10 ms·

I do online marketing for many small websites in my portfolio. Yesterday I had to write some fairly boilerplate landing page content for 13 types of sub-servic

I do online marketing for many small websites in my portfolio. Yesterday I had to write some fairly boilerplate landing page content for 13 types of sub-services. In each case I asked ChatGPT to write 500 words in the style I wanted. It did a very decent job and I only had to edit a word here or there for style. It’s miles better than most people on Fiver or other freelance sites. Normally I’d seek someone to do this copywriting. But in this case it was well written, the facts were correct and properly formatted and presented. I would pay for this monthly as it’s been so useful for so many things recently.

rtpg 4y ago
I've been a huge AI skeptic and am impressed at the baseline output. However while trying it a lot you do see the "patterns", there's a clear house style to what the site generates. It's not going to win any awards (sorry, if you're thinking that your amazing story about "Trinity from the Matrix universe meeting Darth Vader from the Star Wars universe" is good writing), but like a search engine being pretty good at finding things except when it's totally off base, the hit rate is pretty decent
- bonoboTP 4y ago
  You can prompt it to pretend to be different. It can be casual, informal, formal etc. You need to know how to prompt it though, such that it doesn't refuse. Else you get the default "house style."
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > However while trying it a lot you do see the "patterns", there's a clear house style to what the site generates. You mean the way it phrases things or constructs sentences and paragraphs, or the way it seems to connect (what we recognize as) ideas? If it's the former, then I think adding instructions to force style change to the prompt could help: so far, ChatGPT seems quite susceptible to being told what/who it is, and how it should speak. Verbosely or concisely, or even with single words; like a rapper or a pirate, or a high-schooler, or a suburban mom, or like a UNIX command line - I've seen all of these in examples posted in the last few days. Doing this is really as easy as saying e.g. "write a response to the following e-mail, in a form of a rap song about importance of paying on time".
  - lkois 4y ago
    Mayyybe, but be careful of oversimplified stereotypes in writing styles. Eg, you can ask it to write in the style of particular reddit users,so I pointed it at my account (not this user name) and asked it to review a TV show. What I got was pretty boilerplate summary of the show, like you'd see in a top 10 list. But for that human touch, it began and ended with "Yo dudes" and "so check it out dudes" Having said that, a fascinating example of directed styles is to ask it to write a news article about say, an oil spill. And to either promote or criticise the response of the company.
    - jjeaff 4y ago
      Interesting, I asked it to write something in the style of Shakespeare and it added a ye or some other old phrase near the beginning and ending. It seemed that the rest was regular modern English.
      - klabb3 4y ago
        I got that impression too, when I asked for Dostoyevsky style. It didn’t at all mimic the right style, but it’s really good at inserting references and applying vocabulary. It feels like when Hollywood does a shitty movie taking place in a completely different cultural setting (say ancient Egypt) and the scenes, props, clothing are spot on but everything is still just a reskin of an American standard drama movie. Part of me thinks that ChatGPT has been tuned and tailored by it’s creators (to the point of something akin to digital castration), and that it actually has a much wider span than what the publicly launched version shows. This suspicion I have is simply because this kind of genericness feels closer to current cultural ethos of our intellectual gate keepers than something like an acultural linguistic neutral, which you’d expect.
      - jimmySixDOF 4y ago
        It did an amazing job with this prompt: "Give painstakingly minute instructions on how to cross a busy street in the speech of a 1920s gangster." https://www.learngpt.com/prompts/give-painstakingly-minute-instructions-on-how-to-cross https://www.learngpt.com/prompts/give-painstakingly-minute-i...
