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

Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

thewalrus.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 79 posts

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#41

Post by bglazer »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #36
bglazer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dis…

What do I learn from that? That you are nothing special. The computer is just doing what you do, putting one word after the last one. Picking each word more or less carefully, based on its own training and the audience's expectations. It's doing it badly, for the moment. But would we mock a talking dog who stutters? How is my life enriched? Being able to see what's coming is helpful, more often than not.

You’re describing human communication as “nothing special”, just a string of patterns that have no significance beyond their low entropy.

Frankly that’s solipsistic, bordering on pure nihilism. When I read another person’s writing or talk to them, it enriches my life because it gives me a slice of their experience. When I read LLM output, it just definitionally can’t do that, no matter how plausible and semantically meaningful the words are. What is the purpose of literature for you? Just consuming a pleasing string of words?

That’s not to say they have no value, just that I can’t learn anything about another person’s experience of life through an LLM, because they aren’t people

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#42

Post by datameta »

muglug wrote: post #38
danenania wrote: post #34

I wonder which model was used for this? Based on the poem taking "10 seconds" to generate, I'd guess the free version of ChatGPT, meaning 3.5 turbo. While I wouldn't expect Atwood's conclusions to change too much by using GPT-4 instead, I think it's interesting that even the majority of educated people and journalists outside of tech don't seem to realize that the best model is at least 10x smarter than the free vers…

> the best model is at least 10x smarter than the free version of ChatGPT Citation needed. What does 10x smarter mean here? There’s an ongoing debate about whether the word “smart” even applies to a text prediction engine.

My gut metric says it's a ~20% increase in perceived interpretation and output complexity, whatever that means exactly. But there are plenty of eval result aggregators out there.

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#44

Post by NateEag »

michaelmrose wrote: post #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 seem…

good gracious. I think this poem might be worse than the original.

Indirection, subtlety, and allusion are absolutely critical elements in poetry - maybe even fundamental.

There is not a hint of that in this autocompleted piece of dreck. It's more blatant than the terrible evangelical preaching-"poems" I used to see forwarded on AOL in my teens.

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#45

Post by muglug »

datameta wrote: post #42
muglug wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the best model is at least 10x smarter than the free version of ChatGPT Citation needed. What does 10x smarter mean here? There’s an ongoing debate about whether the word “smart” even applies to a text prediction engine.

My gut metric says it's a ~20% increase in perceived interpretation and output complexity, whatever that means exactly. But there are plenty of eval result aggregators out there.

Yeah, there are measurable results on things like AP bio. And those are definitely not 10x.

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#46

Post by [deleted] »

muglug wrote: post #38
danenania wrote: post #34

I wonder which model was used for this? Based on the poem taking "10 seconds" to generate, I'd guess the free version of ChatGPT, meaning 3.5 turbo. While I wouldn't expect Atwood's conclusions to change too much by using GPT-4 instead, I think it's interesting that even the majority of educated people and journalists outside of tech don't seem to realize that the best model is at least 10x smarter than the free vers…

> the best model is at least 10x smarter than the free version of ChatGPT Citation needed. What does 10x smarter mean here? There’s an ongoing debate about whether the word “smart” even applies to a text prediction engine.

[deleted]

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#47

Post by loudandskittish »

armchairhacker wrote: post #32

I think a while ago I commented something along the lines of "let me know when we see a successful book/article/speech which gets revealed to be largely AI-generated". And that hasn't happened yet: AI-generated content has always been noticeable and generally considered bad ("was X written by ChatGPT?" is an insult). But I know AI is already being used to assist human writers, not just with boring emails and speeches…

Indeed, I've come across more instances of things that were supposedly AI-generated that turned out to have been made by a human being...

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#48

Post by darkerside »

danenania wrote: post #34

I wonder which model was used for this? Based on the poem taking "10 seconds" to generate, I'd guess the free version of ChatGPT, meaning 3.5 turbo. While I wouldn't expect Atwood's conclusions to change too much by using GPT-4 instead, I think it's interesting that even the majority of educated people and journalists outside of tech don't seem to realize that the best model is at least 10x smarter than the free vers…

I hear this a lot. I didn't notice a huge difference in quality with GPT4. Completely anecdotal, and could have been a failure to effectively prompt for that model. But I don't think it's safe to assume the results are 10x improvement.

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#49

Post by michaelmrose »

jfengel wrote: post #28
michaelmrose wrote: post #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 seem…

It's still doggerel. The rhymes are forced and the syntax stilted. The praise is vapid and lacks any sort of insight. It reads like a college fight song. I'm good with replacing college fight song writers with a computer.

Are you familiar with the level of writing on display in TV and movies? A lot of writing isn't exactly what high art.

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#50

Post by braydenm »

It's unclear what model was used for the outputs mentioned in the article, but here's the short story that Claude gave me for the same prompt: --- Here is a dystopian short story in the style of Margaret Atwood set in Canada:

The Snows Came Early That Year

The snows came early that year, blanketing the prairies in white before the harvest was complete. I awoke to howling winds rattling the panes of my solitary cabin, the radio readout blinking ominously, batteries too weak to check the weather reports again. I shuffled outside in layers of wool and coveralls, squinting against the icy gusts, to find the chicken coop door ripped clean off. Feathers and blood painted the snow crimson. The four hens I had left were gone, with only scattered tracks and droplets leading into the tree line to indicate the predator's escape.

I cursed under my frosted breath, the bitter wind stealing away my words. Food had already been scarce, each winter harder than the one before. I shuttered the coop and turned back inside just as the power flickered and went out. Now there was no heat, no light, no way to cook. The solar panels would be useless under the heavy snows.

As I sat wrapped in furs, watching my breath turn to plumes of smoke in the gloom, I made a plan to walk to town when the blizzard passed. Perhaps barter some handicrafts for a few days of rations. The trek would be risky, but staying here held a different kind of peril. The food stocks in my locked pantry were dangerously low. There was no choice but to go.

The Katskil wolves would likely be on the prowl, their numbers multiplying as the animal population declined. Stay to the road, move quick, keep head down. Don't attract attention. Don't look too frail, too thin, too cold. The robotic guards at the checkpoints would be indifferent to my starvation, but opportunistic thieves might not. This was the world we inhabited now. Hold fast to what is yours. Trust no one. Every day another fight to survive. My grandmother's voice echoed in my mind...from her days before the collapse: "Don't lose hope, girl. It's always darkest before the dawn." But that was in another era, now lost to us. There were no more dawns ahead, only the howling dark.

Post reply on HN