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

The hundreds of billions being sunk into AI.

> You can't force me to want (or not want) someone's goods and services.

What are you talking about? What does that have to do with anything in this conversation?

> If you're worried about large scale automation and so forth

I'm not.

> I'm fine with something like UBI.

Well as long as you're fine with UBI I guess we can put this conversation to rest.

Seriously, if you don't want to actually participate in the conversation you can just ignore comments. It's fine.

But I feel this disagreement isn't precisely about the technical details. If your stance is based on some fundamental idea of politics/philosophy, I can't change your mind.

Were they alive, it wouldn't be a question - we'd be able to see how they used new technologies, of which LLMs are one. And if they chose to use them at all.

I wasn't trying to provide an answer to that question. You're right that it's unanswerable. That was my point.

I also - of course - wouldn't presume to know better how to construct a sentence, or story, or novel, using any form of technology, including LLMs, than James Joyce. That would be a completely ridiculous assertion for (almost) anyone, ever, to make, regardless of their generation. I don't really understand what 'generations' have to do with the question I was posing, other than that its underscoring of the central ineffability.

I do, however, think it's valuable to take a school of thought (20th century Modernism, for example) and apply it to a new technological advance in an artform. In the same way, I think it's interesting to consider how 18th century Romantic thought would apply to LLMs.

It's fascinating to imagine Wordsworth, for example, both fully embracing LLMs (where is the OpenRouter Romantic? Can they exist?), and, conversely, fully rejecting LLMs.

Again, I'm not expecting a factual answer - I do understand that Wordsworth isn't alive anymore.

But: taking a new technology (like the printing press) and an old school of thought (like classical Greek philosophy) often yields interesting results - as it did with the Enlightenment.

As such, I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with asking unanswerable questions. Quite the opposite. The process of asking is the important part. The answer will be new. That's the other (extremely) important part. How else do you expect forms to advance?

I'm not terribly interested in benchmarking LLMs (especially for creative writing), or in speculating about "explosions of narcissistic disorders", hence not mentioning either. And I certainly wasn't suggesting we attempt to reach a factually correct answer about what Joyce might ask ChatGPT.

(The man deserves some privacy - his letters are gross enough!)

Art: The one thing in the whole world where incentives don't matter. The stuff of fortune cookies.

Perhaps this is contextually useful - when writing prose fiction, one technique I've played with recently which I found interesting is generating a really broad spectrum of 'next tokens' halfway through a sentence, via multiple calls to different models on different temp. settings, etc.

It's fascinating to see the expected route for a sentence, and (this is much harder to get LLMs to output!) the unexpected route for a sentence.

But seeing some expected routes, per the LLM, can make the unexpected, surprising, or interesting routes much more clear in the mind's eye. It makes sentences feel closer to music theory.

You are right that this does create a more 'editorial' relationship between yourself and the work.

I'd stress that this isn't a negative thing, and has heavy literary precedence - an example that comes to mind is Gordon Lish's "intuitive structuring" principle, in which you just write the best-sounding next word, and see what the story becomes by itself, then edit from there - a totally sonic approach.

My example here with "arrays of next tokens" is a super granular, paintbrush-type example, but I want to be clear that I'm not at all advocating for the workflow of 'write a prompt, get a piece of art'.

I do however think that there's a vast middleground between "write me a whole book" and "show me the expected next token", and that this middleground is absolutely fascinating.

Not least because it makes literature (an artform previously more resistant to mathematics than say, music, or painting) more in touch with its own mathematics, which were previously very hidden, and are only currently being discovered.