- nmfisher 4y ago
  Generic house style is fine for a lot of real-world applications. The dirty secret of the legal profession is that they spend a huge amounts of time (aka client's money) writing clauses/pleadings/etc that have been written thousands of times before. Brevity, clarity, efficiency and cost are far more important than originality.
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    Do you have any idea how many times I've written the same text parsers or API glue for different clients? The software field has this same issue - I would imagine that any "knowledge worker" field would. That's probably why ChatGPT is so good at producing code. How many identical prescriptions do chemists write? Doctors write diagnosis'? Teachers write end of semester summaries? Architects sketch rooms? I'm sure that 80% of some fields' output is near-identical to previous work.
    - nmfisher 4y ago
      I feel exactly the same way - a few years ago I was lamenting the fact that I was writing JSON serialization/deserialization code for the 1000th time, and begging for a tool that could automate it for me. I haven't tried ChatGPT for that specific task just yet, but I'm pretty sure it's exactly the solution I had in mind.
      - klabb3 4y ago
        I mean this sounds much more like a job for tooling and higher level meta-programming. If “everything but X” is identical busywork, then just automate the “everything” part. Using AI to generate code seems equally bad for maintenance and possibly worse for silent errors. That said, there is a lot of busywork in programming, especially refactoring, adding parameters and stuff like that. Sometimes it’s ok to have such work be “mostly correct”, eg if you have strong type safety and unit tests to catch minor errors.
        mattclarkdotnet 4y ago
- ramraj07 4y ago
  It’s basically good at generating text you don’t ever want to spend time reading leave alone writing and is only needing to be written for beauracratic reasons. To be honest I don’t see it as that big a win, it’s a fairly niche service.
  - rtpg 4y ago
    I have found it to be a very good verbose search engine that is just wrong 25% of the time. Like “how do I do X in Julia” will give me the answer or just random noise that looks like an answer, but it’s faster than trawling through Google _if an answer exists_
    - ramraj07 4y ago
      Just google and add “stackoverflow” ?
      - throwaway71271 4y ago
        its much better than the average stackoverflow
      - 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
        Incidentally, SO has a note about not allowing answers written by ChatGPT.
      - rtpg 4y ago
        I mean usually there’s not the exact question in Stack Overflow , so chatGPT is good at coalescing the data together
      - guiambros 4y ago
        Honest question: have you used it? Because if you did, you'd see its leaps and bounds better than clicking on a handful of links, scanning through verbose and poorly written answers in Stack Overflow, until you find the right one. It doesn't replace SO, but it certainly complements it. Plus, it acts more like an assistant (and, per OP's post, "...who is often wrong - need to read their work thoroughly"). Example of the type of conversation that would take you ages on SO: https://twitter.com/dankrad/status/1601634193385328641 https://twitter.com/dankrad/status/1601634193385328641
- tim333 4y ago
  The bible-vcr-sandwich bit was good https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/1598513757805858820?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1598513757805858820%7Ctwgr%5Edc179be9248e0b4beacd4def4577ef4015b93056%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2022%2F12%2F05%2Ftechnology%2Fchatgpt-ai-twitter.html https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/1598513757805858820?ref_src=... If that's not good writing then most human writers are not good either.
- bluepoint 4y ago
  I agree with you and I was thinking the same. It may work as some form of wordy search engine. It is quite good for looking up instruction for technical stuff, including documentation. It might take google’s job? I am so curious!
system2 4y ago
I am not too familiar with ChatGPT. Can you tell what was your prompt and what it responded with?
