6 ms·

The lesson we should take from GPT-3 is that we spend way too much time reading text that isn't really saying anything, and/or failing to find meaning in what w

The lesson we should take from GPT-3 is that we spend way too much time reading text that isn't really saying anything, and/or failing to find meaning in what we read. It's a neat trick, and I think it could absolutely replace much or most of the writing on the internet today. But is it good writing? No, not really. At least, not in the sense of writing as producing anything more substantive than slick prose with a vague, meandering context running through it. I think the next step (say, being able to produce short stories with actual literary value) will be substantially more difficult, mostly because it's substantially more difficult for human writers too. It takes learned abstract knowledge and deliberate intention to write something that's coherent and engaging and longer than a few hundred words, and that skill is separate from the intuitive prose generation ability that's essentially unconscious for practiced writers and comes easily to many avid readers (i.e. trained on a large corpus) who take up writing. It will be interesting to see how producers of actual substantive content incorporate these tools into their processes, if at all. I guess I can imagine using it to generate descriptions, for instance, but how does it do with dialogue? Probably not very well.

DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
> But is it good writing? No, not really. agree. I'd say it's impossible to solve. Where would we even place our yardsticks: Has society been able to get any better (than we used to) at assessing and categorizing what "constitutes" great writing? If so in what relation could that be measured to our past performance especially that many no longer read today due to our loss of attention span? (most won't even read this comment because it's way too long). People are terrible at spotting some of the best writing when it happens. History is full of writers who's work could only be understood and appreciated after their death.[1] Death makes their work a finite commodity. There is no more chance asking the author "what they meant". Others get shunned because they were too radical, (or too ahead of their times). Great writers as in "a radical new style" or as "for their radical ideas" get only credited after decades (if not centuries) post mortem. When it's too upsetting (because it's true) we need the distance of history and later generations to appreciate it[2]. Even "what" we comprehend and then appreciate changes over time, and within the same person with every time we read it[3]. [1] 6 people centuries ahead of their time https://www.oxford-royale.com/articles/6-people-centuries-ahead-time/ https://www.oxford-royale.com/articles/6-people-centuries-ah... <- there are hundreds of wrtiers like this (it is just the top result google gave me). How would an AI spot it when all AI was created "in our image". And if it did spot it how would the AI be able to convince us that this is worth a closer look instead that we need to destroy the AI? [2] The Last Messiah by Peter Wessel Zapffe https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah <- say something mediocre to ensure you get published and ranked in "best new books". But saying something profound can potentially get you ignored (at best) and killed (at worst). This ties back to[1] [3] James Joyce Dubliners https://archive.org/details/dubliners00joycrich https://archive.org/details/dubliners00joycrich / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubliners https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubliners <- there are hundreds of examples like Dubliners but they are all different books depending on who reads them and when. the retrospect and integrating what we read (and then re-read over and over at various stages of our lives) into our own reality is what is makes it great. yet even if some minority of people does practice this, it's still highly subjective. how would an AI provide us with value (e.g. if it can the value it creates would only benefit itself but never others) __ I'm not saying AI is incapable of better writing than AI is now, but it would only remain mediocre and never outperform humans. Also the writing can't stand or be judged by itself. It can only be valued and appreciated through human mind. Art (and many books are art) has the same problematic relationship with AI. John Berger's "Ways of seeing" talks about this (but so does a lot of philosophy) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk
- Kelamir 5y ago
  > (most won't even read this comment because it's way too long). I admit I was going to skip it, but I saw a reference to a James Joyce's book and reconsidered :)
bertil 5y ago
If you want to echo the last paragraph of the article, the system also doesn’t know when to stop. Which leads to a simple improvement: teach the model when to stop, what sections to remove. There’s already great ML-based summary engines, and systems able to answer questions from descriptions.
- Smithalicious 5y ago
  I wonder if that could be a viable approach, having a separate "writer" and "editor" AI
  - jcims 5y ago
    I do the same thing when I write (except for my comments on HN lol) GPT-3 reads like the unfiltered garbage that comes out of my head when I'm trying to get ideas out. The primary difference is that I have empathy for the audience so I go through the effort to reread, clean it up, clear it up then cut it down. But that secondary editing process has nothing to do with the subject matter or initial content generation process. It was trained through years of *not* doing it and having my audience ask lots of questions and clearly misunderstand what I was trying to say (let's call it reinforcement learning). As a result I now have an intuition about which concepts need explanatory analogies, based on my understanding of what the readers know, and which are almost certainly going to be understood outright. I think this gets at the root of the difference. Basically when I write, I'm not trying to generate text, I'm trying to generate training data that will amend foreign models with a high fidelity representation of a subset of mine. This feels GAN-like but different. It's like you need to have two separate models, the 'expert' and the 'n00b' (or ten n00bs trained on different data), ask both of them the same thing, and one-shot retrain the n00b from the answers provided by the 'expert' until the n00b is able to generate content that the expert finds to be sufficiently similar.
    - isaacimagine 5y ago
      > Basically when I write, I'm not trying to generate text, I'm trying to generate training data that will amend foreign models with a high fidelity representation of a subset of mine. Well said! Replying so I can find this thread again, please ignore.
wpietri 5y ago
> we spend way too much time reading text that isn't really saying anything, and/or failing to find meaning in what we read Absolutely. It helps make clear that the function of words isn't always what we think. It's the sort of window into the machinery of the mind that helps us reverse-engineer what's really going on. It reminds me of the Oliver Sacks essay "The President's Speech", which Wikipedia describes as being "about a ward of aphasiacs [people who have lost the ability to understand words] and agnosiacs [here, people who understand only the words, as if reading a transcript] listening to a speech given by an unnamed actor-president, 'the old charmer', presumably Ronald Reagan. Many in the first group laughed at the speech, despite their inability to follow the words, and Sacks claims their laughter to be at the president's facial expressions and tone, which they find 'not genuine'. One woman in the latter group criticizes the structure of the president's sentences, stating that he 'does not speak good prose'." Glibness has a purpose, but it's not really about conveying information. It's for something else.
goodpoint 5y ago
Many (human-written) books and articles are 10% content and 90% fluff and repetition. The articles shared on HN are a good example. If the goal is to increase the SNR, GPT-3 is probably not going to help.
- shoto_io 5y ago
  May I ask what SNR is short for?
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Signal to noise ratio.
  - arethuza 5y ago
    I suspect "Signal to Noise Ratio"
- username90 5y ago
  Which is why we read comments and not articles. Articles are full of fluff, comments for some reason aren't.
  - the_lonely_road 5y ago
    All of the salient points from the article will be quoted and discussed with context in the comments. As for the pieces that no one thought important enough to discuss...I appear to be missing nothing.
CuriouslyC 5y ago
My expectation is that autocorrect and sentence completion tools will get better over time, until we get to the point where we have tools that take outlines and turn them into first drafts.
Nav_Panel 5y ago
It's funny, I think using Twitter helped me with this. Forced me to condense large thoughts into small spaces, learning to cut through the reddit-comment fluff. High-density writing. Will be harder for an AI to replicate.
jamesjyu 5y ago
Founder of Sudowrite [1] here. > I think the next step (say, being able to produce short stories with actual literary value) will be substantially more difficult, mostly because it's substantially more difficult for human writers too. Totally agreed. Both my co-founder and I are professionally published short story authors, and we would be the first to say that using something like Sudowrite is no guarantee you will land a story in the New Yorker. Similarly, using Cinema4D won't propel you to the same quality work as Beeple. These are tools. It's up to you as the author to use them in a way that enhances your craft. My goal is to figure out how we mindfully incorporate AI into a writer's workflow. If you look at other fields like visual arts, they have had a wealth of interactive tools starting with photoshop. What is the photoshop for writing? (hint: I don't believe it exists yet, and I want to build it) In terms of the details, you'd be surprised at how well GPT-3 handles descriptions and dialogue. It's actually scarily good at dialogue [2] [3]. [1] https://www.sudowrite.com https://www.sudowrite.com [2] https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#dialogue https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#dialogue [3] https://www.jamesyu.org/singular/ https://www.jamesyu.org/singular/

