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Show HN: Graph-based AI for longform writing

jotte.ai

61–70 of 81 posts

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

#61

What exactly is the use case for "longform writing by AI"? Profiting from mass-produced zero-effort novels?

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.

It's hard to see how great, or even good, novels will ever be generated by an approach that learns statistics over a text corpus, just because the vast majority of novels that can be included in that corpus aren't great, and not even that good.

"Computer, write me a good Fantasy novel" is science fiction.

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

#62
post #58
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most people pursue it because they enjoy writing and/or because they have a dream of writing a great novel and being applauded for it. Of course some hope to win the jackpot of having a massive bestseller on their hands.

But there's also an element to it of writing a story we'd like to read that doesn't exist, and there AI tools might well end up replacing actually writing. Especially if it can riff off your feedback in more of an interactive fiction way.

As well as being able to get plausible expansions of the work of an author you like who is no longer writing (and that is where the most obvious commercial appeal for AI writing is - any given average book earns next to nothing, but even a third rate ghostwritten sequel in the name of a bestselling author can earn a fortune; expect publishers to start trying to sneak clauses about being allowed to generate sequels if/when the author fails to produce new works into contracts)

That said, there'll still be a space for human art for the reasons you give, and a lot of the market for content is similar - we pay for the stories behind the art as much as for the art.

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

#63

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 found the Amazon Wheel of Time boring, as if it was produced by a machine or something. I assume it will be even worse once they start using AI for doing similar things. Language-model AI can simulate texts, but it cannot simulate how reading such texts make humans feel. Only a human writer can do that and only that makes texts truly entertaining.

I think what we will find, contrary to what many people will tell you, is that there is actually something to be said for the character, story and purpose behind art works, including litterateur and, when it comes to writing, the message being conveyed by an author is also part of what makes a novel or an autobiography interesting.

A good example would be, an AI generated auto-biography of a fake singer. It might actually be fun to read if it's well written (generated?), but I'd have to say, I'd have zero interest in reading it because one thing I like about auto-biographies is that I get to know the author in more depth.

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

#64
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…

Thanks for sharing these links. I actually was part of a computational neuroscience program in university, but I never liked the "wet" side of things and all of the "AI" at the time was focused on kNN and SVM, so I'm well behind on what's cutting-edge in CNS. This seems like a good starting point to catch up again.

EDIT: I'm so dumb, the people behind ART were professors in my department! I know it seemed familiar. The whole thing left me jaded.

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

#65
Looks interesting!

I'm working on a novella (human-written) and there are many things where I thought about how the graph of different relations is useful to keep in mind, and the lack of recursive outline makes (collaborative) editing harder than it needs to be.

I'm thankful to be able to work with Latex/Pandoc (for epub generation) and Git while we're only technical people (I'm helped by one person for now), but dread when we'll expand the reading/implementing comments phase with non-technical people --who will probably annotate a pdf or epub?

I'm not sure who exactly your target audience is, but I would infer at least semi-technical people. For technical people I would say you should have the ability to edit text with your own editor (vim, or whatever), have a format that you could version control, and hopefully standard that you could be confident your book will continue 'working' in the future.

Another thing that could be integrated is a generated graph of the character relations within nodes. For example Chapter 1 involves A to E, Chapter 2 is only B, C and E, etc. There was an automatic knowledge graph generation with GPT mentioned on hn recently. Another thing that comes to mind is "the shape of the story". Based on the events you can consider if it's positive, negative or more subtle variations of moods. The resulting timeline should be easy to check, and the Chapter's individual writing style should reflect that.

I'm writing from the perspective of using the AI as an assistive tool rather than purely generative. Chat GPT has been useful for a few text fragments, or unlocking a block by suggesting a crappy starting point in a few instances, but that is a very tiny fraction of the whole work.

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

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks!

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

#67
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for sharing these links. I actually was part of a computational neuroscience program in university, but I never liked the "wet" side of things and all of the "AI" at the time was focused on kNN and SVM, so I'm well behind on what's cutting-edge in CNS. This seems like a good starting point to catch up again. EDIT: I'm so dumb, the people behind ART were professors in my department! I know it seemed familiar. T…

Stephen Grossberg or Gail Carpenter, or one of their students? You weren't at BU CNS were you?

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

#68
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing these links. I actually was part of a computational neuroscience program in university, but I never liked the "wet" side of things and all of the "AI" at the time was focused on kNN and SVM, so I'm well behind on what's cutting-edge in CNS. This seems like a good starting point to catch up again. EDIT: I'm so dumb, the people behind ART were professors in my department! I know it seemed familiar. T…

Stephen Grossberg or Gail Carpenter, or one of their students? You weren't at BU CNS were you?

I was, doing a joint BA/MA program during undergrad. This was a decade ago though.

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

#70
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stephen Grossberg or Gail Carpenter, or one of their students? You weren't at BU CNS were you?

I was, doing a joint BA/MA program during undergrad. This was a decade ago though.

so we overlapped :) wrapped up my PhD there a decade and some years ago.
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