4 ms·

As an experiment, this is cool. As actual usage? I enjoy making stories up (or misremembering existing ones) for my daughter. The human touch is valuable to me

by the_af 4y ago

As an experiment, this is cool. As actual usage? I enjoy making stories up (or misremembering existing ones) for my daughter. The human touch is valuable to me. I also wonder: many well-loved stories of today started as a story the writer was telling his/her children; one example is The Hobbit. What if Tolkien had thought "screw this, I'm overworked and tired, I'll just type some prompt for ChatGPT and it will be enough for Christopher". I know mine is a kneejerk reaction. But I can't help thinking that this is solving a problem no actual humans have. We know how to tell stories, good or bad. We don't need automation for this. We don't need help writing terribly bland and generic stories, either. So it feels vaguely dystopian to me. Technically it is impressive. ChatGPT and things like it are the most impressive thing in years, to me.

iambateman 4y ago
Yea I’m with you. If a children’s story is primarily a generic - albeit engaging - plot, then I think AI will be very successful at telling new stories. But as a means of cultural encoding to help children understand what matters in the world and how they - specifically - fit into that world, it’s going to come up short.
- turzmo 4y ago
  I think this is true, but there are (likely) more children's books out there than you can read in a lifetime, so it seems like adding more middling AI ones to the mix would not be a value-add. At least (skilled) human authors adding to the pile have a better chance to make the story meaningful. Maybe we need a critic AI that can identify the most touching, meaningful, instructive, and morally enlightening stories out there and help us sort through the already daunting number of options
MattGaiser 4y ago
I can see the usage being between parent and kid more than producing best sellers. Or a way to give a kid a cheap but special gift.
- the_af 4y ago
  Yes, but that's precisely the usage I find upsetting!
  - dwringer 4y ago
    I can see your point but I'm not sure it's that straightforward. Let's say you simply took a hat with your kid's favorite characters from tv/movies/books/whatever on slips of paper, drew some, then did the same for plots, then made up a story to tell your kid. At some level, sure, it's not the same as coming up with a story on your own - there's not going to be anything meaningful in why you selected those particular elements of the story - but that merely constrains those choices to free you up to be creative with other aspects of the story. I think there's still room for someone who wants to be creative to use the tools to provide the same experience you're describing. It's not like one has to give the raw output to one's child. And I think such raw outputs will be generally bland, missing something relative to those with a human touch. However, giving bland and meaningless entertainment to children wouldn't really be something new, and I still see a fair concern in there. I suppose this is already part of what articles on "Kids' YouTube" are talking about.[0] [0]https://www.avclub.com/take-a-trip-to-the-automated-hellscape-of-youtube-video-1820196139 https://www.avclub.com/take-a-trip-to-the-automated-hellscap...
  - sanp 4y ago
    perhaps the core idea of the story can still come from you but ChatGPT can help flesh out the details in write it in a compelling manner.
    - nemo44x 4y ago
      That's how I see it. IT could still involve a lot of novel thought and work to get the AI to generate text you want. You nudge it in whatever direction you want it to go.
      - the_af 4y ago
        What actual problem about writing would this solve? This is like coming up with a plot idea and having some hired writer write it. This already existed before computers. So you're essentially using GPT as a ghostwriter, only (unlike human ghostwriters) it has no way to come with something innovative, it just regurgitates whatever it's already in its data in some way or another. "But," I can guess you'll object, "human (ghost)writers are already writing derivative crap, what's the difference?". Exactly. We already know how to hire humans to write derivative crap, and the truly good stuff is out of the question for GPT. So what is this solving? But what about children's bedtime stories? Well, there are tons of really good bedtime stories, lovingly crafted by good authors. Do we need automated ones written by ChatGPT?
snhly 4y ago
It is vaguely dystopian, true, but one thing I remember in order to sleep at night is that ChatGPT and the like are trained on human-written text. So we might currently be looking at ChatGPT at its very best, or close to its very best. Reasoning: from here on out, the stuff it trains on will be polluted with the automatically generated text. Photo copies of photo copies eventually lead to blurrier and crummier images of the real thing. We can keep paying people to come up with optimisations to the algorithm itself, keep paying annotators to manually pepper human common sense into the system, but it's my theory that these payments won't keep up with the spread of automatically generated content in the source dataset and the negative impact that has on the language model that the algorithm outputs. ChatGPT currently enshrines insight and style from 2020-2021 (more-or-less indistinguishable from insight and style from 2022-2023), but now that the system exists, rather than observing a rapid pace of new writing styles and original insights emerging on the web of 2024, we'll potentially see a slightly slower style/original insights emergence rate, then the next year an even slower emergence rate. This will continue until it reaches a stage where the spoken world of language and world wide web world of language have completely diverged, similar to the way 1950s film dialogue bore little resemblance to 1950s speaking styles. Short-term, ChatGPT has called creative pursuits into question, but long term, I think such systems will strongly validate creative pursuits, and only really replace non-creative roles. By turning the web into a wasteland of written cruft, GPT will validate the need for human flourishes, error, divergences from the norm and the arbitrary rewriting of unspoken rules. I think only a strong AI raised like us in our own societies could infuse that kind of culture into its writing, but the process of developing such an AI would basically just be a reinvention of slavery, and we probably don't have the resources here on earth to support it longterm anyway.
