9 ms·

Writing for Snobs

67 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

keenmaster 6y ago
The premise is that GPT-3 has a certain style, but it doesn't. It is almost defined by its ability to readily adopt linguistic idiosyncracies. That includes the OP's example of using colloquialisms like "dang." GPT-3 will reduce the premium on style compared to substance.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Substance has a style all its own. You can make GPT-3 affect any writing style. But you can't make it actually have something to say. That feeling - of reading something that's wasting my time, because it doesn't actually have anything to say - is not going to go away just because what I'm reading says "dang" every so often.
- Zippogriff 6y ago
  The value of much writing, especially on the Web, is being what the reader happens to have found rather than whatever better thing they might instead be reading on the same topic. That is, if your cheap knock-off article is what people end up reading, for whatever reason, instead of the better one(s) you cribbed from, you win. Because the barriers to entry on reading are so low (click link, start reading) and most of the writing's low-value to begin with, people don't exactly shop around for their idle Web reading. These articles may have substance, but simply be far from the best presentation of that substance. I think GPT-3 and similar projects will do a fine job at subpar regurgitation of existing info that's better covered elsewhere but still manages to capture eyeballs, which describes, I expect, something like 99% of all writing on the Web, including, and perhaps especially, message board posts like this, as people often remark when yet another 300-post thread hits the front page on [some tired topic the discussion of which plays out the same every time]. Long-form print isn't perfect but is somewhat better, since there are some barriers both to publishing and to reading and you're not giving the writing away for free so simply holding a passing reader's interest for two minutes means nothing. The web, though, and maybe even magazines? I wouldn't bet against machines doing much or even most of that writing within a decade. Consider: how much of an issue of, say, Cosmo consists of light re-workings of earlier, recurring articles? People already joke about that kind of thing. Machines can probably do that work, very soon.
  - keenmaster 6y ago
    We're playing a sequential game. No one is going to happily lap up GPT-3/4/5 generated articles in the long run as their primary reading unless they only read articles that take the form of "X happened, then Y, and A said B" (which actually is a lot of people, but they're not really readers anyway). GPT will serve as intellectual humiliation. Some people will be embarrassed to find out that most of their reading materials can be generated by robots. On the margins, that can lead to people deliberately seeking out more intellectual content. That includes long format materials such as books. On the labor side, writing talent will be allocated away from shallow topics. That's a plus to me.
    - NortySpock 6y ago
      If GPT could produce something intellectually interesting, wouldn't that pass the Turing test? Seems like all GPT can produce is an infinite supply of shaggy dog stories. I don't know if I'd call that intellectual humiliation, just a lack of a point or punchline. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_dog_story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_dog_story)
      - keenmaster 6y ago
        To rephrase: it will humiliate people who consume non-intellectually interesting material but don't really think about what they're doing. E.g. Someone whose daily reading consists of the top articles on Yahoo News. I don't think they'll continue to do so if Yahoo and its partners switch to GPT-X. So either Yahoo will source better material, or its readership will decline.
        NortySpock 6y ago
        In GPT's current iteration, I agree. If GPT produces better output and is carefully mixed in with existing stories, I don't think anyone will notice. What percentage of stock price stories are generated by a bot? Off the cuff and totally guessing, I'd say 50%. Do you know the exact number? Could you tell? Would the headline service tell you? (probably not)
echelon 6y ago
It just occurred to me that GPT-3 could become an existential threat to Google. If the SERPs are filled with garbage, their search algorithm loses competitive edge. We may need to go back to a reputation graph-based system. That sort of thing doesn't scale, and Google isn't doing this at all. In fact, all of the platforms may suffer. How will Facebook keep out GPT-3 spam?
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  Why would they want to keep out GPT-3 spam? They're probably already looking at how they can drive engagement by having human users argue with bots they run.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Because their users don't want to read GPT-3 spam. If that's the dominant form of content on those platforms, people are going to use those platforms less. I mean, for a while Facebook may get paid for presenting ads to GPT-3 spam bots, but eventually advertisers will catch on that the people are gone.
    - echelon 6y ago
      I can't wait for us to train models on user browser behavior. Maybe we can unleash bots that appear exactly as humans, ruining the advertiser gravy train forever.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - Zippogriff 6y ago
