Is it even Possible for AI assistants like ChatGPT to generate entire long Novels?

[Avarice_Of_The_Seven]

Before we start, I'm not talking about AI-assisted stories or machine translations; I'm talking about Original AI-generated novels.

And the topic is AI Assistants, not the AI in general.

I was scrolling through YouTube and found a video about how the Webnovel platform is filled with novels generated entirely by ChatGPT.
The YouTuber said that many Webnovel authors are using ChatGPT to generate their entire long novels completely. He even said that he knows the exact method step by step on how to use ChatGPT to generate an entire novel.

Now, I have never tried ChatGPT to write a story, but I have been using it for long enough to know its limitations. The fact that ChatGPT can write a long story that can even be read and understood sounds like BS to me.

I know that some AI apps can generate entire long novels based on the prompts you give them, like this one;

But we are not talking about those kinds of apps, we are talking about ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is an AI assistant, it's features are not made to write stories.

The biggest problem with AI assistants like ChatGPT or Gemenai is that they have limited memory in a chat.

Let me explain;
The AI assistant sees a chat through a window. They can only compute data that appears within the window, and as new messages appear in a chat, older messages are pushed out of the window.
You can scroll back the chat to remember the previous messages, but the AI can't scroll back the chat to see the previous messages. All messages pushed outside the window, and all data contained in those messages will be permanently 'forgotten' by the AI.

Now think about it, the more chapters the ChatGPT writes, the more it forgets the previous information about the story. It wouldn't be able to remember what it wrote 10 chapters ago. That kind of story simply wouldn't make sense. It isn't just about inconsistencies; a story like that would be downright confusing and incomprehensible to any reader.

This memory problem exists with all AI, not just AI assistants. What? Don't believe me? Let me give you an example here.
I'm going to show you a small instance of my conversation with an AI companion from Hakko AI.

(If you don't know what that is, then it's basically this little thing on my screen)

Now I played a simple word game with this AI companion. These were the rules of the game;

Now, logically, this game seems too unfair and one-sided. Because I am a human with a limited vocabulary, and AI has unlimited knowledge through Internet access. The AI should have won under any circumstances because no matter how large my vocabulary is, it can't hold a candle to the internet and the information available there.

But here's how the actual game went;

(Man triumph Heven Gu? No, it's Avarice triumph AI Gu)

Why did the AI lose despite having near infinite information access at its disposal? Because of limited memory.
I could even have said the same thing even when the AI didn't make a mistake, and the AI will believe me. Why? Because AI has no way to scroll back and check, it has no choice but to take my word for it.

And you might argue that you can bypass AI's limited memory limitation with ChatGPT's saved memory feature. (Dunno what that is? it's basically this)

But this feature also has limitations.
I knew that, but still, in case I was wrong, I did a little experiment.
I compiled all the chapters I had written (18 chapters with an average of 1.5k words each) into one document and gave that file to ChatGPT. Then I asked it to add all the contents of the documents to the saved memory.

But it didn't, just as I had suspected.
Saved memory also has a storage capacity limit; you can't upload an entire book to it.

The saved memory also has other issues.
You can't save too much data on the same topic, or the data will be mixed up or overwritten by new information of the same type.

And even the most basic of information about a story will include:

Character personalities, Character names, Character relationship chart
Location information.
Basic plot points
Lore
Compressed summary of what happened up until now in the story.

The saved memory can't fully contain all this without any information being overwritten.

I can't think of any other way anyone can generate a long story on ChatGPT or Gemenai.

For an AI to be able to write stories, the most basic requirement is a long-term memory that can store all that information.
The dedicated AI story-writing apps may have that feature, but AI assistants don't have it. So they don't even fulfill the very basic requirement of writing a long novel.

Have I missed something here? A novel written by ChatGPT will be no different from a novel written by a goldfish.

I just can't understand this. Is there something I don't know about AI assistants?

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Most of the "AI written" novels are human-edited (and poorly at that), so you get moments where character names change, where actions just don't make sense, scenes change inexplicably, and character names become somewhat fluid.

For example, I have a story I've been following on Pocket FM (The Ghostbuster Scam) that has a lot of brows furrowing (even of a dog), has a character who keeps having her name changed (when she was alive her name was Lilly, when she died her spirit was trapped IN a lilly flower. To keep the spirit distinct from the plant the MC called her Chloe - but then promptly forgot until another character who could see ghosts called her Chloe out of the blue). The MC was a confidence artist but is also a selfless hero. It is like watching a train wreck at times..

