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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

#121

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

_aunn wrote: post #57
mattikl wrote: 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…

prowritingaid has a very good, free, web-based tool that will parse out all sorts of neat things in your work. for example: i write fiction and have a real problem with “echos” — words that i repeat within a certain distance of each other — and i even miss them when proofing/editing. pwa is a godsend for this. if scrivener would add their own native version of this (hint hint incase any of you L&L people lurk here..…

Well, repetition is considered harmful in literary writing but that, too, is just a convention. There's no reason to force yourself not to do it if you find that it comes to you naturally. Rather, I'd try to find a way to develop it further into a unique style instead. Think of minimal music, heavy metal riffs and chorus...es (chori?), or repeating leitmotifs in classical music. Repetition drives a point home. It's a useful device, in music and visual art, why not in writing also?

Actually, I find that constant repetition of the same words is absolutely necessary in technical writing. I used to do this thing where I'd try to write my research papers as if I was writing literature, trying to find new ways to say the same thing to avoid repetition, and I got some really harsh criticism as a result. I went to my university's center for academic English and they pointed out my mistake to me and suddendly it was blindingly obvious. In a technical paper you have to use the same exact words to refer to the same concept, or you will immediately confuse the reader, who will think you mean two (or more!) different things, one for each different turn of phrase. So I adjusted my writing to exploit the rythm created by the repetition of the same few words every few sentences, because of course I want to convey a precise meaning but I also want my papers to read well. And now reviewers note my papers are well written and clear; and so far nobody has complained about repetition.

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#122

Post by anthk »

sunshineforever wrote: post #97
anthk wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. He, ditto in Spain. In most cases the (same) authors would rehash a detective story as some sci-fi based short novel by just changing some devices and lore and call it done. Well, in the end cyberpunk it's just futuristic noir.

Dan brown seems to do this. Da Vinci code, angels and demons, and the one about the NSA all have the same plot structure.

Altough my case was about really cheap short novels from the 70's, they almost were Pulp Fiction.

An infamous crime in Chicago with mafia and detectives -> some crime in Orion with spaceships, Martian troops and so on.

Altough some of them were fairly good, like one about a time travel paradox.

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#123

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

causality0 wrote: post #8
vumgl wrote: 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…

>> 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.

Arguably, you are describing about 80% of the Fantasy genre, only it's all written by humans.

Sorry if that sounded like a "shallow dismissal" as per the HN guidelines. I used to love F/SF and then I found I couldn't read it anymore because it all felt like the same few story elements were reused over and Over and OVER again. I get the same feeling of dread boredom when I browse the Fantasy isle at bookshops today. is rising in the . must to defeat . It all got so formulaic you could write a Cluedo variant based on it: The Orc Captain with the Great Axe in the Dark Tower.

This, btw, was all before I (very belatedly, because I'm not a native English speark and so I read only what was translated to Greek) discovered Terry Pratchett, Jeff Noon and Iain M. Banks, who were a breath of fresh air (unfortunately rarely refreshed since then) and yeah, as a kid, I read a lot of F/SF. Explains my school grades, hah.

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#124

Post by the_lonely_road »

username90 wrote: post #113
goodpoint wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many (human-written) books and articles are 10% content and 90% fluff and repetition. The articles shared on HN are a good example. If the goal is to increase the SNR, GPT-3 is probably not going to help.

Which is why we read comments and not articles. Articles are full of fluff, comments for some reason aren't.

All of the salient points from the article will be quoted and discussed with context in the comments. As for the pieces that no one thought important enough to discuss...I appear to be missing nothing.

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#125

Post by troelsSteegin »

Are people getting better at reading? A deep read is an immersive, flow experience. But to engage in reading you have feel you have the time and focus to commit to reading and then not be interrupted. I don't want for machine generated narrative, I want more time spent deep reading.

I do way more scanning and skimming now than deep reading - authoritative source, credible, what's new, what's useful - it's all critical thinking and done as efficiently as I can make it. It feels like work. I always wonder if more structuring over the stuff that I read - entity and concept extraction, thesis extraction, separating facts from opinions, a topic-centered feed - would be better. I haven't found or built the right experience yet.

To me, narrative generating models are interesting only as a step toward a better critical reading experience, and the win there would be generating useful abstractions that help one understand faster. Arguably, writing style is one such abstraction.