        Mark my words: if that even looks like that might happen, the advertising behemoths (chiefly Google and Facebook) will spend every last dollar trying to get some kind of human Internet ID program passed into law. If our weapons (programs, scripts, "AI") become half as effective as theirs (the advertising giants'), they'll drop nine-plus figures paying to have ours outlawed, guaranteed. The only thing that might save us from that in the US is that national ID of any sort is pretty unpopular across party lines, and that's effectively what it'd be. I wouldn't be surprised if they're already quietly laying the groundwork for such an effort.
war1025 6y ago
> Japanese and British cultures are so hierarchical and stratified, in such long-lasting and subtle ways, that they've become incredibly good at discerning status from tiny signals. The topic of the article wasn't all that interesting to me, but I thought this quip was interesting. Does anyone have any references that expand on the merit of it? Or thoughts on the idea in general?
- Swizec 6y ago
  You can clearly tell someone status by what kind of tracksuit they wear and when, for example. Or the subtle differences between a man with a $20 haircut and a man with a $150 haircut. Even black t-shirts are not all the same if you know where to look. Hell, if we both have a Porsche 911, but I share it on instagram as my wonderful car and you just never mention it because a Porsche 911 is a normal car to you ... which of us is higher class? Then there are shibboleths. We use this in professional contexts. If you’re a Fortune500 person and I say I will consult my lawyer, you know I’m a schmuck and a small vendor. Otherwise I’d have a department and would say I will “talk to legal”
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    If an expensive track suit, not sharing your Porsche on the 'gram and referring to your lawyer as "legal" are all it takes to seem legit then getting swindled by a "vendor" in Uzbekistan might be in your future. Edit: the point was that shallow things easily copied with minimal investment make bad signals.
    - Swizec 6y ago
      It’s an example and the rules are always shifting. Same as how the kids know whether you’re cool or not. If you’re not part of the in crowd you’ll never know what glaringly obvious signal makes you stand out.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    Cars are fascinating, in my area the flashiest cars are parked outside the smallest houses.
pmoriarty 6y ago
"One lesson that GPT-3 might be teaching us: the tell-tale signature artifact of simulation is not the spiky glitch, it's the smooth, shallow, facile surface. It's not the errors, it's a certain kind of boring flawlessness, that's what we should be on the lookout for." These models could be trained on any arbitrary corpus of writing, from any one author or combinations of authors. Let's see the the critics complain about "boring flawlessness" when the model is trained on the works of Shakespeare, Voltaire, Buckowski, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, or Hunter S Thompson... or some combination of the above.
- lalaithion 6y ago
  GPT-3 was trained on all of those authors.
  - pmoriarty 6y ago
    But many millions of others besides these. So these authors were drowned out in the noise. I'm talking about training on just a relatively small number of authors, so the model can acquire some of their distinctive traits.
    - caconym_ 6y ago
      I don't know much about GPT-3, but if you drastically reduce the size of the corpus won't you also drastically reduce the output domain to the point that it's no longer useful? Or is there some way to get it to take whatever "semantic understanding" makes it somewhat convincing, that it's gathered from the full corpus, and ape a particular author's style over it? It's very possible for human authors to imitate style. In fact, if you write a lot of the same kind of thing that you read, you'll find your own style gravitating toward that of whoever you're reading at the time. I just (re)read Franny and Zooey, for instance, and for days I've been fighting Salinger outbreaks in my own prose. Presumably a machine could do the same thing, but I'd guess it's a very hard problem on top of creating something like GPT-3. edit: and this is not even getting into the thematic and semantic richness of the content, which is something good authors pack a lot more of into each word than the blogspam wordsmiths GPT-3 is about to put out of work.
masswerk 6y ago
> "the tell-tale signature artifact of simulation is not the spiky glitch, it's the smooth, shallow, facile surface" Notably, this has been true for visual content from the beginning, compare the original "TRON" movie. It had been especially true in times, when smooth gradients and perfect lines had been a luxury, which were hard to achieve in analog media technology, and became the tell-tale signature of computer generated visual content. After an intermezzo in the uncanny valley and with embraceable pixels, we seem to be right back where we started. – It's somewhat logical that what is true for visual content should also be true for textual content. [Edit] We may add a definition: "Interesting" is the artful deviation from the smooth and perfect.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom#Production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom#Production hard to achieve as a practical effect, but still cheaper than digital.
  - masswerk 6y ago
    Max Headroom is somewhat special, since it's a crossover of digital and video. The later has always been signaled by glitches and artifacts (as in color, unstable vertical and/or horizontal hold, overly expressed scanlines, lately also by exaggerated cushion distortion, etc).
