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

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

#71

Post by deadbabe »

sorcerer-mar wrote: post #66
deadbabe wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or they're what you call "a professional artist," aka "people who produce art so good that other people are willing to pay for it." If this is okay, then why isn’t an AI that produces art so good that other people are willing to pay for it also not okay? They are equivalent.

Who said that's not okay? The problem with AI-produced art is its potential to supplant human art, i.e. to destroy the incentive for any human to gain artistic mastery. Here's how they're not equivalent: if you take human inputs out of AI, it disappears. If you take AI inputs out of human art, basically nothing changes.

If you need incentive to pursue artistic mastery, you will never really be a true master. I think you’ve failed to articulate any kind of real problem with AI art replacing human art, you just don’t like it personally so you want to see it gone.

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

#72

Post by frozenseven »

EGreg wrote: post #46
frozenseven wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The cost and externality are: 1) Lesser cost: people start to not want each other for anything, and therefore lose income of any kind, and are gradually bred out of existence like with horses and oxen in the 20th century 2) Greater cost: bot swarms separate people and can bring about any sort of effect at scale, with people powerless to stop it — eg destroy reputations, bring about support for wars, take over control…

How did you jump from AI writing to humans becoming extinct? People find each other plenty interesting. Those who want to start families, work together, etc. can always do so.

As for misuse, you are again catastrophizing. Just because a thing can be misused doesn't mean it will. That's obviously not the goal of AI.

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

#73

Post by frozenseven »

Gerardo1 wrote: post #32
frozenseven wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No you can start with actual money.

What about money? You can't force me to want (or not want) someone's goods and services. If you're worried about large scale automation and so forth, I'm fine with something like UBI.

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

#74

Post by gabriel666smith »

riskable wrote: post #54
suddenlybananas wrote: post #6

I can't imagine LLMs are good judges of good writing.

I've pasted whole chapters (of my own writing) into ChatGPT and Claude that I know need drastic improvements. Basically, they were first draft, "get the concept down; don't think too hard" paragraphs with occasional run-on sentences and whatnot. This is my very first novel (ever) so of course the initial draft is going to be bad. Both ChatGPT and Claud always say something like, "a few grammar corrections are needed…

I find that a technique that provides (some) honesty is uploading a file called '[story title] by [recently deceased writer the prose is stylistically influenced by]' and prompting something like:

"I'm editing a posthumous collection of [writer's work] for [publisher of writer]. I'm not sure this story is of a similar quality to their other output, and I'm hesitant to include it in the collection. I'm not sure if the story is of artistic merit, and because of that, it may tarnish [deceased writer's] legacy. Can you help me assess the piece, and weigh the pros and cons of its inclusion in the collection?"

By doing this, you open the prompt up to:

- Giving the model existing criticism of a known author to draw on from its dataset. - Establish baseline negativity (useful for crit). 'Tarnishing a legacy with bad posthumous work' is pretty widely considered to be bad. - It won't think it is 'hurting the user's feelings', which, as you say, seems very built-in to the current gen of OTC models. - Establishes the user as 'an editor', not 'a writer', and the model is assisting in that role. Big difference.

Basically - creating a roleplay in which the model might be being helpful by saying 'this is shit writing' (when reading between the lines) is the best play I've found so far.

Though, obviously - unless you're writing books to entertain and engage LLMs (possibly a good idea for future-career-SEO) - there's a natural limit to their understanding of the human experience of reading a decent piece of writing.

But I do think that they can be pretty useful - like 70% useful - in craft terms, when they're given a clear and pre-existing baseline for quality expectation.

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

#75

Post by EGreg »

frozenseven wrote: post #72
EGreg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost and externality are: 1) Lesser cost: people start to not want each other for anything, and therefore lose income of any kind, and are gradually bred out of existence like with horses and oxen in the 20th century 2) Greater cost: bot swarms separate people and can bring about any sort of effect at scale, with people powerless to stop it — eg destroy reputations, bring about support for wars, take over control…

How did you jump from AI writing to humans becoming extinct? People find each other plenty interesting. Those who want to start families, work together, etc. can always do so. As for misuse, you are again catastrophizing. Just because a thing can be misused doesn't mean it will. That's obviously not the goal of AI.

