When I was a little kid, I always thought choose your own adventures were really cool -- at least until I started one. The execution was always woefully lacking.

And, mostly, they did not catch on (unless you consider the video game industry an evolution of choose your own adventure stories).

But what if choose your own adventure stories are about to have their revenge on all the stodgy super serious writers who eschewed them?

the dynamic nature of these sorts of tools — their “choose your own adventure” quality — is genuinely new. That dynamism and hand-tailored quality will, I suspect, be more compelling for many than simply reading mediocre novels about MKULTRA or Florentine toymakers.

The linked article from which this comes is not terribly good. But it did spark some interesting thoughts for me.

Apparently, the author, a historian, has been vibe coding little interactive historian games that are designed to give players a sense of specific moments in history. Mostly they sound dumb. Like the crappy CDs or floppies that came prepackaged with the software you actually wanted to buy back in the '90s.

But I think he sees clearly when he says:

It’s not just that AI slop is replacing some of the lower-rung forms of fiction and prose. It’s that the audience share for writing as a whole will be increasingly displaced by interactive “writing-adjacent” things.

One way AI will change writing is to make it more interactive. And that's saying something because writing / reading is not interactive.

At least, that's my knee jerk reaction. But maybe it's different than I suspect. I am reminded of Marshal McLuhan's distinction between hot and cold media (something I haven't revisited in a few years): media that requires more of your imagination is hot, while media that allows you to be more passive (like TV) is cold.

I wonder how we should classify interacting with a chat agent. In one mode, you can sit there and dully prompt and wait for it to tell you things (very cold). In another it becomes something like an extension of yourself that gives you way wider intellectual reach.

Here's something else the historian says:

the production of writing is deeply solitary and personal, but the consumption of writing is just as deeply public and shared.

I think this is true. And it made me wonder whether there ever will be an LLM that cares whether anyone reads its output. Sure, its up for grabs how to define cares, but I think it is very clear that this is something that is extremely important to most humans. An LLM seems entirely unphased whether there is an audience for its words.

I think that people don't read solely to pick up information. Some reading is done to experience a particular kind of changing of our minds. The sort of reading that's about learning new information is probably going to get devoured by the choose your own adventure LLMs. But the sort of writing that's about changing who we are seems to me like it will be immune to AI for a good while yet.