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Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

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Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#11
I don't know anything about poetry but I do know you have to put some effort into a prompt and iterate to get anything useful out.

Here are some interesting results from literally feeding this article and prompting chatgpt to improve the poem and take into account her critique. They seem at least to my eyes a little better.

===========================================================

    Upon these shores, where time seems still,
    PIBO stands, guided by a passioned will.
    With hands ungloved, their touch sincere,
    They embrace nature, drawing it near.

    Loving straightforwardly, without pretense or guise,
    In every bird's song, a part of them lies.
    In this dance, where boundaries fade and intertwine,
    Your journey, dear bird, feels much like mine.

    In the quiet of Pelee, where heartbeats merge with the sea's hum,
    There lies a tale of dedication, of hands and feathers becoming one.
===========================================================

    Upon Pelee's shores, where the migratory journey starts,
    PIBO stands undeterred, with gentle, gloveless hands and hearts.
    No insect repellant, for it might be toxic, they bear,
    Yet with every sting and bite, their dedication's rare.

    Warblers greet the dawn, singing their age-old song,
    Yet amidst them, mosquitoes and chiggers throng.
    With delicate touch, they band, note, and release,
    Suffering in silence, so our joy in birdsong doesn't cease.

    In the hum of nature and the dance of skies so grand,
    Echoes the profound mission, of PIBO's ever-watchful band.

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, it may be not a threat (yet) to professional, especially established author. But they will be good helpers for people like me, who can get suggestions, improvements and illustrations just for the price of my 4090 and time to tinker with models. I think that's more or less what Atwood was saying: that it's not yet good enough to replace talented professionals. I doubt she'd argue that it can do the other things…

She seems to feel the gap is really large right now. Even if it is as bad as she indicates, I wonder how long it will be before the gap is closed given the progress we've seen recently.

The feeling among writers generally (and among companies that thought, for a time, they could fire most of their writers and editors…) is that LLMs need another couple huge upheavals in how they operate, to compete with and replace skilled humans rather than being a 1.1x multiplier for a skilled human. Their current trajectory isn’t making them all that worried, now that they’ve had some time to see what LLM text generators can actually do (which isn’t much).

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#13
post #3

That criticism reminds me articles/videos where professional musicians critise some famous hit songs. Musicians sometimes can comment that guitar is ahead of drums or vocal doesn't hit notes quite well. The things that I as not musician doesn't hear at all. And this is also common topic in their reviews, that one should write music for audience, not for other musicians. I'm not native speaker and many weirdnesses of…

I find your reaction intriguing since I had nearly the opposite reaction. Especially when it comes to the second piece I had little to critique about it technically (maybe a little from a structural standpoint but not as much grammatically), but I found it incredibly dull due to its complete lack of any real point. With your musical analogy, it felt to me like a piece where all of the instruments were played perfectly, but failed to make a song I actually would care to listen to again.

> But they will be good helpers for people like me, who can get suggestions, improvements and illustrations just for the price of my 4090 and time to tinker with models.

This I agree with; for someone who may not be as gifted a writer, but still has something interesting to say, generative models could help with that. I just hope that people don’t lean on these models for generating ideas because if that story was any indication, that’ll just lead to a proliferation of boring, soulless works.

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#14

Reading this, I realize that the "prompt" is what's lacking, in terms of the output produced. A writer has a prompt too -- which is created through the entirety of their experience leading up to the moment they sit down to write, often heavily weighted towards the hours leading up to that moment. AI will catch up to actual human writers when it can spend a day's visual, auditory, and linguistic stimuli crafting the p…

it's not a prompt, it's a dialog, it's many prompts.

Yes When I have a conversation with GPT4, it keeps the history, and the entire history is a prompt for the next prompt.

I would say, not totally unlike a human memory. just GPT4 is limited to 8000 characters or something. Humans have a bit more, but with added 'forgetfulness', so who knows how many characters for real. Humans don't actually recall perfect text very well.

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#16
post #3

That criticism reminds me articles/videos where professional musicians critise some famous hit songs. Musicians sometimes can comment that guitar is ahead of drums or vocal doesn't hit notes quite well. The things that I as not musician doesn't hear at all. And this is also common topic in their reviews, that one should write music for audience, not for other musicians. I'm not native speaker and many weirdnesses of…

Even if there weren’t stylistic and logical problems with the story, I don’t think I’d be terribly interested in reading it.

Fundamentally, literature is about communication with other people, living in another person’s mental world or understanding their unique perspective.

It’s not really clear to me what human value an LLM generated story has. It’s a statistically probable sequence of tokens generated from the distribution of internet-based language. It had no unique perspective, and conveys nothing about actual human experience. What do I learn from that? How is my life enriched?

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#17

Reading this, I realize that the "prompt" is what's lacking, in terms of the output produced. A writer has a prompt too -- which is created through the entirety of their experience leading up to the moment they sit down to write, often heavily weighted towards the hours leading up to that moment. AI will catch up to actual human writers when it can spend a day's visual, auditory, and linguistic stimuli crafting the p…

More like a constant chain of prompts, except the prompts are exponentially more data and each output is combined with more sensory inputs for another inference and they happen in real time.

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not a prompt, it's a dialog, it's many prompts.

Yes When I have a conversation with GPT4, it keeps the history, and the entire history is a prompt for the next prompt. I would say, not totally unlike a human memory. just GPT4 is limited to 8000 characters or something. Humans have a bit more, but with added 'forgetfulness', so who knows how many characters for real. Humans don't actually recall perfect text very well.

I think that human memory "keeps" the next prompt by baking it into the parameters of the "neural net" (the brain) immediately

this is has gotta be somehow an analogue of dreams andor sleep andor AI hallucinations.

I think this because for many of us, to not sleep triggers hallucinations, which is the conscious experience of whatever the organic version of 'backpropagation' (training the model?) really is.

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#19
I'm quite impressed with "The Weeping Willows of Winnipeg", I'm happy to commend ChatGPT on it more than Atwood does. Sure, Atwood is an acclaimed professional, but hey, I've written dystopian short stories worse than that! Although mine probably involved less plagiarism than ChatGPT's.
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