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The computers are getting better at writing

newyorker.com

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Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#41

Post by tartoran »

Animats wrote: post #35
lbacaj wrote: post #3

I 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…

we are as far away from being able to use AI to write a best seller as we are from landing on the Sun. Harlequin Romances, though, those little soft-core porn pamphlets for women found at supermarket checkouts, could probably be generated. There are about 4,000 of them, and they're written to a set formula - “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl on page 56, and, by page 180, the book would end with a marriage proposal.” Lo…

But that’s not good writing, it’s just junk remixed, what would be the point? And that could be procedurally be generated.

In general I don’t see utility of having AI write stuff for us to read, it’s not like we are running out of things to read. What I’m more interested in is getting an computer to memorize facts, understand the context and then subleties of a convetsarion to the extent that you could ask back questions and infer answers from that ingested knowledge we fed it. And I think we’re far from it though we’re making fast strides towards a different direction.

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#42

Post by dumpsterdiver »

Animats wrote: post #35
lbacaj wrote: post #3

I 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…

we are as far away from being able to use AI to write a best seller as we are from landing on the Sun. Harlequin Romances, though, those little soft-core porn pamphlets for women found at supermarket checkouts, could probably be generated. There are about 4,000 of them, and they're written to a set formula - “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl on page 56, and, by page 180, the book would end with a marriage proposal.” Lo…

Well, it's not just women, I have read and enjoyed such writing. But you are correct, writing that lacks substance intended for people who expect nothing more. Sex is easy to write about. It doesn't take much to turn people on.

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#43

Post by dang »

nickpinkston wrote: post #6

Maybe 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.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#44

Post by fapjacks »

throwawaygh wrote: post #13
causality0 wrote: post #4

GPT-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 uncomfo…

> which is a surprisingly deep statement People used to say the same thing about Markov chains, and then the hype died down it took 20 years for another hypetrain to pull into the station. The same will happen with GPT-n. > says very uncomfortable things about the skill of humans in recognizing genuine creative significance. Indeed. People see pictures in clouds and omnipotent beings in the stars. Humans are uncomfor…

My biggest problem with people the world round is invariably rooted in this sense of ownership of what other people find meaningful. This kind of top-down dictation of ultimately subjective meaning is what is uncomfortable (because meaning is a form of tacit knowledge and therefore incommunicable) and is the path to inquisitions, woke / oracular authoritarian thought-policing regimes with reeducation camps.

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#45

Post by bckr »

causality0 wrote: post #4

GPT-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 uncomfo…

I was actually taken in by the infants-in-the-dustbin image. I thought it was gruesome, then I reflected on how infant mortality has decreased and what a better time we're living in. This article was uncanny valley for me.

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#46

Post by tsimionescu »

bikeshaving wrote: post #19
swiley wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deep statements are deep because the communicate feeling, if the machine never felt anything but tripped over meaning like this (and it's pretty obvious it's just gluing things together) it really dulls the effect.

Who’s to say that our greatest writers didn’t “trip over meaning”? A lot of poetic processes involve finding, curating and re-contextualizing interesting phrases (see found poetry), and there’s potentially a lot of value in applying the same process to computer-generated writing.

That's why no one is truly moved by a single phrase. We often quote memorable bits from larger works ("to be, or not to be"), but that quote is only memorable because the entire work makes us believe that it is not an accident.

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#47

Post by bpodgursky »

Animats wrote: post #33

GPT-3 is already better than most blog comments, many bloggers, and most online text porn. Maybe most ad copy. Many pundits. Some college professors. It has no clue what it's talking about, of course. It's terrible at fact-based material, because what comes out looks plausible, but contains made-up facts. Some facts will be correct, because they were mentioned a few times in the training database. Others are just pla…

I have a friend who uses GPT-3 to generate startup marketing copy and customer-facing emails. He just prompts with the company description and "The email which is most effective at getting customers to sign up for is:"

It reads as good or better than a human would do. Maybe not better than the BEST human marketer would do, but far better than average, and instant + free(ish).

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#48

Post by mattikl »

Rewinding a bit from computers doing all the writing, are you using any tools that help you write considerably better (not just spelling/punctuation checking)?

As a non-native English speaker I would like to have a tool that points out my nonstandard usages of language. I think it could be something as simple as parsing the text and searching it against a corpus, but I have no idea how many "unique structures" a text typically contains where no one else has used those same exact words. AI could help to suggest better ways to formulate the text.

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#49

Post by exporectomy »

tsimionescu wrote: post #46
bikeshaving wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who’s to say that our greatest writers didn’t “trip over meaning”? A lot of poetic processes involve finding, curating and re-contextualizing interesting phrases (see found poetry), and there’s potentially a lot of value in applying the same process to computer-generated writing.

That's why no one is truly moved by a single phrase. We often quote memorable bits from larger works ("to be, or not to be"), but that quote is only memorable because the entire work makes us believe that it is not an accident.

I was by a famous 6 word poem: "For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn."

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#50

Post by tsimionescu »

ryandrake wrote: post #29
Swizec wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right. AI will not replace good writing. AI will replace typical writing – seo spam, news reports, ads, coding tutorials, etc Good writing has insight. AI can’t do that yet. Most writing is filler lettuce. AI is great.

Most news articles don’t seem to be even proofread anymore! At least AI spells perfectly. It will at least likely soon replace the uncreative who/what/where/when news writing.

Only for papers that don't care about who/what/where/when, because GPT-3 itself doesn't really care about those questions.
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