DyslexicAtheist 5y ago

> But is it good writing? No, not really. agree. I'd say it's impossible to solve. Where would we even place our yardsticks: Has society been able to get any better (than we used to) at assessing and categorizing what "constitutes" great writing? If so in what relation could that be measured to our past performance especially that many no longer read today due to our loss of attention span? (most won't even read this comment because it's way too long). People are terrible at spotting some of the best writing when it happens. History is full of writers who's work could only be understood and appreciated after their death.[1] Death makes their work a finite commodity. There is no more chance asking the author "what they meant". Others get shunned because they were too radical, (or too ahead of their times). Great writers as in "a radical new style" or as "for their radical ideas" get only credited after decades (if not centuries) post mortem. When it's too upsetting (because it's true) we need the distance of history and later generations to appreciate it[2]. Even "what" we comprehend and then appreciate changes over time, and within the same person with every time we read it[3]. [1] 6 people centuries ahead of their time https://www.oxford-royale.com/articles/6-people-centuries-ahead-time/ https://www.oxford-royale.com/articles/6-people-centuries-ah... <- there are hundreds of wrtiers like this (it is just the top result google gave me). How would an AI spot it when all AI was created "in our image". And if it did spot it how would the AI be able to convince us that this is worth a closer look instead that we need to destroy the AI? [2] The Last Messiah by Peter Wessel Zapffe https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah <- say something mediocre to ensure you get published and ranked in "best new books". But saying something profound can potentially get you ignored (at best) and killed (at worst). This ties back to[1] [3] James Joyce Dubliners https://archive.org/details/dubliners00joycrich https://archive.org/details/dubliners00joycrich / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubliners https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubliners <- there are hundreds of examples like Dubliners but they are all different books depending on who reads them and when. the retrospect and integrating what we read (and then re-read over and over at various stages of our lives) into our own reality is what is makes it great. yet even if some minority of people does practice this, it's still highly subjective. how would an AI provide us with value (e.g. if it can the value it creates would only benefit itself but never others) __ I'm not saying AI is incapable of better writing than AI is now, but it would only remain mediocre and never outperform humans. Also the writing can't stand or be judged by itself. It can only be valued and appreciated through human mind. Art (and many books are art) has the same problematic relationship with AI. John Berger's "Ways of seeing" talks about this (but so does a lot of philosophy) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk

Kelamir 5y ago
> (most won't even read this comment because it's way too long). I admit I was going to skip it, but I saw a reference to a James Joyce's book and reconsidered :)

bertil 5y ago

If you want to echo the last paragraph of the article, the system also doesn’t know when to stop. Which leads to a simple improvement: teach the model when to stop, what sections to remove. There’s already great ML-based summary engines, and systems able to answer questions from descriptions.