Maybe there's potential in being able to generate readable narratives from things that people have a hard time describing, like datasets. Then the grail is business dashboards composed as sonnets.

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#126

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

minimaxir wrote: post #31

See also my experiments with GPT-3 on sane prompts, which have wildly varying quality even after generating them in bulk: https://github.com/minimaxir/gpt-3-experiments Creative writing hasn't been one of the super-hyped use cases by OpenAI for the OpenAI API outside of AI Dungeon, surprisingly. For just random generation, the necessary curation can detract from the time-savings advantages. (as an aside, the API is a…

Generating M:tG cards is interesting to me. Can we talk about this a bit? :)

My degree dissertation was an M:tG expert system that included a hand-crafted parser and generator for (a small subset of) ability text [1]. My Masters' thesis was a grammar induction system trained on M:tG cards [2]. And I finally managed to sneak some M:tG grammar induction in my papers as a PhD student [3].

I had a quick look at the colab of your project. If I may be critical, the examples you have are ... so-so. I've seen previous attempts to generate M:tG text with neural nets, starting with the old project in M:tG Salvation that became Roborosewater and that used LSTMs if memory serves. Results have always been a mixed bag that looks promising but always falls down holes even with hand-curation. This still seems to be the case with your project.

A couple of examples (you probably know already):

  −2: Put a +1/+1 counter on each other creature you control.
"Each other creature" should refer to a card with the (super) type "creature" but this card is a "planeswaker".

  +1: Each opponent chooses a creature they control. If that creature was a copy of that creature, each other player reveals their hand, chooses one of those cards, then puts it into their hand, then shuffles.
Which creature was that creature a copy of?

  −10: Target opponent sacrifices a creature.
  −9: Each opponent sacrifices a creature.
Representing costs in a meaningful manner is a constant problem in every M:tG generator I've seen.

The problems I highlight above are not with grammaticality, which is certainly a big step forward with respect to the past. But many of the abilities still don't make a lot of sense, or don't make sense to be on the same card, or have weird costs etc. If you want your project to be something genuinely new, I have to say I don't think it's there yet.

My intuition is that it would take a lot more than language modelling to generate M:tG cards that make enough sense that it's more fun to generate them than create them yourself. I think it would be necessary to have background knowledge of the game, at least its rules, if not some concept of a metagame. It might also help to re-train standard NLP pipelines specifically for M:tG (e.g. some kind of ability-text specific anaphora resolution might help with "that creature" above).

Also, I note that the new online version of the game is capable of parsing cads as scripts in a programming language using a hand-crafted grammar rather than a machine-learned model [4] [5]. So it seems to me that the state-of-the-art for M:tG language modelling is still a hand-crafted grammar.

__________________

[1] https://github.com/stassa/Gleemin - unfortunately, doesn't run anymore after multiple changes to Prolog interepreters used to create and then port the project over.

[2] https://github.com/stassa/THELEMA - should work with older versions of Swi-Prolog, unfortunately not documented in the README.

[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10994-020-05945-w - see Section 3.3 "Experiment 3: M:tG fragment". Cringe-inducing to read just a few months after writing, sorry.

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/74hw1z/magic_aren...

[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/9kxid9/mtgadisper...

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#127

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

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.

But if you write such an article, you need to convery specific information - about the "who/what/where/when" of the news story. This is information that was not available to GPT-3 at the time of training (e.g. it doesn't know that Biden is the PotUS now) so someone will have to sit down and craft a prompt that contains this information and such that it causes GPT-3 to generate a piece that repeats this information. To do all that sounds like a lot more work than just writing the article by hand.

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#129

Post by nickpinkston »

dang wrote: post #43
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

I wouldn't say it's shallow. I think the New Yorker's editorial board / style guide does a disservice in explaining science / engineering concepts. I just delivered my critique via sarcasm.

Re: The computers are getting better at writing

#130

Post by libertine »

jamesjyu wrote: post #128

Oh wow, just seeing this post made it to the front page. Founder of Sudowrite here, happy to answer questions.

I don't mean to put on you the spot, but I have been wondering about this:

Do you think that such tools will have the eyes of the regulators on top of them due to copyright issues, since the data used could have a lot of copyrighted material?

I haven't yet made my mind about this: is the output original content, or just shuffled proprietary content?

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