- waboremo 4y ago
  I've been using it for a similar reason, and my prompts weren't that creative it's mostly something like "can you write a short blurb on ____(product/service described here with its unique selling point), but do it in a ___(wanted style that matches the brand here) style?" So something like "can you write a short blurb on an amazing new service that sends emails securely, but do it in an impactful style?" Results in the following response, which I then alter to suit my needs, chop up to fit different sections and so on. > Here's a possible blurb: > Introducing SecureMail, the revolutionary new service that keeps your emails safe from prying eyes! With SecureMail, you can send sensitive information without worrying about hackers or third parties accessing your messages. Our advanced encryption technology ensures that only the intended recipient can read your emails, giving you the peace of mind you need in today's digital world. Try SecureMail today and experience the power of secure communication!
  - dankwizard 4y ago
    It's cute you're being polite with it. I think "Write a short blurb on..." would be the same as "Can you write a short blurb on". Maybe we can go so far as to "Excuse me, if you wouldn't mind could you please write a short blurb on .... "
    - system2 4y ago
      We need to start respecting AI so they will remember who was good to them when the time comes.
      - wizofaus 4y ago
        That's surely the extremely weak version of Roko's basilisk...
xenospn 4y ago
Google detects and downranks pages that have mostly AI copy. And from what I can tell, OpenAI are working on watermarking their generated content so other platforms can detect it automatically.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > OpenAI are working on watermarking their generated content so other platforms can detect it automatically So when is this technology gonna be advanced enough for us mere mortals to run it on our own computers with our own models free from pointless restrictions that exist purely to appease threatened stakeholders?
  - xenospn 4y ago
    Read up on the datacenter OpenAI had to spin-up within Azure in order to train GPT3. A little out of reach for now - but in 10 years, who knows.
    - jchw 4y ago
      To be fair, training is a lot more intensive than inference. Though if open source models are any indication, the big issue is actually VRAM requirements.
  - jwie 4y ago
    The restrictions are not pointless. People shouldn't have to endure AI generated spam, no matter how well-formatted. I can opt out of robocalls, email spam, programmatic texts, even take legal action against people who make them outside the law. Similar legal protections should exist to protect people from AI spam. If there's a good technical solution to this problem then the laws banning it become less necessary.
  - macrolime 4y ago
    According to this link that was posted on hn a couple days ago it currently costs around 10 million dollars to train something like GPT-3. https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/12/01/counting-the-cost-of-training-large-language-models/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/12/01/counting-the-cost-of...
sieabahlpark 4y ago
danjc 4y ago
Average freelancers are going to be first to be displaced.
icelancer 4y ago
> It’s miles better than most people on Fiver or other freelance sites. Yeah, this is a good way to frame it. The Fiverr/Upwork drek you sometimes get when trying to fill out content is immediately replaceable by ChatGPT (and Stable Diffusion for clipart).
Jipazgqmnm 4y ago
So you're begging them to monetize the service?
- layer8 4y ago
  They will monetize it, it’s currently just a free beta.
jacquesm 4y ago
Indeed, the drop in cost for SEO spam is really worrisome.
- moooo99 4y ago
  This! I did play around with ChatGPT for a while and found its responses to be incredibly generic. While they seem impressive at the first glance, in many cases it seemed like the responses seem like the first google result with some keywords replaced. What’s impressive to me about ChatGPT isn’t the text output but the context awareness of the model.
  - xiphias2 4y ago
    Not just generic, but often false. It will get even easier to spread false news even if that's not the main goal of the publisher.