My wife also watches these crappy YouTube videos of stories of justice and revenge that were clearly at least 90% AI generated from the first word to the final output - some of them drag out to novel length.

 

[foxes]

Аbout a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand tokens is the size of one volume. Based on this, you can generate one volume with a good prompt. But the full process is more complicated. The first request is to come up with a general plan, detailing individual parts until the final text. A short summary helps the AI stay on topic. In general, even with a lot of context, his logic is barely enough for one chapter.

 

[Arkus86]

Chat GPT can output a novel's worth of words that will even resemble a story at a glance, but it will not be consistent in any way. And it's not just about memory, AI struggles with simple logic too. Something like having your character scratching his nose while he's carrying a heavy crate in both hands is fair game for AI.

 

[Ral_062]

For the longest i can remember since i first started writing my stories, i had been sharing them to chatgpt. If it was the first chatgpt, maybe it can generate stories but i've using it since last year, and the current chat gpt is garbage. The AI fails to remember some of the plotlines i gave it and sometimes it only referenced only the old messages i have sent it, ignoring the new message. I said maybe because i haven't had the chance to use it to its full potential.

From what I've experienced so far in chat gpt, generating a story would be complicated as my common problems with it might arise and it would have taken a lot of time just to get the prompt right.


I don't use AI to create stories, i just create a story and shares it with AI.

 

[Kitsuna]

AI is only as good as you are at using it. In most cases, you also have to pay for greater memory or a better model. But if you let it do everything, the result will just be a schizo story

 

[Avarice_Of_The_Seven]

Аbout a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand tokens is the size of one volume. Based on this, you can generate one volume with a good prompt. But the full process is more complicated. The first request is to come up with a general plan, detailing individual parts until the final text. A short summary helps the AI stay on topic. In general, even with a lot of context, his logic is barely enough for one chapter.

I dunno, but that sounds like an awful lot of work. Isn't it easier to just use dedicated AI story-writing apps? Why use ChatGPT if it's that complicated? Better yet, why use AI at all?

I don't think writing Web novels requires too much effort. After you pass the initial planning stage, it's just about drafting and editing the text. What's so hard about that? Your imagination can't be weaker than AI, right?

 

[MafiaNoble]

t

Most of the "AI written" novels are human-edited (and poorly at that), so you get moments where character names change, where actions just don't make sense, scenes change inexplicably, and character names become somewhat fluid.

For example, I have a story I've been following on Pocket FM (The Ghostbuster Scam) that has a lot of brows furrowing (even of a dog), has a character who keeps having her name changed (when she was alive her name was Lilly, when she died her spirit was trapped IN a lilly flower. To keep the spirit distinct from the plant the MC called her Chloe - but then promptly forgot until another character who could see ghosts called her Chloe out of the blue). The MC was a confidence artist but is also a selfless hero. It is like watching a train wreck at times..

My wife also watches these crappy YouTube videos of stories of justice and revenge that were clearly at least 90% AI generated from the first word to the final output - some of them drag out to novel length.

The fact that writing takes a lot of time and creativity hasn't changed even with AI writing. You can use it as a assistance to make it easier but at the end of the day it just isn't capable of replacing the author without making AI slop.

You can use AI to rewrite rough drafts or even generate outright continuation/text but you'll always have to proof read and/or improve it.

I've used both ChatGPT and sudowrite to experiment and write with AI and at the end of the day you'll be putting in time and effort if you want to make something of good quality.

But yes, generating with AI is definitely possible as long as you check everything, rewrite where necessary and go back and fourth a couple of times to ensure the AI gets the lore and whatever you want right.

It sometimes indeed messes up and stops remembering things but that's fine as long as you use it as a tool and not as something that's meant to replace your work.

 

[foxes]

I don't think writing Web novels requires too much effort. After you pass the initial planning stage, it's just about drafting and editing the text. What's so hard about that?

It's not difficult - it's impossible. If you're writing the story yourself and you want it to be worthy, there's no limit to perfection.

Your imagination can't be weaker than AI, right?

Imagination doesn't work around the clock.

 

[Avarice_Of_The_Seven]

It's not difficult - it's impossible. If you're writing the story yourself and you want it to be worthy, there's no limit to perfection.

But AI-generated work isn't perfect either. In fact, it's far worse than when you yourself write.

Imagination doesn't work around the clock.

Well... I dunno. I have never felt that, but that could be the case for others.

 

[foxes]

But AI-generated work isn't perfect either. In fact, it's far worse than when you yourself write.

