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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

#71

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,…

I'm not sure if you're trying to say that this output is better, but in my opinion it is very much not.

I don't think that someone that wrote "you fit into me", would use the abundance of qualificatives that this text has. Furthermore there's nothing of Atwood's style that I can detect in it. The only interesting bit for me is the inverted assumption that the voice that speaks to us is male, but I feel like even that's too lame of a device for something a veteran author would do.

> you fit into me

> like a hook into an eye

> a fish hook

> an open eye

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The LLM isn't creating new information, only packaging existing information.

When it creates a poem, song, essay, painting, or program that has never existed before, it is doing what we do. Whether or not we define that as "creating new information" is not an especially interesting question at the end of the day.

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LLM isn't creating new information, only packaging existing information.

When it creates a poem, song, essay, painting, or program that has never existed before, it is doing what we do. Whether or not we define that as "creating new information" is not an especially interesting question at the end of the day.

No, because what matters here is if information complexity (aka entropy) is being increased.

Humans increase it, LLMs decrease it.

This matters because eventually in the future information complexity will be humankind's only valuable resource.

(So humans create value, LLMs destroy it.)

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we do manage to remember stuff that happened "quadrillions" of tokens (of sensory input) back. Sure, we are wrong a lot, but we have a context that goes way back. A LLM has a fruit fly's version of what we work with, although in some versions it has perfect recall in that context.

Or it can be said that we boil down our experience to a few millions of tokens, only a set of experiences, emotions and often wrong/made up memories. Your comment assumes a human can recall all (potentially incorrect) memories and use those to make some judgement, but fact of the matter is we don't.

Yeah, Humans do ton of aggregation and filtering. Thus you can't remember individual days of commuting, because it is so similar, the brain just lets it go.

I'd think something like this would be added to the models eventually. Of course, over-simplifying.

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#75
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is rather pseudoscientific.

99% of conversations on Internet are pseudoscientific.

Think here we are just 'conceptualizing', 'spit-balling', 'blue-sky-discussion', 'wondering out loud', 'hypothesizing'. etc...

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it creates a poem, song, essay, painting, or program that has never existed before, it is doing what we do. Whether or not we define that as "creating new information" is not an especially interesting question at the end of the day.

No, because what matters here is if information complexity (aka entropy) is being increased. Humans increase it, LLMs decrease it. This matters because eventually in the future information complexity will be humankind's only valuable resource. (So humans create value, LLMs destroy it.)

(Shrug) If you want to increase entropy, just call rand().

You might take a bit of time to learn what you're talking about before posting, or at least before forming permanent opinions on the subject. It's fascinating stuff, trust me... and I'm not that much farther along than you are, trust me on that as well.

Re: Margaret Atwood Reviews a Margaret Atwood Story by AI

#78
post #29
post #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.

> I've written dystopian short stories worse than that! Is your name Roger? Sub-question: do you have any nieces or nephews?

Sorry. No and no.
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