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      Supporting the signalling, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23833111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23833111 was definitely a product of the VCR era. See also the expressed scanlines in the "faked" 80's of the first video in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24398456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24398456 . As for exaggerated curvature, surely we've all run across https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term by now?
- Thorrez 6y ago
krick 6y ago
Any of these thoughts are valid only under the assumption that one is concerned if something is written by GPT-3 or a human. But nobody cares. I would gladly read Wikipedia written by GPT-3, if it can rewrite math articles in a less fucked-up unnecessary jargon-filled way than they already are. And if not, I will hate it more, but only to a degree it will do it's job worse than a human did (presumably it's humans who write all this atrocity, I don't know for sure). And nobody reads marketing brochures anyway. I hope they don't, and I pity them otherwise. Who I don't pity though are lawyers, and if GPT-3 can make lawyers as miserable, as normal people are when forced to deal with lawyers: good. I mean, I don't really believe anything can eliminate this pesky profession (which depends on laws & litigation process being incomprehensible to ordinary citizens), but I can at least entertain myself with this thought for a while.
- Proziam 6y ago
  I can imagine GTP-3 being used to make legal documents that are even more difficult for a human being to parse. That's probably a net-negative for society as a whole if it is used that way. Of course, it's fun to chuckle at the thought of a lawyer having to read through the most insane document of all time and muttering profanities to himself the entire time.
  - krick 6y ago
    "The most insane document of all time" is not the point. It is good to make documents unreadable, sure, but they still must be valid, and you have to be sure they are valid, before you use them in the battle. However close to the realms of sci-fi we may be, I believe we are still very far from any machine being able to compete with a professional lawyer in that kind of stuff. Jokes aside, they kinda specialise on it. What GPT-3 can be good at though is making a huge amounts of text cheaply and quickly. Making up a tons of bullshit to present in court (or putting the other side in a position when they have to) is a way to make litigation last forever, i.e. until the side with less money is forced to give up on a case they could have otherwise won. You can win by virtue of having more lawyers to read and type stuff. And that way to use GPT-3 based stuff I imagine to be much closer shot. A company with 2 competent lawyers will be able to generate virtually same amount of semi-coherent bullshit as a company with a 100 of lawyers. You can produce an amount of stuff in a single night that is humanly impossible to read, but still if kinda meaningful stuff with some content kinda "relevant" to the matter at hand. At some point it will stop making any sense, the judge won't read this shit, nobody will. You will have to somehow forbid to make stuff more complicated than it must be. What is currently normal will fall apart. As I said, I don't actually believe it will do any good: people will still find a way to make it way too complicated for normal humans, but acceptable for lawyers. But until they agree on a new norm, it will be painful for everybody involved.
bencollier49 6y ago
Hmm. Have these guys seen Ryan North's "Star Trek GPT-NG"? `S1, E20: The Big Goodbye: The crew of the Enterprise-D sets aside all of its other duties to try and solve a murder mystery. Filmed on location in Miami. A woman dressed in a Starfleet uniform from the ship is murdered, and Riker's going to need a tan to solve this case.`
camillomiller 6y ago
Is anyone ever aware in the English-speaking community that there are other languages in the world other than English, and other literary cultures that are written in languages other than English?
lmm 6y ago
> There's a kind of writing that is actively aspiring to a smooth, shallow, facile surface, a certain kind of boring flawlessness. The writing that most corporations do. That's who GPT-3 will get to first. Not the novelists and the poets but the corporate copy-writers. They came for the writers of car brochures, but I wasn't a writer of car brochures, so I said nothing. I'm not at all convinced. A car brochure at least has to tell you what's good about the car. Poetry seems to actively aspire to saying nothing substantive, and so does a lot of "literary" fiction and a certain kind of magazine article.
- Thorrez 6y ago
  Computers are good at giving you facts, that's why computers will be able to write a car brochure. Poetry is more about making you feel something. That's harder for a computer to do.
  - lmm 6y ago
    That's just not true of GPT-3 though. It's very good at capturing tone and therefore provoking the same kinds of feelings as "real" examples of the same style. It's much less good at conveying facts.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    Marketing of cars has very little to do with facts, it's all about emotion. There are no pictures of the typical congestion, its all open roads with no other pesky road users. The models are all slim whereas most of their customers struggle to drag their fat backsides into the car. The kids are happy to sit in the back whilst the reality is they will be screaming "are we there yet" after five minutes of a long drive. Modern marketing is all about emotion.