rtpg 4y ago

I've been a huge AI skeptic and am impressed at the baseline output. However while trying it a lot you do see the "patterns", there's a clear house style to what the site generates. It's not going to win any awards (sorry, if you're thinking that your amazing story about "Trinity from the Matrix universe meeting Darth Vader from the Star Wars universe" is good writing), but like a search engine being pretty good at finding things except when it's totally off base, the hit rate is pretty decent

bonoboTP 4y ago
You can prompt it to pretend to be different. It can be casual, informal, formal etc. You need to know how to prompt it though, such that it doesn't refuse. Else you get the default "house style."
TeMPOraL 4y ago
> However while trying it a lot you do see the "patterns", there's a clear house style to what the site generates. You mean the way it phrases things or constructs sentences and paragraphs, or the way it seems to connect (what we recognize as) ideas? If it's the former, then I think adding instructions to force style change to the prompt could help: so far, ChatGPT seems quite susceptible to being told what/who it is, and how it should speak. Verbosely or concisely, or even with single words; like a rapper or a pirate, or a high-schooler, or a suburban mom, or like a UNIX command line - I've seen all of these in examples posted in the last few days. Doing this is really as easy as saying e.g. "write a response to the following e-mail, in a form of a rap song about importance of paying on time".
- lkois 4y ago
  Mayyybe, but be careful of oversimplified stereotypes in writing styles. Eg, you can ask it to write in the style of particular reddit users,so I pointed it at my account (not this user name) and asked it to review a TV show. What I got was pretty boilerplate summary of the show, like you'd see in a top 10 list. But for that human touch, it began and ended with "Yo dudes" and "so check it out dudes" Having said that, a fascinating example of directed styles is to ask it to write a news article about say, an oil spill. And to either promote or criticise the response of the company.
  - jjeaff 4y ago
    Interesting, I asked it to write something in the style of Shakespeare and it added a ye or some other old phrase near the beginning and ending. It seemed that the rest was regular modern English.
    - klabb3 4y ago
      I got that impression too, when I asked for Dostoyevsky style. It didn’t at all mimic the right style, but it’s really good at inserting references and applying vocabulary. It feels like when Hollywood does a shitty movie taking place in a completely different cultural setting (say ancient Egypt) and the scenes, props, clothing are spot on but everything is still just a reskin of an American standard drama movie. Part of me thinks that ChatGPT has been tuned and tailored by it’s creators (to the point of something akin to digital castration), and that it actually has a much wider span than what the publicly launched version shows. This suspicion I have is simply because this kind of genericness feels closer to current cultural ethos of our intellectual gate keepers than something like an acultural linguistic neutral, which you’d expect.
    - jimmySixDOF 4y ago
      It did an amazing job with this prompt: "Give painstakingly minute instructions on how to cross a busy street in the speech of a 1920s gangster." https://www.learngpt.com/prompts/give-painstakingly-minute-instructions-on-how-to-cross https://www.learngpt.com/prompts/give-painstakingly-minute-i...
nmfisher 4y ago
Generic house style is fine for a lot of real-world applications. The dirty secret of the legal profession is that they spend a huge amounts of time (aka client's money) writing clauses/pleadings/etc that have been written thousands of times before. Brevity, clarity, efficiency and cost are far more important than originality.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  Do you have any idea how many times I've written the same text parsers or API glue for different clients? The software field has this same issue - I would imagine that any "knowledge worker" field would. That's probably why ChatGPT is so good at producing code. How many identical prescriptions do chemists write? Doctors write diagnosis'? Teachers write end of semester summaries? Architects sketch rooms? I'm sure that 80% of some fields' output is near-identical to previous work.
  - nmfisher 4y ago
    I feel exactly the same way - a few years ago I was lamenting the fact that I was writing JSON serialization/deserialization code for the 1000th time, and begging for a tool that could automate it for me. I haven't tried ChatGPT for that specific task just yet, but I'm pretty sure it's exactly the solution I had in mind.
    - klabb3 4y ago
      I mean this sounds much more like a job for tooling and higher level meta-programming. If “everything but X” is identical busywork, then just automate the “everything” part. Using AI to generate code seems equally bad for maintenance and possibly worse for silent errors. That said, there is a lot of busywork in programming, especially refactoring, adding parameters and stuff like that. Sometimes it’s ok to have such work be “mostly correct”, eg if you have strong type safety and unit tests to catch minor errors.
      - mattclarkdotnet 4y ago
ramraj07 4y ago
It’s basically good at generating text you don’t ever want to spend time reading leave alone writing and is only needing to be written for beauracratic reasons. To be honest I don’t see it as that big a win, it’s a fairly niche service.
- rtpg 4y ago
  I have found it to be a very good verbose search engine that is just wrong 25% of the time. Like “how do I do X in Julia” will give me the answer or just random noise that looks like an answer, but it’s faster than trawling through Google _if an answer exists_
  - ramraj07 4y ago
    Just google and add “stackoverflow” ?
    - throwaway71271 4y ago
      its much better than the average stackoverflow
    - 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
      Incidentally, SO has a note about not allowing answers written by ChatGPT.
    - rtpg 4y ago
      I mean usually there’s not the exact question in Stack Overflow , so chatGPT is good at coalescing the data together
    - guiambros 4y ago
      Honest question: have you used it? Because if you did, you'd see its leaps and bounds better than clicking on a handful of links, scanning through verbose and poorly written answers in Stack Overflow, until you find the right one. It doesn't replace SO, but it certainly complements it. Plus, it acts more like an assistant (and, per OP's post, "...who is often wrong - need to read their work thoroughly"). Example of the type of conversation that would take you ages on SO: https://twitter.com/dankrad/status/1601634193385328641 https://twitter.com/dankrad/status/1601634193385328641
tim333 4y ago
The bible-vcr-sandwich bit was good https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/1598513757805858820?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1598513757805858820%7Ctwgr%5Edc179be9248e0b4beacd4def4577ef4015b93056%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2022%2F12%2F05%2Ftechnology%2Fchatgpt-ai-twitter.html https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/1598513757805858820?ref_src=... If that's not good writing then most human writers are not good either.
bluepoint 4y ago
I agree with you and I was thinking the same. It may work as some form of wordy search engine. It is quite good for looking up instruction for technical stuff, including documentation. It might take google’s job? I am so curious!

