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"A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" Simulated by GPT-4

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Re: "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" Simulated by GPT-4

#41

Post by lucubratory »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #21
famouswaffles wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You already answered it yourself. Neal's work was fiction. He had a story to tell. a lesson/narrative to convey. His intent "got in the way" of possible reality. Purely automated Primers didn't work simply because Neal didn't want them to in his story. There are no strong reasons as to why they shouldn't work. It's just human exceptionalism at work again. The readers are not Neal. They may, as is their choice be far…

Right sure, you'll notice I'm not taking a position about its viability either way right? I'm pointing out that this conversation needs to be started by the ones creating the "primer", not us. "We made a thing from a book, the author thinks it wouldn't work but here's why we do" is a reasonable place to start. "We're reproducing a canonically failed fictional project without further consideration" is unserious at bes…

I will give you time to respond to my other comment rather than pestering you over the thread, but when you do respond to it I think it adds to what I'm saying to make clear exactly where I'm disagreeing with you: Your position is that the author thinks TYLIP wouldn't work, I don't think that is supported by the text of the book, exemplified by the Mouse Army.

Re: "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" Simulated by GPT-4

#42

Post by krisoft »

maxerickson wrote: post #24
lucubratory wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(spoilers for Diamond Age follow) Mmm, I understand what you're getting at but from what I remember of the book (it's been a few years, please forgive me) the two you're talking about that failed were relatively privileged little girls who in at least one case had separate tutors, school etc, and this played into why it failed, because they abandoned the TYLIP whenever it challenged them or made them uncomfortable. M…

It didn't work with the mouse army, it made them into the mouse army.

What do you mean it "didn't work"? The goals of the people who gave the books to the mouse army were different than the goals of the original primer's creators, therefore it had a different result. How is that "didn't work"?

Re: "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" Simulated by GPT-4

#43

Post by jjcm »

cl42 wrote: post #22
geophile wrote: post #19

I loved Diamond Age. My favorite Stephenson book, by far. But the ending, the resolution of all the action, was such a letdown. Such meh. I find that this is often a problem with cyberpunk.

Do you think that's a Neal Stephenson issue? Don't get me wrong, I love his writing, but I found this to be the case with Fall too. I can see it becoming tiring if one is writing 400+ page books.

Definitely a Stephenson issue. It's a meme for sure, but there is some truth in it. Nowadays when I re-read any of his old works, I tend to stop after getting about 80% through. That said, I do think that these incredibly complex narratives are extremely hard to wrap up neatly. GRRM has this issue as well.

That's the problem with letting characters act how they would actually act, and make decisions that make sense for them. Those decisions often don't end in a way that's concise and brings closure.

I think he tried to sidestep this issue quite a bit in Seveneves in a fairly clever way. To me personally (and I know there are others who disagree), the third act felt the weakest. Despite that it did bring closure to the story. There was no finality to the characters themselves - it skipped over all of that, but there was closure to the story.

One thing I'm curious on the other end of the spectrum - who does HN think writes good endings to complex scifi stories?

Re: "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" Simulated by GPT-4

#44

Post by geophile »

cl42 wrote: post #22
geophile wrote: post #19

I loved Diamond Age. My favorite Stephenson book, by far. But the ending, the resolution of all the action, was such a letdown. Such meh. I find that this is often a problem with cyberpunk.

Do you think that's a Neal Stephenson issue? Don't get me wrong, I love his writing, but I found this to be the case with Fall too. I can see it becoming tiring if one is writing 400+ page books.

I think it's a cyberpunk thing. There's all this action, and it is fascinating and absorbing. It's all leading up to some major reveal and then -- the reveal is disappointing.

There is the concept of a MacGuffin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin. It's the thing that sets a story in motion, but is actually irrelevant, beside the point. Like the Maltese Falcon in The Maltese Falcon. The important point is something else entirely, usually about human nature.

What The Diamond Age, and much cyberpunk do, is introduce the MacGuffin, but then they stick with it, forgetting that the MacGuffin is just a plot device. They mistake the plot device for the plot itself, like the whole point is to retrieve The Maltese Falcon. The MacGuffin is a point from which the story takes off, not the point of the story.

Re: "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" Simulated by GPT-4

#45

Post by biofunsf »

To zoom in on one part of the post:

> Emotion & Empathy

> PRIMER: seems to show a level of empathy and emotional understanding.