67 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

The premise is that GPT-3 has a certain style, but it doesn't. It is almost defined by its ability to readily adopt linguistic idiosyncracies. That includes the OP's example of using colloquialisms like "dang." GPT-3 will reduce the premium on style compared to substance.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Substance has a style all its own. You can make GPT-3 affect any writing style. But you can't make it actually have something to say. That feeling - of reading something that's wasting my time, because it doesn't actually have anything to say - is not going to go away just because what I'm reading says "dang" every so often.
Zippogriff 6y ago
The value of much writing, especially on the Web, is being what the reader happens to have found rather than whatever better thing they might instead be reading on the same topic. That is, if your cheap knock-off article is what people end up reading, for whatever reason, instead of the better one(s) you cribbed from, you win. Because the barriers to entry on reading are so low (click link, start reading) and most of the writing's low-value to begin with, people don't exactly shop around for their idle Web reading. These articles may have substance, but simply be far from the best presentation of that substance. I think GPT-3 and similar projects will do a fine job at subpar regurgitation of existing info that's better covered elsewhere but still manages to capture eyeballs, which describes, I expect, something like 99% of all writing on the Web, including, and perhaps especially, message board posts like this, as people often remark when yet another 300-post thread hits the front page on [some tired topic the discussion of which plays out the same every time]. Long-form print isn't perfect but is somewhat better, since there are some barriers both to publishing and to reading and you're not giving the writing away for free so simply holding a passing reader's interest for two minutes means nothing. The web, though, and maybe even magazines? I wouldn't bet against machines doing much or even most of that writing within a decade. Consider: how much of an issue of, say, Cosmo consists of light re-workings of earlier, recurring articles? People already joke about that kind of thing. Machines can probably do that work, very soon.
- keenmaster 6y ago
  We're playing a sequential game. No one is going to happily lap up GPT-3/4/5 generated articles in the long run as their primary reading unless they only read articles that take the form of "X happened, then Y, and A said B" (which actually is a lot of people, but they're not really readers anyway). GPT will serve as intellectual humiliation. Some people will be embarrassed to find out that most of their reading materials can be generated by robots. On the margins, that can lead to people deliberately seeking out more intellectual content. That includes long format materials such as books. On the labor side, writing talent will be allocated away from shallow topics. That's a plus to me.
  - NortySpock 6y ago
    If GPT could produce something intellectually interesting, wouldn't that pass the Turing test? Seems like all GPT can produce is an infinite supply of shaggy dog stories. I don't know if I'd call that intellectual humiliation, just a lack of a point or punchline. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_dog_story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_dog_story)
    - keenmaster 6y ago
      To rephrase: it will humiliate people who consume non-intellectually interesting material but don't really think about what they're doing. E.g. Someone whose daily reading consists of the top articles on Yahoo News. I don't think they'll continue to do so if Yahoo and its partners switch to GPT-X. So either Yahoo will source better material, or its readership will decline.
      - NortySpock 6y ago
        In GPT's current iteration, I agree. If GPT produces better output and is carefully mixed in with existing stories, I don't think anyone will notice. What percentage of stock price stories are generated by a bot? Off the cuff and totally guessing, I'd say 50%. Do you know the exact number? Could you tell? Would the headline service tell you? (probably not)

echelon 6y ago

It just occurred to me that GPT-3 could become an existential threat to Google. If the SERPs are filled with garbage, their search algorithm loses competitive edge. We may need to go back to a reputation graph-based system. That sort of thing doesn't scale, and Google isn't doing this at all. In fact, all of the platforms may suffer. How will Facebook keep out GPT-3 spam?

ForHackernews 6y ago
Why would they want to keep out GPT-3 spam? They're probably already looking at how they can drive engagement by having human users argue with bots they run.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Because their users don't want to read GPT-3 spam. If that's the dominant form of content on those platforms, people are going to use those platforms less. I mean, for a while Facebook may get paid for presenting ads to GPT-3 spam bots, but eventually advertisers will catch on that the people are gone.
  - echelon 6y ago
    I can't wait for us to train models on user browser behavior. Maybe we can unleash bots that appear exactly as humans, ruining the advertiser gravy train forever.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Zippogriff 6y ago
      Mark my words: if that even looks like that might happen, the advertising behemoths (chiefly Google and Facebook) will spend every last dollar trying to get some kind of human Internet ID program passed into law. If our weapons (programs, scripts, "AI") become half as effective as theirs (the advertising giants'), they'll drop nine-plus figures paying to have ours outlawed, guaranteed. The only thing that might save us from that in the US is that national ID of any sort is pretty unpopular across party lines, and that's effectively what it'd be. I wouldn't be surprised if they're already quietly laying the groundwork for such an effort.

war1025 6y ago

> Japanese and British cultures are so hierarchical and stratified, in such long-lasting and subtle ways, that they've become incredibly good at discerning status from tiny signals. The topic of the article wasn't all that interesting to me, but I thought this quip was interesting. Does anyone have any references that expand on the merit of it? Or thoughts on the idea in general?

