Why haven't we have a great AI novel yet? Because LLMs are compression engines trained on the statistical regularities of human text. When generating stories, they produce a kind of average of all stories in the training distribution. This is why LLM fiction tends to be so generic: competent but undistinguished prose, predictable character arcs etc. This kind of "average of averages" explains not just why LLM fiction is bad but why it's bad in such a specific and recognisable way. It's never incoherent or offensive. It's never wrong exactly. It's just… beige. And scaling doesn't work either. More parameters and more data push the model toward a higher-resolution average, not away from averaging itself. You get more polished averages, not more distinctive points. Better beige is still beige. This is the "ill-defined domain" problem. AI is currently very good in certain domains: code compiles or it doesn't, a proof holds or it fails etc. But literature doesn;t work at all like this. There's no compiler for narrative or readily formalisable criteria for a truly great work of fiction.