Just summarize the answers. Otherwise, the conversation will turn into an endless recursion. This is the difference between simple low-quality and complex high-quality.

I have never felt that, but that could be the case for others.

I'm glad that someone doesn't experience creative block, burnout, or lack of motivation.

 

[JordanIda]

We use Chat GPT Pro and Gemini at work. We also use Azure hosted AI. Mostly for code generation.

We pay top dollar for premium versions, and we have trained prompt engineers on staff.

Despite all of that, AI generated is like so easy to pick out in a lineup. Because the output is garbage. GPT AI can't develop a coherent thought from section to section, because it can't think and has no thought process. It can "write," but it doesn't know what it's writing about. This is easy to see. And the actual content? The details? The b.s. it spews out almost sounds like it makes sense, to someone who has no idea what they're reading. But the details are mostly hallucination. We don't dare present any of it without first putting it in front of subject matter experts equipped with chain saws.

For all of that, it still saves time. The first pass of outlining and shredding material, that saves hours of drudgery. And for code generation, same thing, we'd never trust it for high performance code, but it saves time for busywork like unit tests. So we use it. But we don't trust it to write for a knowledgeable human audience.

So, can GPT AI write a novel? Ugh. Please.

Chat GPT can output a novel's worth of words that will even resemble a story at a glance, ... [and] AI struggles with simple logic too.

Exactly! It looks like a novel! YES. Novel length garbage.

 

[Avarice_Of_The_Seven]

We use Chat GPT Pro and Gemini at work. We also use Azure hosted AI. Mostly for code generation.

We pay top dollar for premium versions, and we have trained prompt engineers on staff.

Despite all of that, AI generated is like so easy to pick out in a lineup. Because the output is garbage. GPT AI can't develop a coherent thought from section to section, because it can't think and has no thought process. It can "write," but it doesn't know what it's writing about. This is easy to see. And the actual content? The details? The b.s. it spews out almost sounds like it makes sense, to someone who has no idea what they're reading. But the details are mostly hallucination. We don't dare present any of it without first putting it in front of subject matter experts equipped with chain saws.

For all of that, it still saves time. The first pass of outlining and shredding material, that saves hours of drudgery. And for code generation, same thing, we'd never trust it for high performance code, but it saves time for busywork like unit tests. So we use it. But we don't trust it to write for a knowledgeable human audience.

So, can GPT AI write a novel? Ugh. Please.

Yes!!! This is exactly what I'm talking about. That kind of story may look like a novel, but you will simply not be able to make sense of it.

 

[ACertainPassingUser]

The problem is that the AI hallucinate alot, and therefore its hard to keep up with very long plotlines.

Not something "unsolveable", but it is somehing you need to keep in check, while needing you to solve it yourself.

 

[CountVanBadger]

I tried getting Chatgpt to write a novel for me a year or two ago just to see if it could do it. I gave it a general idea to build off of and had it make a list of characters before it started. It made it about three or four chapters in before it started forgetting what happened in previous chapters. Characters that were introduced in chapter two would appear in the first half of chapter three, and then in the second half of chapter three they'd be reintroduced as if none of that had ever happened. By chapter fifteen, major plot points had been repeated four or five times. At one point it even tried to start the story over from the beginning while also pretending that it was continuing off of what had just happened. It also took multiple tries to generate each chapter because it kept trying to insert scenarios I didn't ask for that went against its own terms of service.

It was entertaining in an I can't look away from this flaming trainwreck kind of way. But IMO, it's only a matter of time before AI will be able to write entire novels from start to finish. Just a couple years ago, if you asked AI for a picture of a dog it would give you a black and brown smear. Now Sora AI can make ten second anime clips that almost look on par with a real low budget anime. Compared to that, writing full length novels almost sounds easy.

 

[Gray_Mann]

I've never been on the Anti-AI train and find a lot of it to be little more than people screeching in the dark about their upcoming replacements...which has happened countless times throughout history and will now be more commonplace since technological advancement is picking up pace once again with the introduction of AI I to the mainstream.

That said, anyone using the current generation of AI software to generate novels....deserves the kick in the head that I've dreamed of them getting after trying to read some of these.....things.

It's appalling to even pretend it's a novel in any shape of the word.

However, I do believe in the next 10-15 years minimum, I think AI will be capable of this. The number of people on RR Forums for example, saying this is impossible, have a very piss-poor grasp of technological advancement. Oh sure, it might stall for a time, but pretending it is anything more than a temporary halt in progress, is laughable naivety. That's me being generous.

