Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

tobysimonds.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 162 posts

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#31

Post by tamassimond »

notahacker wrote: post #24
itishappy wrote: post #10

Those examples seem quite unrelated to one another. The first reads as admitting intentional fraud and deceit, the second reads like dealing with imposter syndrome. I'd love to know the prompt. Also, not sure how you can judge a style to be clearly better than another. The workflow of generating a bunch of stories in the style of different authors and then voting on a favorite just seems like picking a favorite autho…

> Those examples seem quite unrelated to one another. The first reads as admitting intentional fraud and deceit, the second reads like dealing with imposter syndrome. I'd love to know the prompt. Yeah. And to read the rest of each of the stories it generated... Both paragraphs are simply short excerpts which involve no actual narrative, never mind the stuff that LLMs are typically weak at (maintaining consistency, in…

Yeah as we mention in the blog it's really hard to eval on short passages. If you go on the Github can see longer stories where the change is more noticeable. Both those stories are from the same prompt

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#32

Post by Gerardo1 »

frozenseven wrote: post #26
Gerardo1 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More capable AI systems make the world better. Support that. Now support it while including direct costs and externalities.

If the cost and externality is that people are upset about it, I honestly don't care.

No you can start with actual money.

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#33

Post by Gerardo1 »

frozenseven wrote: post #20
saberience wrote: post #8

Why would we ever want to build something like this, unless your goal is to have fiction writers make even less money than they already do. Just stop, please. Try and automate some horrible and repetitive drudgery. Do you want to live in a world where humans no longer do any creative work? It’s grotesque.

I want to live in a world with more options and freedom to choose. If somebody wants to build and explore with these AI systems, you can't stop them.

> I want to live in a world with more options and freedom to choose

And you think that AI will be beneficial to that want?

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#34

Post by tamassimond »

SamBam wrote: post #22
mock-possum wrote: post #13

This feels like a lot of fluff, without some solid examples of the results - the one example of generated prose that they do provide is pretty unimpressive, it reads like… well, like an LLM wrote it.

Indeed. Also the whole thing is just "apply an Evolutionary Algorithm to stories." The only interesting question is whether the LLM that decides the story's fitness rating (which they call Elo, despite seeming to have nothing to do with the actual Elo ranking system) can mimic a human's rating. Given the brief example, it's not clear that it can, since it seems no better.

To clarify we use an Elo ranking system to update models scores, so if you loose to a higher rated story you don't loose as much Elo ranking. Definitely agree with LLM judge criticism though it's still an open questions of how we can make them better. Using the repeated story comparison judging system does help make them more consistent. A good rubric helps make them more human like as-well. The really big question is how large is the generator verifier gap between creating stories and marking them

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#36

Post by frozenseven »

taneq wrote: post #29
frozenseven wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More capable AI systems make the world better. If you don't like AI written material on principle, you can simply choose not to read it. Follow human writers who don't use AI.

That’s precisely the problem, though. The internet is already rapidly filling with AI-generated slop, and it takes a non-trivial amount of human brain power to determine whether the how-to article you’re reading is actually a reliable source or whether it was churned out to generate ad revenue. The infinite number of monkeys with typewriters are generating something that sounds enough like Shakespeare that it’s makin…

I deliberately wrote my comment in a way that would preemp this response. Yet here we are.

I honestly have little to no problem with finding and filtering the stuff I want to see. All the writers and creators I liked five or ten years ago? Basically all of them are still there and not hard to find. My process of finding new people has not changed.

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#37

Post by HappMacDonald »

esafak wrote: post #35
zorked wrote: post #5

If there is something that I would like AI to never touch, it's that. Please stop making the world worse.

I think it's fine as long as its output is watermarked so you can avoid it.

If you need to watermark it then you don't need to watermark it, though.

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#38

Post by frozenseven »

Gerardo1 wrote: post #33
frozenseven wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to live in a world with more options and freedom to choose. If somebody wants to build and explore with these AI systems, you can't stop them.

> I want to live in a world with more options and freedom to choose And you think that AI will be beneficial to that want?

Yes, undoubtedly.

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#39

Post by mcpar-land »

deadbabe wrote: post #15
zorked wrote: post #5

If there is something that I would like AI to never touch, it's that. Please stop making the world worse.

You cannot stop people from making the world worse or better. The best you can do is focus on your own life. In time many will say we are lucky to live in a world with so much content, where anything you want to see or read can be spun up in an instant, without labor. And though most will no longer make a living doing some of these content creation activities by hand and brain, you can still rejoice knowing that thos…

> You cannot stop people from making the world worse or better.

I can think of quite a few ways to do this.

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#40

Post by suddenlybananas »

deadbabe wrote: post #15
zorked wrote: post #5

If there is something that I would like AI to never touch, it's that. Please stop making the world worse.

You cannot stop people from making the world worse or better. The best you can do is focus on your own life. In time many will say we are lucky to live in a world with so much content, where anything you want to see or read can be spun up in an instant, without labor. And though most will no longer make a living doing some of these content creation activities by hand and brain, you can still rejoice knowing that thos…

>You cannot stop people from making the world worse or better. The best you can do is focus on your own life.

We have laws and regulations for a reason.

Post reply on HN