Live data from Hacker News

The computers are getting better at writing

newyorker.com

61–70 of 165 posts

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Yeah. But the thing is, after you have own baby, you may find yourself with like 5 pairs of never worn baby shoes.

So while it somewhat suggest death, it is only because of the literally context, which makes you expect something deep. If you seen that in an ad, you would not feel the same.

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#62
post #48

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…

I think real-time lookup in a corpus would be enough if it's implemented well.

I'm a non-native speaker (reasonably fluent) in two non-English languages, and when I'm writing, if anything strikes me as sounding "off" then I google the phrase and see how common it is.

In my less-fluent of the two languages, I end up doing this a lot, often just to check my work. As a result I write e-mails and such very slowly, but at a fluency level exceeding my actual fluency in that language. Which seems like a good tradeoff for written communication.

It would obviously be useful to have that done for me while I type.

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#63
post #48

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…

As a fellow non-native who accepted not to strive for full assimilation, my suggestion is to do the same. You can refine your writing by reading a lot. Books like “The elements of style” and “On writing well” can help with grasping those structural elements you might be struggling to identify. Apart from that, our brain has been shaped by our native language, and we can’t really delete that. Which is great news! It m…

> It means we can express concepts in English with structures and flows that, if grammatically correct, have the advantage of sounding original, different, sometimes exotic.

Yeah, that happens all the time. It always strikes me as unfair when someone comes out with an ostensibly perfect sentence and the result is "well, you didn't make any mistakes; all the words mean what you want them to mean and all the grammar is used correctly. But the sentence is still wrong; that's just not how we say that."

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#64
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I used to read a lot of junk paperbacks - mostly horrors, but also stories about truck drivers, detectives and western stories. They were schematic to the extreme. Looking back, it was the same story over and over and over. I liked them back then. I used to read also a lot of repetitive sci-fi: those small start trek books.

I never read Harlequin, but it being repetitive is not something special. Back when people read a lot of books, we did not read James Joyce and Charles Dickens exclusively. I mean, spiderman comics, ninja turtles comics, they were all the same story repeated again and again too.

We read easy for fun books.

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#65
Couldn't help but notice that 'Xanadu' uses a lot of rhymes ... GPT apparently didn't notice that constraint.

And then there's: "While all the stars that round her burn’d, Bow’d to the ground and based their fires. To the one ever-branching cloud" When 'base' is used as a past-tense verb, we expect a prepositional phrase ... before the next period. The preposition is never 'to'. Doesn't matter; the period stopped the English part.

"That blew and drifted—blow and drift;" What?

"If you told me that Coleridge wrote it, I would believe you."

NExt.

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#66
The lesson we should take from GPT-3 is that we spend way too much time reading text that isn't really saying anything, and/or failing to find meaning in what we read. It's a neat trick, and I think it could absolutely replace much or most of the writing on the internet today. But is it good writing? No, not really. At least, not in the sense of writing as producing anything more substantive than slick prose with a vague, meandering context running through it.

I think the next step (say, being able to produce short stories with actual literary value) will be substantially more difficult, mostly because it's substantially more difficult for human writers too. It takes learned abstract knowledge and deliberate intention to write something that's coherent and engaging and longer than a few hundred words, and that skill is separate from the intuitive prose generation ability that's essentially unconscious for practiced writers and comes easily to many avid readers (i.e. trained on a large corpus) who take up writing.

It will be interesting to see how producers of actual substantive content incorporate these tools into their processes, if at all. I guess I can imagine using it to generate descriptions, for instance, but how does it do with dialogue? Probably not very well.

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#67
post #5

Computer-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 p…

Don't you think there's a danger you'd end up with stories that looked like JRR Tolkien as written by George RR Martin?

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#68
post #48

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…

I am using LanguageTool. Not the website, but a command-line tool. You can configure it with all sorts of rules to check all sorts of spelling, grammar, style, and language issues. However, as far as I have noticed, LanguageTool is not a very advanced language-help tool. Still, it did improve my writing a lot. If nothing else, my writing has gotten more consistent.

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#69

The lesson we should take from GPT-3 is that we spend way too much time reading text that isn't really saying anything, and/or failing to find meaning in what we read. It's a neat trick, and I think it could absolutely replace much or most of the writing on the internet today. But is it good writing? No, not really. At least, not in the sense of writing as producing anything more substantive than slick prose with a v…

If you want to echo the last paragraph of the article, the system also doesn’t know when to stop.

Which leads to a simple improvement: teach the model when to stop, what sections to remove. There’s already great ML-based summary engines, and systems able to answer questions from descriptions.

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fellow non-native who accepted not to strive for full assimilation, my suggestion is to do the same. You can refine your writing by reading a lot. Books like “The elements of style” and “On writing well” can help with grasping those structural elements you might be struggling to identify. Apart from that, our brain has been shaped by our native language, and we can’t really delete that. Which is great news! It m…

> It means we can express concepts in English with structures and flows that, if grammatically correct, have the advantage of sounding original, different, sometimes exotic. Yeah, that happens all the time. It always strikes me as unfair when someone comes out with an ostensibly perfect sentence and the result is "well, you didn't make any mistakes; all the words mean what you want them to mean and all the grammar is…

I’m a native English speaker and you all write well enough in English that I didn’t notice that you are not native speakers from your writing. I went back and looked more carefully and noticed a few little mistakes, but nothing I wouldn’t write off as the result of someone writing quickly.
Post reply on HN