Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Graph-based AI for longform writing

jotte.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 81 posts

Re: Show HN: Graph-based AI for longform writing

#51

Post by jamilton »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #34
nonethewiser wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see zero problem with that. If great literary works can be produced with a click of a button we should do it. And if they’re not great then they’re not great - we’re already more than capable of producing not great novels.

> And if they’re not great then they’re not great You see no problem with flooding every market with junk products that cost nothing to produce so that non-junk products are crowded out and impossible to find? This is exactly the thing that everyone now hates Amazon for and why trying to find honest reviews of anything online is so horribly frustrating. Some barrier to entry is always better than no barrier to entry.

I don't think this is really an issue with written work in particular. Thousands of novels I won't like already exist, I already have to rely on personal recommendations and samples, a million more novels I won't like is fine if it makes 10 I will.

Re: Show HN: Graph-based AI for longform writing

#52

Post by jamilton »

aprinsen wrote: post #17
aiappreciator wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At very minimum, better novels. Current text transformers are horrendous in writing long form stories (ie, longer than 1 page). Because they don't have a concept of long-term memory. It has to keep everything in its short term memory (the context window), which is at most 2k words right now. Everything else is discarded, so the AI is unable to keep track of past events. This AI probably tries to summarise past events…

Why would we want an AI that writes novels though? Is this a "to see if we can" thing? Let's say this or some future AI system writes better novels than any human author at a fraction of the cost. Novel writing is solved. What will we have achieved? I wish I could opt out of this world you want to create, where if you achieve your vision, I will be utterly useless and obsolete.

Personally, I like reading and usually prefer to read a book I like instead of a book I don't like, so the existence of more books I like would be cool. I expect I would still read human-written fiction, too.

Many authors are already "obsolete" in that they're not paid a living wage for the job of writing creative fiction. It's understandable to prefer being paid for it, and in an ideal world being obsolete would just mean you get to do it for fun and fulfillment and not worry about the money.

Re: Show HN: Graph-based AI for longform writing

#53

Post by rjh29 »

aprinsen wrote: post #17
aiappreciator wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At very minimum, better novels. Current text transformers are horrendous in writing long form stories (ie, longer than 1 page). Because they don't have a concept of long-term memory. It has to keep everything in its short term memory (the context window), which is at most 2k words right now. Everything else is discarded, so the AI is unable to keep track of past events. This AI probably tries to summarise past events…

Why would we want an AI that writes novels though? Is this a "to see if we can" thing? Let's say this or some future AI system writes better novels than any human author at a fraction of the cost. Novel writing is solved. What will we have achieved? I wish I could opt out of this world you want to create, where if you achieve your vision, I will be utterly useless and obsolete.

The main market for these tools are fanfiction and smut - it's a way to empower people who want to create their own personal fantasies or stories that nobody else would write, without having to be a good writer.

Re: Show HN: Graph-based AI for longform writing

#55

Post by jamilton »

nl wrote: post #40

This seems to be an attempt at knowledge engineering by another name. It's unclear to me why this version is better than any other the many other outliner-type writing tools that have been available since the 1980s[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MORE_(application)

It's an outliner plus a language model to write the outline or the text itself if you want.

Re: Show HN: Graph-based AI for longform writing

#56

Post by vidarh »

jamilton wrote: post #51
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And if they’re not great then they’re not great You see no problem with flooding every market with junk products that cost nothing to produce so that non-junk products are crowded out and impossible to find? This is exactly the thing that everyone now hates Amazon for and why trying to find honest reviews of anything online is so horribly frustrating. Some barrier to entry is always better than no barrier to entry.

I don't think this is really an issue with written work in particular. Thousands of novels I won't like already exist, I already have to rely on personal recommendations and samples, a million more novels I won't like is fine if it makes 10 I will.

Millions of novels you won't like already exists. And most of them already don't earn any money. The biggest job for anyone who needs to earn money from their writing is publicising it, not writing it, unless you get accepted by a traditional publisher and they think they have a bestseller on their hands.

Re: Show HN: Graph-based AI for longform writing

#57

Post by vidarh »

jamilton wrote: post #52
aprinsen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would we want an AI that writes novels though? Is this a "to see if we can" thing? Let's say this or some future AI system writes better novels than any human author at a fraction of the cost. Novel writing is solved. What will we have achieved? I wish I could opt out of this world you want to create, where if you achieve your vision, I will be utterly useless and obsolete.

Personally, I like reading and usually prefer to read a book I like instead of a book I don't like, so the existence of more books I like would be cool. I expect I would still read human-written fiction, too. Many authors are already "obsolete" in that they're not paid a living wage for the job of writing creative fiction. It's understandable to prefer being paid for it, and in an ideal world being obsolete would jus…

To add to your last paragraph: The median income for full time writers in the UK is below minimum wage. Most full time writers do it as a supplementary income only (the median household income for full time writers is above the average), and the vast majority of writers are not full time.

