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This is hilarious. In my experience writing novels with ChatGPT, it starts to break down after a long running thread before eventually becoming almost useless.

This is hilarious. In my experience writing novels with ChatGPT, it starts to break down after a long running thread before eventually becoming almost useless. I wind up needing to remind it what it’s doing over and over. That is likely by virtue of its limit on tokens, but I think also because the weight each token has reduces as the conversation continues. I wonder if users would slowly watch the website go insane after using over X interactions.

freeqaz 4y ago
If you look at dedicated writing AI tools like NovelAI, you can see that this is exactly how they work. They have a concept of a "lore book" with "keywords" that you can use to remind the AI about how to properly generate the content. For example, if I were writing a novel about a fantasy kingdom and there is an evil king, then I can write a description of the king ("The king is evil and wears a red crown") with the keyword to "include" it being "crown", "king", etc. As the number of tokens increases with these AIs I think this problem will decrease decrease (1k was NovelAI originally, and now GPT-3 Codex is 8k). I do wonder what the "ideal" solution is in the future though. Or do you have to create a "lore book" for ChatGPT too? (A thought I've had is that maybe we can automatically "create" the "lore book" and then re-inject that seamlessly? For example, in the fantasy kingdom example, maybe ChatGPT can generate a list of characters for each "chunk" of text and then automatically inject that into the "last" batch of text.)
- lelandfe 4y ago
  > maybe ChatGPT can generate a list of characters for each "chunk" of text and then automatically inject that into the "last" batch of text Funny enough, that’s the automated version of what I do! Every X prompts, I ask ChatGPT: List the cast of this story and their goals I’ve found this really helps extend the shelf life of our thread :)
  - freeqaz 4y ago
    That's amazing -- thank you for sharing! I'll try this out in the future :)
- dinkumthinkum 4y ago
  But if we are looking at a thinking AGI that is “superior” to human abilities we should see Tolkien or Martin. If the argument is “just wait” then there needs to be sone explanation of why a Tolkien is really possible with this type of AI.
  - jameshart 4y ago
    Funny you mention those two. They also suffer from the problem: “starts to break down after a long running thread before eventually becoming almost useless.” Tolkien kept changing his world as he went along, so the Lord of The Rings required him to make changes to the Hobbit, and his Silmarillion needed extensive edits to bring it back into synch with LoTR canon. As for Martin (assuming you mean G.R.R.)… well, he’s already mimicking that other failure mode of ChatGPT - that response times can get long when under load, and eventually the whole session might just time out.
momojo 4y ago
Humans do the same thing; which is to say we're also constrained by the amount of context we can hold in RAM. Those who write novels end up encoding and compressing that information into notes. I wonder if there's a similar way one could work with ChatGPT, instead of having to constantly remind it of the little details, like you did.
dluan 4y ago
I wonder if you could treat it as kind of stateless, or maybe a ChatGPT-RDT could work.
- freeqaz 4y ago
  What is that? "ChatGPT-RDT"? I searched it and I don't see anything online.
polynomial 4y ago
Right, though the difference (IMO) is between such long running threads, and 'X' interactions which are composed of many much shorter threads. ChatGPT is optimized for short attention spans, and those with the shortest attention spans are likely the most impressed, while those with much longer attention spans, which not coincidentally often correlate to more sophisticated -for lack of a better word- use of language in the form of much more complex (potentially prolix) linguistic constructions, to express a perspective that has more in common with Proust (both in terms of his prose style, and also his famous account of the madeleine, often understood to be about the lost time of memory, but inseparable from attention itself) than the fragmented discourses presented by modern social media, may find this robotic dog and pony show to be somewhat less interesting, albeit obviously useful as a tool in certain contexts.

freeqaz 4y ago

If you look at dedicated writing AI tools like NovelAI, you can see that this is exactly how they work. They have a concept of a "lore book" with "keywords" that you can use to remind the AI about how to properly generate the content. For example, if I were writing a novel about a fantasy kingdom and there is an evil king, then I can write a description of the king ("The king is evil and wears a red crown") with the keyword to "include" it being "crown", "king", etc. As the number of tokens increases with these AIs I think this problem will decrease decrease (1k was NovelAI originally, and now GPT-3 Codex is 8k). I do wonder what the "ideal" solution is in the future though. Or do you have to create a "lore book" for ChatGPT too? (A thought I've had is that maybe we can automatically "create" the "lore book" and then re-inject that seamlessly? For example, in the fantasy kingdom example, maybe ChatGPT can generate a list of characters for each "chunk" of text and then automatically inject that into the "last" batch of text.)

lelandfe 4y ago
> maybe ChatGPT can generate a list of characters for each "chunk" of text and then automatically inject that into the "last" batch of text Funny enough, that’s the automated version of what I do! Every X prompts, I ask ChatGPT: List the cast of this story and their goals I’ve found this really helps extend the shelf life of our thread :)
- freeqaz 4y ago
  That's amazing -- thank you for sharing! I'll try this out in the future :)
dinkumthinkum 4y ago
But if we are looking at a thinking AGI that is “superior” to human abilities we should see Tolkien or Martin. If the argument is “just wait” then there needs to be sone explanation of why a Tolkien is really possible with this type of AI.
- jameshart 4y ago
  Funny you mention those two. They also suffer from the problem: “starts to break down after a long running thread before eventually becoming almost useless.” Tolkien kept changing his world as he went along, so the Lord of The Rings required him to make changes to the Hobbit, and his Silmarillion needed extensive edits to bring it back into synch with LoTR canon. As for Martin (assuming you mean G.R.R.)… well, he’s already mimicking that other failure mode of ChatGPT - that response times can get long when under load, and eventually the whole session might just time out.

momojo 4y ago

Humans do the same thing; which is to say we're also constrained by the amount of context we can hold in RAM. Those who write novels end up encoding and compressing that information into notes. I wonder if there's a similar way one could work with ChatGPT, instead of having to constantly remind it of the little details, like you did.

dluan 4y ago

I wonder if you could treat it as kind of stateless, or maybe a ChatGPT-RDT could work.

freeqaz 4y ago
What is that? "ChatGPT-RDT"? I searched it and I don't see anything online.

polynomial 4y ago

Right, though the difference (IMO) is between such long running threads, and 'X' interactions which are composed of many much shorter threads. ChatGPT is optimized for short attention spans, and those with the shortest attention spans are likely the most impressed, while those with much longer attention spans, which not coincidentally often correlate to more sophisticated -for lack of a better word- use of language in the form of much more complex (potentially prolix) linguistic constructions, to express a perspective that has more in common with Proust (both in terms of his prose style, and also his famous account of the madeleine, often understood to be about the lost time of memory, but inseparable from attention itself) than the fragmented discourses presented by modern social media, may find this robotic dog and pony show to be somewhat less interesting, albeit obviously useful as a tool in certain contexts.