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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

#81

Post by vidarh »

riskable wrote: post #68
suddenlybananas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Exactly... What Claude output is what the prompt asked for: Critique. Even if there was nothing wrong at all Claude would still find something to critique—even if it has to hallucinate something wrong. That's it's job: To generate critique. It's not really doing any sort of "deep analysis" it's just reading the text and comparing it to what it knows about similar texts from its model. It'll then predict/generate the…

Most human criticism is not doing anything of deep analysis either, but just reading the text and comparing it to what we know about similar text.

> Even if there was nothing wrong at all Claude would still find something to critique

And the entire point was that you claimed 'Both ChatGPT and Claud always say something like, "a few grammar corrections are needed but this is excellent!"'.

Which clearly is not the case, as demonstrated. What you get out will depend on how much effort you're willing to put into prompting to specify the type of response you want, because they certainly lack "personality" and will try to please you. But that includes trying to please you when your prompt specifies how you want them to treat the input.

> It doesn't really have an understanding of the text at all.

This is a take that might have made sense a few years ago. It does not make sense with current models at all, and to me is a take that typically suggest a lack of experience with the models. Current models can in my experience e.g. often spot reasoning errors in text provided to them that the human writer of said text refuse to acknowledge is there.

I suggest you try to paste some bits of text into any of the major models and ask them to explain what they think the author might have meant. They don't get it perfectly right all of the time, but they can go quite in-depth and provide analysis that well exceeds what a lot of people would manage.

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

#82

Post by sorcerer-mar »

deadbabe wrote: post #80
sorcerer-mar wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Give me examples please.

If you think the end state is the same, it's because you misunderstand the argument being made. Try being more curious and less fortune-cookie! Nobody said "making money from art is bad."

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

#83

Post by EGreg »

frozenseven wrote: post #77
EGreg wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just to be clear, you are supporting a world where humans are powerless, few in number, and don’t interact much with each other anymore.

As I’ve been saying for a decade, we are building a zoo for ourselves.

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

#84

Post by km144 »

gabriel666smith wrote: post #69
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.

Wow! Why? Personally, I'm fascinated by the question of what Joyce would have done with SillyTavern. Or Nabokov. Or Burroughs. Or T S Eliot, who incorporated news clippings into Wasteland - which feels, to me, extremely analogous with the way LLMs refract existing text into new patterns.

Creative works carry meaning through their author. The best art gives you insight into the imaginative mind of another human being—that is central to the experience of art at a fundamental level.

But the machine does not intend anything. Based on the article as I understand it, this product basically does some simulated annealing of the quality of art as judged by an AI to achieve the "best possible story"—again, as judged by an AI.

Maybe I am an outlier or an idiot, but I don't think you can judge every tool by its utility. People say that AI helps them write stories, I ask to what end? AI helps write code, again to what end? Is the story you're writing adding value to the world? Is the software you're writing adding value to the world? These seem like the important questions if AI does indeed become a dominant economic force over the coming decades.

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

#85

Post by km144 »

frozenseven wrote: post #16
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.

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.

I feel that when making a claim like that, the burden of proof is on you to explain how AI makes the world a better place. I have seen far more of the opposite since the advent of GPT-3. Please do not say it makes you more productive at your job, unless you can also clearly derive how being better at your job might make the world a better place.

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

#86

Post by suddenlybananas »

vidarh wrote: post #81
riskable wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly... What Claude output is what the prompt asked for: Critique. Even if there was nothing wrong at all Claude would still find something to critique—even if it has to hallucinate something wrong. That's it's job: To generate critique. It's not really doing any sort of "deep analysis" it's just reading the text and comparing it to what it knows about similar texts from its model. It'll then predict/generate the…

Most human criticism is not doing anything of deep analysis either, but just reading the text and comparing it to what we know about similar text. > Even if there was nothing wrong at all Claude would still find something to critique And the entire point was that you claimed 'Both ChatGPT and Claud always say something like, "a few grammar corrections are needed but this is excellent!"'. Which clearly is not the case…

It literally said that the word "this" in the second sentence was bad despite that word not being used in the sentence.

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

#87

Post by suddenlybananas »

vidarh wrote: post #79
suddenlybananas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Okay but if it's just saying bullshit, it's useless as a critic.

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

#88

Post by sorcerer-mar »

frozenseven wrote: post #73
Gerardo1 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> More capable AI systems make the world better [so long as we also include the mitigations necessary due to the known and unknown downsides of AI]

I guess that's what you meant?

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

#89

Post by gabriel666smith »

km144 wrote: post #84
gabriel666smith wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! Why? Personally, I'm fascinated by the question of what Joyce would have done with SillyTavern. Or Nabokov. Or Burroughs. Or T S Eliot, who incorporated news clippings into Wasteland - which feels, to me, extremely analogous with the way LLMs refract existing text into new patterns.

Creative works carry meaning through their author. The best art gives you insight into the imaginative mind of another human being—that is central to the experience of art at a fundamental level. But the machine does not intend anything. Based on the article as I understand it, this product basically does some simulated annealing of the quality of art as judged by an AI to achieve the "best possible story"—again, as…

Ah, fair enough. I believe quite strongly that creative works' meaning exists for the reader / audience / user. I don't think interpretation of art is towards an authorial, authoritative truth - rather that it's a lens to view the world through, and change one's perspective on it - so this is where we differ. But I understand your viewpoint.

I do agree that the LLM's idea of achieving the 'best possible story' is defined entirely by its design and prompting, and that is obviously completely ridiculous - not least because appreciating (or enduring) a story is a totally subjective experience.

I do disagree that one needs to ask "to what end?" when talking about writing stories, the same way one shouldn't need to ask "to what end?" about a pencil or a paintbrush. The joy of creating should be in the creation.

Commercial software is absolutely a more nuanced, complex topic - it's so much more intertwined with people's jobs, livelihoods, aeroplanes not falling out of the sky, power grids staying on, etc. That's a different, separate question. I don't think it's fair to equate them.

I think LLMs are the most interesting paintbrush-for-words we've come up with since the typewriter (at least), and that, historically, artists who embrace new technologies that arise in their forms are usually proven to be correct in their embrace of them.

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

#90

Post by CuriouslyC »

riskable wrote: post #55
CuriouslyC wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are fairly good judges of writing, in fact they're better at evaluating writing than they are at actually writing. I use Gemini as a beta reader, and I've had a lot human beta readers look at the same material, and Gemini consistently gives significantly better than average feedback, though it's stronger at structural and prose evaluation and weaker at emotional and "wishlist" style feedback as you would probabl…

How are you using it as a beta reader? What prompts do you use? I'd love to try it.

Just dump your manuscript into google's aistudio, and tell it you'd like it to serve as a beta reader/editor, and tell it what your objectives are with your manuscript so it can give you targeted feedback.
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