The ONLY conceivable way AI wouldn't reach this threshold is if the world collectively disavowed it and did away with the technology altogether.

Now, since that clearly isn't happening, suck it up buttercups.

The future isn't going to be decided by whether or not AI is prevented from growing more advanced or intelligent or whatever, by rather it will be decided by how WE adapt to it's inevitable improvement.

That's it. Nothing more. It's THAT simple.

Accept it, or be replaced.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

I've never been on the Anti-AI train and find a lot of it to be little more than people screeching in the dark about their upcoming replacements...which has happened countless times throughout history and will now be more commonplace since technological advancement is picking up pace once again with the introduction of AI I to the mainstream.

That said, anyone using the current generation of AI software to generate novels....deserves the kick in the head that I've dreamed of them getting after trying to read some of these.....things.

It's appalling to even pretend it's a novel in any shape of the word.

However, I do believe in the next 10-15 years minimum, I think AI will be capable of this. The number of people on RR Forums for example, saying this is impossible, have a very piss-poor grasp of technological advancement. Oh sure, it might stall for a time, but pretending it is anything more than a temporary halt in progress, is laughable naivety. That's me being generous.

The ONLY conceivable way AI wouldn't reach this threshold is if the world collectively disavowed it and did away with the technology altogether.

Now, since that clearly isn't happening, suck it up buttercups.

The future isn't going to be decided by whether or not AI is prevented from growing more advanced or intelligent or whatever, by rather it will be decided by how WE adapt to it's inevitable improvement.

That's it. Nothing more. It's THAT simple.

Accept it, or be replaced.

Nah, I think AI will always need a living collaborator to produce something more than entertaining slop, no matter how advanced it gets. Just the YouTube "stories" my wife listens to shows this, with the odd pronunciations, reading "Dr.", "Dr" and "Doctor" differently, etc.
The role of writer and editor may reverse, since many are using AI as an editor (both for suggesting content and revisions and for actually making corrections), with the human prompting and correcting the AI slop into something most can stand but I don't think AI will be able to produce a quality long-term story unless human standards drop even farther than they have while the technology advances.

 

[Gray_Mann]

, I think AI will always need a living collaborator to produce something more than entertaining slop, no matter how advanced it gets. Just the YouTube "stories" my wife listens to shows this, with the odd pronunciations, reading "Dr.", "Dr" and "Doctor" differently, etc.

You are looking at this from the standpoint of today's current gen AI, which I agree is terrible.

I respectfully disagree that this will be anything even remotely close to the limitations of AI in this regard. That's just short-sighted to me. Completely unimaginative.

But, I do admit I'm approaching this from a position of relative security since my work could only be replaced by AI if life-like androids take over on-site armed security work.

So, while I still believe as I do, I can see how others would believe my views are rather colored with a certain bias and acknowledge so.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

I used to be in the "not a fan of AI but not worried about it either" camp - and still pretty much am, really - but talked to a guy who'd been on the Microsoft team that tried to bring AI to market. Microsoft dissolved the team and folded about one quarter of the people into other divisions, letting the rest go, when ChatGPT beat them by about four months.
His insights made me a lot less concerned about it - he is now using it (with a team of five people, plus occasional voice actors and outside graphic designers - to make movies; from what I gathered, he mostly does ads for his local market and very short films, but planned to get out a full length film sometime in 2026), and does not ever expect it to be creative without very detailed prompts, no matter how the tech develops. The prompts will get easier over time, and the AI will learn what specific users expect of it, but will always need them.
For now, it's more like a carnival cold-reader, telling the "creative" what they want to hear - it can put some stuff together in surprising ways, and even create narratives based on what it can find online, but it can't start from scratch and never will be able to.

 

[ItsDevil]

Years ago, I used to write my own stories on Webnovel. However, once I started college and began working, I just didn't have the time to write anymore. When I discovered AI, I started using it to bring my ideas to life. It has improved significantly since then. While it's true that AI doesn't always keep track of the full context, you can manage that by noting down key plot points and system elements.
Ultimately, AI is capable of writing full novels, though whether they are 'high quality' depends on the reader's taste. I know many writers and artists find AI offensive, so it all comes down to the coherence you give the story through editing. I’ve found that the more you use AI, the more you learn how to produce quality work. I actually enjoy the editing process, and I don't find it offensive because, at the end of the day, it's for my own enjoyment. If AI ever stops working, I’ll simply go back to writing the conventional way like I did when I had more time. I truly admire people who work and write simultaneously; being able to manage your time to maintain a hobby while handling daily life is truly admirable