The computers are getting better at writing
newyorker.com
The computers are getting better at writing
1–10 of 165 posts
Re: The computers are getting better at writing
#2Is it just me, or is the "continuation" grammatical but completely nonsensical? It talks about infants being thrown into dust bins and calling them animals - not in an intentional way. It talks about trying to crawl away from the blood on his belly. It talks about bugs being ill. It just doesn't actually make sense.
Re: The computers are getting better at writing
#3I have been doing a lot of writing lately, short and longer essays. I have also written on-and-off for the last ten years.
Writing well is not easy.
I used to think I wrote well until I started reading better writers. The whole idea that we will just slap together a bunch of text using some “AI” and it will resonate with people is crazy to me. As an engineer whose dabbled with some AI and ML, and has even seen what GPT3 can do, we are as far away from being able to use AI to write a best seller as we are from landing on the Sun. Not saying it will never happen just that nothing we are building right now will be able to do that.
Good writing factors in human culture, sparks emotions in people, tells stories that resonate. I will keep going to sleep at night safely assuming that no AI will out-write humans anytime soon and you should too.
Re: The computers are getting better at writing
#4GPT-3-generated writing is a combination of comically absurd and incredibly deep. The weak infants of the woman next door who had to be picked up with the tongs and thrown into the dustbin is quite silly but then there's He wanted to crawl away from it, but there was no place to go. which is a surprisingly deep statement about the revulsion he feels towards himself. That a computer can generate that says very uncomfortable things about the skill of humans in recognizing genuine creative significance.
Re: The computers are getting better at writing
#5Computer-played chess or go games are already more interesting than the human-played ones. If you get computer-written novels indistinguishable from the best human-written novels, or even better, would you read them? There will be 1 million of them generated every day, all better than Harry Potter, or by taste, War and Peace.
Re: The computers are getting better at writing
#6Maybe one day computers will even learn to write like the New Yorker... starting every article an initial page of irrelevant artful content and then moving to an overly flowery essay lacking actual insights into the topic at hand.
Re: The computers are getting better at writing
#7Maybe one day computers will even learn to write like the New Yorker... starting every article an initial page of irrelevant artful content and then moving to an overly flowery essay lacking actual insights into the topic at hand.
sheeeeeeesh
Re: The computers are getting better at writing
#8Computer-played chess or go games are already more interesting than the human-played ones. If you get computer-written novels indistinguishable from the best human-written novels, or even better, would you read them? There will be 1 million of them generated every day, all better than Harry Potter, or by taste, War and Peace.
The better question is, would you read anything else? What happens when we can just dial up the story we want? What happens when these models combine the skillfulness of a human writer with the command of facts, theories, behaviors, and lore of computer records?
Imagine. You could feed it all of Tolkien's writings and tell it to give you an epic saga of novels set in the First Age of Middle Earth. You could tweak a parameter and instantly get a version of your favorite novel that proceeds with a different main character or a different choice and have it be indistinguishable from a version written by the original author and one hundred percent consistent with events and previous plots.
I'm not too ashamed to say that if memory-erasure technology existed I'd be sorely tempted to experience my favorite media for the first time over and other. Creative AI is the looming spectre of that danger, as it becomes more and more skilled at giving us the best, we will grow intolerant of anything less.
Re: The computers are getting better at writing
#9Re: The computers are getting better at writing
#10I have been doing a lot of writing lately, short and longer essays. I have also written on-and-off for the last ten years. Writing well is not easy. I used to think I wrote well until I started reading better writers. The whole idea that we will just slap together a bunch of text using some “AI” and it will resonate with people is crazy to me. As an engineer whose dabbled with some AI and ML, and has even seen what G…
Computer generated text have tens of millions of people they can put out of a job, manipulate into emotions, phish for scams, etc. without needing to produce text like James Joyce.