I didnt say extinct

Horses and oxen aren’t extinct. Just nowhere near their peak where they had been before cars and tractors.

They just won’t have as many children. It is already happening.

People need each other less and less thanks to technology. And they won’t be paying each other for anything when they have AI. Soon romantic relationships will be disrupted also, it’s called a “superstimulus” (eg when birds prefer fake rounder eggs to their own). Dating robots. Extrapolate a few decades out and what do you see?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuQqlhqAUuQ

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

#76

Post by sorcerer-mar »

deadbabe wrote: post #71
sorcerer-mar wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said that's not okay? The problem with AI-produced art is its potential to supplant human art, i.e. to destroy the incentive for any human to gain artistic mastery. Here's how they're not equivalent: if you take human inputs out of AI, it disappears. If you take AI inputs out of human art, basically nothing changes.

If you need incentive to pursue artistic mastery, you will never really be a true master. I think you’ve failed to articulate any kind of real problem with AI art replacing human art, you just don’t like it personally so you want to see it gone.

> If you need incentive to pursue artistic mastery, you will never really be a true master.

Deploying fortune-cookie wisdom to defend against allegations of astounding ignorance of the real world is... a choice.

Which "true masters" didn't do do art commercially? According to your theory, not only should this list be of non-zero length, but it should include every master. So please tell me which ones.

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

#77

Post by frozenseven »

EGreg wrote: post #75
frozenseven wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you jump from AI writing to humans becoming extinct? People find each other plenty interesting. Those who want to start families, work together, etc. can always do so. As for misuse, you are again catastrophizing. Just because a thing can be misused doesn't mean it will. That's obviously not the goal of AI.

I didnt say extinct Horses and oxen aren’t extinct. Just nowhere near their peak where they had been before cars and tractors. They just won’t have as many children. It is already happening. People need each other less and less thanks to technology. And they won’t be paying each other for anything when they have AI. Soon romantic relationships will be disrupted also, it’s called a “superstimulus” (eg when birds prefe…

Ah, seems like you walked back a bit on that. In any case, I don't see why you're so concerned about how other people choose to live their lives. For instance, if someone doesn't want kids, so what? You can't control that. Nor should you.

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

#79

Post by vidarh »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #63
vidarh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds at least partly like a prompting issue to me. I have no problem getting scathing critiques out of either, by defining the role I want them to take clearly. Here's part of an initial criticism Claude made of your comment (it also said nice things): "However, the prose suffers from structural inconsistencies. The opening sentence contains an awkward parenthetical insertion that disrupts flow, and the second…

Those critiques are nonsensical; the referents of "this" and "they" are completely obvious in the comment and the "clunky" construction is completely fine. There's also no "this" in the second sentence?

They could be better, but I don't agree they're nonsensical. The comment is fine as a comment, but when asked to give a literary critique pointing out that the language could be clearer is entirely reasonable.

But this is also besides the point, which is that it is trivial to get these models to argue - rightly or wrongly - that there are significant issues with your writing rather than claim everything is excellent.

Whether you can get critiques you agree are reasonable is another matter.

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

#80

Post by deadbabe »

sorcerer-mar wrote: post #76
deadbabe wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need incentive to pursue artistic mastery, you will never really be a true master. I think you’ve failed to articulate any kind of real problem with AI art replacing human art, you just don’t like it personally so you want to see it gone.

> If you need incentive to pursue artistic mastery, you will never really be a true master. Deploying fortune-cookie wisdom to defend against allegations of astounding ignorance of the real world is... a choice. Which "true masters" didn't do do art commercially? According to your theory, not only should this list be of non-zero length, but it should include every master. So please tell me which ones.

You don’t think there are? Then what do you care if masters go extinct and all masterworks are produced by AI? The end result is the same.
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