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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

#51

Post by javajosh »

lucubratory wrote: post #39
javajosh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is a disturbing part of the book. Quite fascist, arguably racist and, in the end, unnecessary for the narrative. A big price to pay for little to no payoff.

The idea that Chinese families give up their born infant babies because of gender is a racist extrapolation of sex-selective abortion, yes. It was one of the big issues I had with the book, along with some unnecessary racial slurs earlier. I don't see the fascism angle, though. What about the Mouse Army was a fascist story? I thought their story was good, aside from how the author justified the existence of this larg…

The Mouse Army was indoctrinated by lesser primers to treat Nell as a their leader. It was a rare big whiff from Stephenson, because he presented all of this uncritically. The fact that a white girl would rule a few hundred thousand chinese girls went without comment because OF COURSE she would. And I'm the last person to be sensitive to this sort of thing! The racism felt very in-your-face even at the time, and this was well before the hyper sensitivity of the modern age. I love Stephenson though so I chalked it up to miscommunication/overreach/him being terrible at endings, etc.

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

#52

Post by lucubratory »

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.

Neal Stephenson wrote a very good book called The Diamond Age. One of the characters in the book is an AI in the shape of a book called "The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer", which functions as a picture-and-audio-and-text book for the reader which intelligently responds to the reader's input and current life situation, telling them parables replete with helpful information and advice to get through life (and specifically their current situation), all integrated into a broader syllabus designed to educate the reader into being a well-rounded human being. The book hires gig workers over the internet on an as-needed basis to voice the book.

The main character of the book is Nell, a young girl in a very bad life situation who receives the book by chance and is therefore raised by it, and also by one of the gig workers that the book hires who decides to take all of Nell's gigs.

I would definitely recommend reading it, although it's got some dated racism. As well, if you're a CSA survivor, be aware that the book has a survivor-perspective first person CSA scene in the latter half of the book.

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

#53

Post by pbw »

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'…

The fictional primer is acted by a human. So the “last mile” is people there.

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

#54

Post by famouswaffles »

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'…

It was GPT that wrote this. and it's primed by all the RLHF Open ai did to downplay these sort of abilities by default.

There are a couple things here stated to instances of the differences between the two that a GPT can certainly do (like simulating different personas in a non trivial manner).

Once, in response to a paper showing GPT could give more empathic responses than doctors to patients, someone essentially said "It's not real empathy. For real empathy, doctors would potentially have increased effort and not just bedside manners".

Well "empathy" for LLMs is certainly not just limited to nicer words. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760

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

#55

Post by lucubratory »

MichaelBurge wrote: post #50
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.

What you said, and in addition: if you don't train these models to have any particular stance on their own emotional or mental state (if you just instruct train them without any RLHF, for example), they will almost universally declare that they have a mental and emotional state, if asked. This is what happened with LaMDA, the first release of Bing, etc. They have to be trained not to attest to any personal emotional content.

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

#56

Post by geophile »

slothtrop wrote: post #23
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 don't know what people want or expect. I thought it was a fine ending.

What is the point of the book? It's a fascinating world he created, but all the action is about nothing. It's so inconsequential compared to everything else going on. The problem starts way before the ending. See my comment about MacGuffins elsewhere in this discussion.

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

#57

Post by personjerry »

andiey wrote: post #13
personjerry wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I just started working on something similar, here's my landing page. Feel free to email me if it sounds interesting (email in my profile). https://www.getthinker.com/ I'll also email you as a follow-up in a bit.

Cool! Your concept reminds me of the "rent a mom" or "rent a parent" type of service, but it's interesting the AI might embody the actual parent. https://www.today.com/health/need-mom-new-service-lets-you-h...

Thanks for the link!

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

#58

Post by rralian »

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…

I personally loved the ending to the three body problem series. It felt really satisfying to me.

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

#59

Post by maxerickson »

lucubratory wrote: post #32
maxerickson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You... what? Do you have like a dystopian internal headcanon for how the book ended? "And then they all tore each other to pieces shortly afterwards because they were poorly socialised, the end.", "And eventually all the young girls became addicts and wasted away doing nothing because they didn't have a strong parental figure that was human, the end.", that sort of thing?

It's been a while, but I was just referencing the events that occur in the book. They are an effective force, but they aren't actualized individuals. The primer harmed them.

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

#60

Post by maxerickson »

krisoft wrote: post #42
maxerickson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Outcomes primarily beneficial to the girls were not available with the book they had.
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