evaluates how likely you are to succeed in the world of your story (e.g., is this realistic fiction or fantasy). Based on this assessment it assigns a "difficulty" to the task and rolls a virtual dice behind the scenes. If the roll is high enough you succeed, too low you fail. The LLM shares the result in prose, moves the story forward a beat, and asks for you to take the wheel.
If you want to understand how the Library works on a deeper level, check out this blog post. My hope is that you will use the information there to make your own library. However, if you haven't already, you should experience what it's like to be a reader-author. I invite you to check out an unwritten book here.
Questions or comments? I'm on Mastodon @Colarusso@mastodon.social