Swizec 6y ago
You can clearly tell someone status by what kind of tracksuit they wear and when, for example. Or the subtle differences between a man with a $20 haircut and a man with a $150 haircut. Even black t-shirts are not all the same if you know where to look. Hell, if we both have a Porsche 911, but I share it on instagram as my wonderful car and you just never mention it because a Porsche 911 is a normal car to you ... which of us is higher class? Then there are shibboleths. We use this in professional contexts. If you’re a Fortune500 person and I say I will consult my lawyer, you know I’m a schmuck and a small vendor. Otherwise I’d have a department and would say I will “talk to legal”
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  If an expensive track suit, not sharing your Porsche on the 'gram and referring to your lawyer as "legal" are all it takes to seem legit then getting swindled by a "vendor" in Uzbekistan might be in your future. Edit: the point was that shallow things easily copied with minimal investment make bad signals.
  - Swizec 6y ago
    It’s an example and the rules are always shifting. Same as how the kids know whether you’re cool or not. If you’re not part of the in crowd you’ll never know what glaringly obvious signal makes you stand out.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  Cars are fascinating, in my area the flashiest cars are parked outside the smallest houses.

pmoriarty 6y ago

"One lesson that GPT-3 might be teaching us: the tell-tale signature artifact of simulation is not the spiky glitch, it's the smooth, shallow, facile surface. It's not the errors, it's a certain kind of boring flawlessness, that's what we should be on the lookout for." These models could be trained on any arbitrary corpus of writing, from any one author or combinations of authors. Let's see the the critics complain about "boring flawlessness" when the model is trained on the works of Shakespeare, Voltaire, Buckowski, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, or Hunter S Thompson... or some combination of the above.

lalaithion 6y ago
GPT-3 was trained on all of those authors.
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  But many millions of others besides these. So these authors were drowned out in the noise. I'm talking about training on just a relatively small number of authors, so the model can acquire some of their distinctive traits.
  - caconym_ 6y ago
    I don't know much about GPT-3, but if you drastically reduce the size of the corpus won't you also drastically reduce the output domain to the point that it's no longer useful? Or is there some way to get it to take whatever "semantic understanding" makes it somewhat convincing, that it's gathered from the full corpus, and ape a particular author's style over it? It's very possible for human authors to imitate style. In fact, if you write a lot of the same kind of thing that you read, you'll find your own style gravitating toward that of whoever you're reading at the time. I just (re)read Franny and Zooey, for instance, and for days I've been fighting Salinger outbreaks in my own prose. Presumably a machine could do the same thing, but I'd guess it's a very hard problem on top of creating something like GPT-3. edit: and this is not even getting into the thematic and semantic richness of the content, which is something good authors pack a lot more of into each word than the blogspam wordsmiths GPT-3 is about to put out of work.

masswerk 6y ago

> "the tell-tale signature artifact of simulation is not the spiky glitch, it's the smooth, shallow, facile surface" Notably, this has been true for visual content from the beginning, compare the original "TRON" movie. It had been especially true in times, when smooth gradients and perfect lines had been a luxury, which were hard to achieve in analog media technology, and became the tell-tale signature of computer generated visual content. After an intermezzo in the uncanny valley and with embraceable pixels, we seem to be right back where we started. – It's somewhat logical that what is true for visual content should also be true for textual content. [Edit] We may add a definition: "Interesting" is the artful deviation from the smooth and perfect.

