4 ms·
GPT-3-generated writing is a combination of comically absurd and incredibly deep. The weak infants of the woman next door who had to be picked up with the tongs
by causality0 6y ago
GPT-3-generated writing is a combination of comically absurd and incredibly deep. The weak infants of the woman next door who had to be picked up with the tongs and thrown into the dustbin is quite silly but then there's He wanted to crawl away from it, but there was no place to go. which is a surprisingly deep statement about the revulsion he feels towards himself. That a computer can generate that says very uncomfortable things about the skill of humans in recognizing genuine creative significance.
- throwawaygh 6y ago> which is a surprisingly deep statement People used to say the same thing about Markov chains, and then the hype died down it took 20 years for another hypetrain to pull into the station. The same will happen with GPT-n. > says very uncomfortable things about the skill of humans in recognizing genuine creative significance. Indeed. People see pictures in clouds and omnipotent beings in the stars. Humans are uncomfortably good at finding meaning in nothings.
- cageface 6y agoWhat applications are Markov chains used in now?
- amarant 6y agoKubernetes uses them to come up with random generated cluster names if you don't provide a name of your own..I bet many other applications use them in a similar manner
- FractalHQ 6y agoCrypto currencies and decentralized protocols like the libp2p (used in IPFS) like Markov chains iirc
- Mordisquitos 6y agoSequence analysis in Bioinformatics, for example to align sequences and detect homology and as in HMMER: http://hmmer.org/ http://hmmer.org/
- kumarvvr 6y agoAnd other people reward those findings with money. Good writing is hard. Writing that evokes emotions in others is even harder.
- watwut 6y agoIt is extraordinary rare to ear money by writing. It may be hard, but people dont reward it with cash.
- throwawaygh 6y agoExactly. Getting people to see patterns is easy. Getting people to fork over money based on those perceptions is much more difficult. Ask any church plant.
- nl 6y agoThe limitations of Markov chains are obvious within hours of starting to use them. GPT-3, less-so.
- fapjacks 6y agoMy biggest problem with people the world round is invariably rooted in this sense of ownership of what other people find meaningful. This kind of top-down dictation of ultimately subjective meaning is what is uncomfortable (because meaning is a form of tacit knowledge and therefore incommunicable) and is the path to inquisitions, woke / oracular authoritarian thought-policing regimes with reeducation camps.
- swiley 6y agoDeep statements are deep because the communicate feeling, if the machine never felt anything but tripped over meaning like this (and it's pretty obvious it's just gluing things together) it really dulls the effect.
- bikeshaving 6y agoWho’s to say that our greatest writers didn’t “trip over meaning”? A lot of poetic processes involve finding, curating and re-contextualizing interesting phrases (see found poetry), and there’s potentially a lot of value in applying the same process to computer-generated writing.
- tsimionescu 6y agoThat's why no one is truly moved by a single phrase. We often quote memorable bits from larger works ("to be, or not to be"), but that quote is only memorable because the entire work makes us believe that it is not an accident.
- exporectomy 6y agoI was by a famous 6 word poem: "For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn."
- tsimionescu 6y agoSure, there are exceptions. And for those exceptions it may be fair to say that perhaps they were just a lucky stumble. Even here I do wonder how well this poem would be remembered if it weren't associated with Hemingway.
- watwut 6y agoYeah. But the thing is, after you have own baby, you may find yourself with like 5 pairs of never worn baby shoes. So while it somewhat suggest death, it is only because of the literally context, which makes you expect something deep. If you seen that in an ad, you would not feel the same.
- bckr 6y agoI was actually taken in by the infants-in-the-dustbin image. I thought it was gruesome, then I reflected on how infant mortality has decreased and what a better time we're living in. This article was uncanny valley for me.
- intergalplan 6y agoWriters use all kinds of tools to "cheat", up to and including not actually writing. Mining computer-generated nonsense or coherent-but-empty prose for the odd accidentally-excellent phrase or sentence might end up being just another. Hell, it may already be.
- notahacker 6y agoIs it "surprisingly deep" though? Looks like two standard cliches of human writing often used in close proximity and the wider context suggests literal motion (which is also present in the silly line about the weak infants!) I did like "fuzzy belly" tbf, and Kafka himself might have appreciated the purely serendipitous irony of a line about "the bugs his father used to bring him as a little boy"