Smithalicious 5y ago
I wonder if that could be a viable approach, having a separate "writer" and "editor" AI
- jcims 5y ago
  I do the same thing when I write (except for my comments on HN lol) GPT-3 reads like the unfiltered garbage that comes out of my head when I'm trying to get ideas out. The primary difference is that I have empathy for the audience so I go through the effort to reread, clean it up, clear it up then cut it down. But that secondary editing process has nothing to do with the subject matter or initial content generation process. It was trained through years of *not* doing it and having my audience ask lots of questions and clearly misunderstand what I was trying to say (let's call it reinforcement learning). As a result I now have an intuition about which concepts need explanatory analogies, based on my understanding of what the readers know, and which are almost certainly going to be understood outright. I think this gets at the root of the difference. Basically when I write, I'm not trying to generate text, I'm trying to generate training data that will amend foreign models with a high fidelity representation of a subset of mine. This feels GAN-like but different. It's like you need to have two separate models, the 'expert' and the 'n00b' (or ten n00bs trained on different data), ask both of them the same thing, and one-shot retrain the n00b from the answers provided by the 'expert' until the n00b is able to generate content that the expert finds to be sufficiently similar.
  - isaacimagine 5y ago
    > Basically when I write, I'm not trying to generate text, I'm trying to generate training data that will amend foreign models with a high fidelity representation of a subset of mine. Well said! Replying so I can find this thread again, please ignore.

wpietri 5y ago

> we spend way too much time reading text that isn't really saying anything, and/or failing to find meaning in what we read Absolutely. It helps make clear that the function of words isn't always what we think. It's the sort of window into the machinery of the mind that helps us reverse-engineer what's really going on. It reminds me of the Oliver Sacks essay "The President's Speech", which Wikipedia describes as being "about a ward of aphasiacs [people who have lost the ability to understand words] and agnosiacs [here, people who understand only the words, as if reading a transcript] listening to a speech given by an unnamed actor-president, 'the old charmer', presumably Ronald Reagan. Many in the first group laughed at the speech, despite their inability to follow the words, and Sacks claims their laughter to be at the president's facial expressions and tone, which they find 'not genuine'. One woman in the latter group criticizes the structure of the president's sentences, stating that he 'does not speak good prose'." Glibness has a purpose, but it's not really about conveying information. It's for something else.

goodpoint 5y ago

Many (human-written) books and articles are 10% content and 90% fluff and repetition. The articles shared on HN are a good example. If the goal is to increase the SNR, GPT-3 is probably not going to help.

shoto_io 5y ago
May I ask what SNR is short for?
- ghaff 5y ago
  Signal to noise ratio.
- arethuza 5y ago
  I suspect "Signal to Noise Ratio"
username90 5y ago
Which is why we read comments and not articles. Articles are full of fluff, comments for some reason aren't.
- the_lonely_road 5y ago
  All of the salient points from the article will be quoted and discussed with context in the comments. As for the pieces that no one thought important enough to discuss...I appear to be missing nothing.

CuriouslyC 5y ago

My expectation is that autocorrect and sentence completion tools will get better over time, until we get to the point where we have tools that take outlines and turn them into first drafts.

Nav_Panel 5y ago

It's funny, I think using Twitter helped me with this. Forced me to condense large thoughts into small spaces, learning to cut through the reddit-comment fluff. High-density writing. Will be harder for an AI to replicate.

jamesjyu 5y ago

Founder of Sudowrite [1] here. > I think the next step (say, being able to produce short stories with actual literary value) will be substantially more difficult, mostly because it's substantially more difficult for human writers too. Totally agreed. Both my co-founder and I are professionally published short story authors, and we would be the first to say that using something like Sudowrite is no guarantee you will land a story in the New Yorker. Similarly, using Cinema4D won't propel you to the same quality work as Beeple. These are tools. It's up to you as the author to use them in a way that enhances your craft. My goal is to figure out how we mindfully incorporate AI into a writer's workflow. If you look at other fields like visual arts, they have had a wealth of interactive tools starting with photoshop. What is the photoshop for writing? (hint: I don't believe it exists yet, and I want to build it) In terms of the details, you'd be surprised at how well GPT-3 handles descriptions and dialogue. It's actually scarily good at dialogue [2] [3]. [1] https://www.sudowrite.com https://www.sudowrite.com [2] https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#dialogue https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#dialogue [3] https://www.jamesyu.org/singular/ https://www.jamesyu.org/singular/