This is hilarious. As impressive as GPT-3/4 has been at writing, what's more shocking is just how bullshity-y human writing is.. And a "business consultant" is the epitome of a role requiring bullshit writing. Chat GPT could certainly out business-consultant the very best business consultants. Sometimes to be taken seriously at work, you need to take some concise idea or data and fluff it up into a multiple pages or…
Yeah. Most people have focused on what LLMs can do, but I think it’s equally if not more interesting what can they not do, and why?
When we say LLMs can generate text we’re painting brush strokes as broad as a 10-lane highway. Apparently we have quite limited vocabulary about what writing actually is, and specifically what categories and levels exist.
For instance, it’s fun (and in my view completely expected) to see that courteous emails, LinkedIn inspirational spam, corp-speech etc, GPT outperforms humans with flying colors, on the first attempt too! Whereas if you’re asking for the next book of Game of Thrones or any well-written literature it falls flat – incredibly boring, generic, full of platitudes and empty arcs and characters.
We have to start mapping the field of writing to a better conceptual space. Currently it seems like we can’t even differentiate between the equivalent of arithmetic and abstract algebra.