If you as a writer use a paid editor and cover designers, odds are it'll take you several years to break even today.

Unless you're "discovered" by a traditional publisher and they think they have the next Harry Potter on their hands, even being traditionally published means next to no sales for a large majority.

So it's already about fun and fulfillment for most authors. I went into writing (so far two) novels knowing the above, and did it anyway. That said, some do go into it thinking they'll make lots of money, or desperately looking for another income source.

Re: Show HN: Graph-based AI for longform writing

#58

Post by ChatGTP »

vidarh wrote: post #56
jamilton wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is really an issue with written work in particular. Thousands of novels I won't like already exist, I already have to rely on personal recommendations and samples, a million more novels I won't like is fine if it makes 10 I will.

Millions of novels you won't like already exists. And most of them already don't earn any money. The biggest job for anyone who needs to earn money from their writing is publicising it, not writing it, unless you get accepted by a traditional publisher and they think they have a bestseller on their hands.

Then it's an interesting thing to bother even pursuing?

I actually noticed this the more I play around with AI art, it's cool that we can do it, but I actually wonder if unlimited access to randomly generated art is actually useful? This becomes even more true when we're talking about novels, which are already hard to read (time constraints).

I was playing with DALL-E 2 today when I was bored and then it kind of hit me that there is almost no actual point to it all. Even if every time I clicked the button it painted a Van Gough, who cares?

I'm almost certain that there is more to like behind a painting then the painting itself, there is the story. For example my Dad is a painter so I like the painting because he painted it, yes it's a pleasant painting but that's not entirely the point. It's also that he painted it specifically for me with scenes that I actually know from my home town.

My cousin is an art collector, when we he shows me something new , we're 99% interested in the story behind the art. The tribe who carved a sculpture, it's age, previous owners etc.

I also own a painting which someone gave me because they ran out of cash when trying to start a company, so I accepted it as a payment for the work. It's valuable to me for what it represents. I think of the guys dreams and that I at least did my best to help him on his path even though that particular venture failed, it reminded me it pays to be kind and in the end he actually become quite successful doing something else so it represents a never give up attitude.

Maybe to say it another way, there was already pretty much unlimited access to good art, good photographs, hell probably even good code (through open source libraries). I guess the next step is actually figuring out what the point of having unlimited access to this stuff actually is?

I hate to say it but I'm actually starting to have similar concerns to others when we talk about "generated junk" polluting the information space. I actually think this is what will happen.

Re: Show HN: Graph-based AI for longform writing

#59

Post by vidarh »

aiappreciator wrote: post #20
aprinsen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would we want an AI that writes novels though? Is this a "to see if we can" thing? Let's say this or some future AI system writes better novels than any human author at a fraction of the cost. Novel writing is solved. What will we have achieved? I wish I could opt out of this world you want to create, where if you achieve your vision, I will be utterly useless and obsolete.

As I said: "that AI will also master therapy, sales, supervising children, customer service etc, as it now has an strong understanding of human behaviour." Novel writing is like the training ground for emotional intelligence in AIs. Fiction writing itself is not economically important, but the skills learnt from it is. As a passionate hobby writer myself. I say you should actually go and try the writing tools, sudowr…

I tried pasting some paragraphs from my work in progress novel into ChatGPT, and asked it to "improve the writing". The output was exactly the kind of crap you'd expect from someone well read but with no writing experience. E.g. way too many adjectives, and reading as if it had been written by looking up every other word in a thesaurus. I tried having it add some paragraphs, and similar thing: A whole lot of beginner-level writing of the "first he did X, and then he did Y. A bit later he did Z" type of writing. And that's testing just the very superficial language issues and ignoring plot entirely

It's impressive it can even do that, and it'll improve, but anyone looking to these tools to generate good fiction at this point will be disappointed.

Re: Show HN: Graph-based AI for longform writing

#60

Post by dr_dshiv »

ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #47
Mizza wrote: post #2

I am glad to see more stuff with graph based AI here. I have a running bet with a friend about whether future is going to be OBM (One Big Model) or LoLM (Lots of Little Models). I'm strongly in the LoLM/graph camp and have been working in that direction as well: https://github.com/Miserlou/Helix

Very interesting! "The general hypothesis of the project is: Consciousness, or something resembling consciousness, emerges not from the capability of a single task model like GPT or Stable Diffusion, but from the oscillations between the inputs and outputs of different instances of different models performing different tasks." Your metaphors of self-oscillation and multiple oscillations are very much in line with the…

That last link is great! Very compelling. I’ve bought the book…
Post reply on HN