082349872349872 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom#Production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom#Production hard to achieve as a practical effect, but still cheaper than digital.
- masswerk 6y ago
  Max Headroom is somewhat special, since it's a crossover of digital and video. The later has always been signaled by glitches and artifacts (as in color, unstable vertical and/or horizontal hold, overly expressed scanlines, lately also by exaggerated cushion distortion, etc).
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    Supporting the signalling, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23833111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23833111 was definitely a product of the VCR era. See also the expressed scanlines in the "faked" 80's of the first video in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24398456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24398456 . As for exaggerated curvature, surely we've all run across https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term by now?
Thorrez 6y ago

krick 6y ago

Any of these thoughts are valid only under the assumption that one is concerned if something is written by GPT-3 or a human. But nobody cares. I would gladly read Wikipedia written by GPT-3, if it can rewrite math articles in a less fucked-up unnecessary jargon-filled way than they already are. And if not, I will hate it more, but only to a degree it will do it's job worse than a human did (presumably it's humans who write all this atrocity, I don't know for sure). And nobody reads marketing brochures anyway. I hope they don't, and I pity them otherwise. Who I don't pity though are lawyers, and if GPT-3 can make lawyers as miserable, as normal people are when forced to deal with lawyers: good. I mean, I don't really believe anything can eliminate this pesky profession (which depends on laws & litigation process being incomprehensible to ordinary citizens), but I can at least entertain myself with this thought for a while.

Proziam 6y ago
I can imagine GTP-3 being used to make legal documents that are even more difficult for a human being to parse. That's probably a net-negative for society as a whole if it is used that way. Of course, it's fun to chuckle at the thought of a lawyer having to read through the most insane document of all time and muttering profanities to himself the entire time.
- krick 6y ago
  "The most insane document of all time" is not the point. It is good to make documents unreadable, sure, but they still must be valid, and you have to be sure they are valid, before you use them in the battle. However close to the realms of sci-fi we may be, I believe we are still very far from any machine being able to compete with a professional lawyer in that kind of stuff. Jokes aside, they kinda specialise on it. What GPT-3 can be good at though is making a huge amounts of text cheaply and quickly. Making up a tons of bullshit to present in court (or putting the other side in a position when they have to) is a way to make litigation last forever, i.e. until the side with less money is forced to give up on a case they could have otherwise won. You can win by virtue of having more lawyers to read and type stuff. And that way to use GPT-3 based stuff I imagine to be much closer shot. A company with 2 competent lawyers will be able to generate virtually same amount of semi-coherent bullshit as a company with a 100 of lawyers. You can produce an amount of stuff in a single night that is humanly impossible to read, but still if kinda meaningful stuff with some content kinda "relevant" to the matter at hand. At some point it will stop making any sense, the judge won't read this shit, nobody will. You will have to somehow forbid to make stuff more complicated than it must be. What is currently normal will fall apart. As I said, I don't actually believe it will do any good: people will still find a way to make it way too complicated for normal humans, but acceptable for lawyers. But until they agree on a new norm, it will be painful for everybody involved.

bencollier49 6y ago

Hmm. Have these guys seen Ryan North's "Star Trek GPT-NG"? `S1, E20: The Big Goodbye: The crew of the Enterprise-D sets aside all of its other duties to try and solve a murder mystery. Filmed on location in Miami. A woman dressed in a Starfleet uniform from the ship is murdered, and Riker's going to need a tan to solve this case.`

camillomiller 6y ago

Is anyone ever aware in the English-speaking community that there are other languages in the world other than English, and other literary cultures that are written in languages other than English?

lmm 6y ago

> There's a kind of writing that is actively aspiring to a smooth, shallow, facile surface, a certain kind of boring flawlessness. The writing that most corporations do. That's who GPT-3 will get to first. Not the novelists and the poets but the corporate copy-writers. They came for the writers of car brochures, but I wasn't a writer of car brochures, so I said nothing. I'm not at all convinced. A car brochure at least has to tell you what's good about the car. Poetry seems to actively aspire to saying nothing substantive, and so does a lot of "literary" fiction and a certain kind of magazine article.

Thorrez 6y ago
Computers are good at giving you facts, that's why computers will be able to write a car brochure. Poetry is more about making you feel something. That's harder for a computer to do.
- lmm 6y ago
  That's just not true of GPT-3 though. It's very good at capturing tone and therefore provoking the same kinds of feelings as "real" examples of the same style. It's much less good at conveying facts.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  Marketing of cars has very little to do with facts, it's all about emotion. There are no pictures of the typical congestion, its all open roads with no other pesky road users. The models are all slim whereas most of their customers struggle to drag their fat backsides into the car. The kids are happy to sit in the back whilst the reality is they will be screaming "are we there yet" after five minutes of a long drive. Modern marketing is all about emotion.