> Re: TFA's complaints of blandness, and the several comments here about the narrator not being Watson, I'm always confused by how people expect ChatGPT to foll

> Re: TFA's complaints of blandness, and the several comments here about the narrator not being Watson, I'm always confused by how people expect ChatGPT to follow constraints it wasn't given. If you give it the constraints of not being bland or being exciting it writes something which is just as bland, and to all intents and purposes the same story (It can follow an instruction regarding narrator, doing Holmes just fine, quite well with Queen Victoria and predictably badly with Adrian Mole and Donald Trump). Hell it'll only slightly vary the story by pasting in words like "shadowy cabal" and "conspiracy" if you ask it to write in the style of Pynchon, though tbf it does a pretty elaborate (and funny) rewrite in the style of the Bible. Hidden abilities to coax more usable output out of a system by tweaking prompts to explicitly state things that should have been explicit (or do weird unintuitive stuff like tagging image generation prompts with UnrealEngine to get better contrast) is an issue with natural language interfaces, but that doesn't mean ChatGPT has an Excel like ability to find an acceptable answer and it's just the pesky humans getting in the way by not giving it good enough prompts. On the contrary, the more you vary your prompt and keep getting back variations on the same theme, the more you think "wow, this model is really low temperature and there's a lot less here than the initial appearance of being half decent at storytelling suggested".