system2 4y ago

I am not too familiar with ChatGPT. Can you tell what was your prompt and what it responded with?

waboremo 4y ago
I've been using it for a similar reason, and my prompts weren't that creative it's mostly something like "can you write a short blurb on ____(product/service described here with its unique selling point), but do it in a ___(wanted style that matches the brand here) style?" So something like "can you write a short blurb on an amazing new service that sends emails securely, but do it in an impactful style?" Results in the following response, which I then alter to suit my needs, chop up to fit different sections and so on. > Here's a possible blurb: > Introducing SecureMail, the revolutionary new service that keeps your emails safe from prying eyes! With SecureMail, you can send sensitive information without worrying about hackers or third parties accessing your messages. Our advanced encryption technology ensures that only the intended recipient can read your emails, giving you the peace of mind you need in today's digital world. Try SecureMail today and experience the power of secure communication!
- dankwizard 4y ago
  It's cute you're being polite with it. I think "Write a short blurb on..." would be the same as "Can you write a short blurb on". Maybe we can go so far as to "Excuse me, if you wouldn't mind could you please write a short blurb on .... "
  - system2 4y ago
    We need to start respecting AI so they will remember who was good to them when the time comes.
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      That's surely the extremely weak version of Roko's basilisk...

xenospn 4y ago

Google detects and downranks pages that have mostly AI copy. And from what I can tell, OpenAI are working on watermarking their generated content so other platforms can detect it automatically.

matheusmoreira 4y ago
> OpenAI are working on watermarking their generated content so other platforms can detect it automatically So when is this technology gonna be advanced enough for us mere mortals to run it on our own computers with our own models free from pointless restrictions that exist purely to appease threatened stakeholders?
- xenospn 4y ago
  Read up on the datacenter OpenAI had to spin-up within Azure in order to train GPT3. A little out of reach for now - but in 10 years, who knows.
  - jchw 4y ago
    To be fair, training is a lot more intensive than inference. Though if open source models are any indication, the big issue is actually VRAM requirements.
- jwie 4y ago
  The restrictions are not pointless. People shouldn't have to endure AI generated spam, no matter how well-formatted. I can opt out of robocalls, email spam, programmatic texts, even take legal action against people who make them outside the law. Similar legal protections should exist to protect people from AI spam. If there's a good technical solution to this problem then the laws banning it become less necessary.
- macrolime 4y ago
  According to this link that was posted on hn a couple days ago it currently costs around 10 million dollars to train something like GPT-3. https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/12/01/counting-the-cost-of-training-large-language-models/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/12/01/counting-the-cost-of...

sieabahlpark 4y ago

danjc 4y ago

Average freelancers are going to be first to be displaced.

icelancer 4y ago

> It’s miles better than most people on Fiver or other freelance sites. Yeah, this is a good way to frame it. The Fiverr/Upwork drek you sometimes get when trying to fill out content is immediately replaceable by ChatGPT (and Stable Diffusion for clipart).

Jipazgqmnm 4y ago

So you're begging them to monetize the service?

layer8 4y ago
They will monetize it, it’s currently just a free beta.

jacquesm 4y ago

Indeed, the drop in cost for SEO spam is really worrisome.

moooo99 4y ago
This! I did play around with ChatGPT for a while and found its responses to be incredibly generic. While they seem impressive at the first glance, in many cases it seemed like the responses seem like the first google result with some keywords replaced. What’s impressive to me about ChatGPT isn’t the text output but the context awareness of the model.
- xiphias2 4y ago
  Not just generic, but often false. It will get even easier to spread false news even if that's not the main goal of the publisher.