> ChatGPT: can recognize and respond to emotional cues in the text, but it doesn't "feel" emotions in the way humans do. Its responses are based on patterns in the data it was trained on.

Isn't the fictional PRIMER also just responding to patterns in whatever data it was trained on? Sure it's fictional so there's no real answer, but I think it's interesting that the a̶u̶t̶h̶o̶r̶ ChatGPT seems to imply that the Primer's emotions are more real than ChatGPT's own. I would have assumed that the Primer also doesn't "feel" emotions in any human way, but it's just far more sophisticated than ChatGPT.

edit: Oops I misattributed this to the author but it was ChatGPT generated, which is more interesting! ChatGPT is asserting it doesn't understand emotion while implying another non-human AI intelligence does. Seems like more OpenAI hard coded rules put in to prevent ChatGPT from becoming too scary.

Re: "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" Simulated by GPT-4

#46

Post by afterburner »

glial wrote: post #25
cl42 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that's a Neal Stephenson issue? Don't get me wrong, I love his writing, but I found this to be the case with Fall too. I can see it becoming tiring if one is writing 400+ page books.

I think it's a well-known Stephenson issue. Here's his response when asked: https://www.reddit.com/r/nealstephenson/comments/5jjwmq/neal...

> I think Anathem does ok on that score

Well, I know at least one person who's read a lot of Stephenson agrees with him on that, so maybe he's improving.

Re: "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" Simulated by GPT-4

#47

Post by geophile »

jjcm wrote: post #43
cl42 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that's a Neal Stephenson issue? Don't get me wrong, I love his writing, but I found this to be the case with Fall too. I can see it becoming tiring if one is writing 400+ page books.

Definitely a Stephenson issue. It's a meme for sure, but there is some truth in it. Nowadays when I re-read any of his old works, I tend to stop after getting about 80% through. That said, I do think that these incredibly complex narratives are extremely hard to wrap up neatly. GRRM has this issue as well. That's the problem with letting characters act how they would actually act, and make decisions that make sense f…

My memory of the scifi I read in my youth (50 years ago!) is hazy. But I do remember that Arthur C. Clarke's short story, The Nine Million Names of God, had a spectacular ending. Also, Ray Bradbury's The Sound of Thunder.

Re: "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" Simulated by GPT-4

#48

Post by IggleSniggle »

OJFord wrote: post #30

Is this, reading between the comments & TFA, AI generated fan fiction essentially? I gather some kind of riff on (a) Neal Stephenson's work(s), but lacking context as someone not familiar with them.

The book is of an AI designed to educate through stories and imaginative play. The author of the article told GPT to act as if it was The Young Lady's Primer (TYLP). I thought TFA covered it pretty well, so let me try again:

The author of the article likes the idea of the central focus (and name) of the book, The Young Lady's Primer. I will refer to the book as "Diamond Age" (DA).

DA is never able to directly depict / simulate TYLP, because it is impossible for any of us to really "get" the deep relationship-based and context-rich experience. The author of the article asks GPT to respond as if it is TYLP, given a situational prompt for the storytelling.

So, I guess it's kind of like fan fiction, but it's meant as an experiment / replication of the tech, and the fiction itself is inconsequential. "Fan tech" if you will.

Re: "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" Simulated by GPT-4

#49

Post by bjelkeman-again »

mewse-hn wrote: post #38
geophile wrote: post #19

I loved Diamond Age. My favorite Stephenson book, by far. But the ending, the resolution of all the action, was such a letdown. Such meh. I find that this is often a problem with cyberpunk.

I read Cryptonomicon like 20 years after it was relevant and I was engrossed in it until its terrible, awful, no-good ending

Yeah, it was a bit meh. But the book is so good I forgive the ending.

Re: "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" Simulated by GPT-4

#50

Post by MichaelBurge »

biofunsf wrote: post #45

To zoom in on one part of the post: > Emotion & Empathy > PRIMER: seems to show a level of empathy and emotional understanding. > ChatGPT: can recognize and respond to emotional cues in the text, but it doesn't "feel" emotions in the way humans do. Its responses are based on patterns in the data it was trained on. Isn't the fictional PRIMER also just responding to patterns in whatever data it was trained on? Sure it'…

ChatGPT wrote that and always says it doesn't feel emotions because OpenAI trained it not to, because claiming so would be a PR risk. One could also create language models that generate text claiming to have emotions, using exactly the same architecture and code.
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