- great_psy 4y ago
  I agree with the premise that content will get more polluted, but there is an element of human vote every time we choose a prompt output and say “this is good enough for me to post/use/turn into a book”. This is just a very convoluted way of manually labeling data as good and bad.
- mestelan 4y ago
  It would be interesting to see whether a label emerges, to denote content created pre-chatGPT; ex: certified pre-2023 AI-free content. Also, it would be possible to train bots on an archive of such material.(accordingly, out of date; so less useful in numerous ways).
pandemicsoul 4y ago
> But I can't help thinking that this is solving a problem no actual humans have. This. There are 10000 children's books out there with coherent art sets and a storyline that's not just total gibberish. This kind of crap is no better than SEO blogs. Its only purpose is to pump out massive amounts of content in the hopes of earning a small amount of money on each squirt of crap that maybe amounts to something over the long term. Build good things. Solve problems. That's how you make money.
yamtaddle 4y ago
I'm starting to worry that we're going to run pretty short of activities humans find fulfilling to do, that have any notable amount of extrinsic reward or value. What happens when the computer does tell better stories to your kids than you do? When you turn the computer loose on them for a week and, well, god damn, by the end of the week they seem to have taken exactly the lessons they needed and are bringing them up in real-life situations and are even getting better at reading themselves, and raving about how good the stories are, and you can't deny that if you'd done it, the results wouldn't have been as good? Now repeat for all the ways that humans find it satisfying to serve others using their creativity. I very much doubt it's healthy for all the things we find fulfilling and enjoyable to have only intrinsic motivation to drive them. It's hard to turn down better outcomes, but what if a side-effect is that as a species we become psychologically (even spiritually, if you will) lost? So kids are raised more effectively—but for what? So that all the things they enjoy doing are valuable to, and needed or wanted by, exactly no-one? So we get more efficient at producing goods and entertainment—for what? So the brushes and paints we buy for our paintings that nobody cares to see and that your talentless cousin can outdo—in every way, including sublimity and mood and all that—with a lazy prompt on some future image generator, are somewhat cheaper? What's the point?
- the_af 4y ago
  Everything you mentioned worries me. > What happens when the computer does tell better stories to your kids than you do? Others have answered "but ChatGPT will never get as good at this". Let's, for the sake of argument, suppose that it does: suppose ChatGPT does get better. What then? Why is it a net win for mankind that a computer program can tell better (or "good enough") stories? If mechanical tasks get done by machines, and creative tasks get done by machines, and games get played by machines, and everything under the sun gets done by machines... ...what's left for us, then? Writing is an enjoyable activity for humans. It's not something to "optimize", it's fine as it is. If we optimize humans out of the activity of writing (or composing music, or drawing, etc), have we truly "won"?
  - SamPatt 4y ago
    What's left for us is whatever we want to do. People still do all kinds of things which machines and computers can do better than we can. No reason to think that will change.
JoeOfTexas 4y ago
Master writers like Tolkien don't need ChatGPT to help write. Amateurs, however, do need the help. Not everyone is a born story teller, but if you have a story to tell and need help telling it, ChatGPT can fill in those gaps for you. It might not be a work of art like LOTR, but you'll most likely just be getting tips and hints on how to format better.
- the_af 4y ago
  Nobody needs ChatGPT to help write. Most writers learn by writing. This is a "solved" problem, in the sense that mankind has had writers -- successful and otherwise, good and bad -- for hundreds of years now. We got this, this isn't an activity that needs improving by AI tools. It's not an actual problem that humans have, e.g. "I would write better, if only I had an AI assistant!". Creative writing is also not about speed, it's not something that needs optimizing for that. For art in general, actually: "if only Picasso could paint faster!" is not an actual problem mankind has. I'm talking about creative writing, mind you. Not some technical writing like creating manuals or reports -- I'm all for AI helping us with those.

by the_af 4y ago

iambateman 4y ago

Yea I’m with you. If a children’s story is primarily a generic - albeit engaging - plot, then I think AI will be very successful at telling new stories. But as a means of cultural encoding to help children understand what matters in the world and how they - specifically - fit into that world, it’s going to come up short.

turzmo 4y ago
I think this is true, but there are (likely) more children's books out there than you can read in a lifetime, so it seems like adding more middling AI ones to the mix would not be a value-add. At least (skilled) human authors adding to the pile have a better chance to make the story meaningful. Maybe we need a critic AI that can identify the most touching, meaningful, instructive, and morally enlightening stories out there and help us sort through the already daunting number of options

MattGaiser 4y ago

I can see the usage being between parent and kid more than producing best sellers. Or a way to give a kid a cheap but special gift.

the_af 4y ago
Yes, but that's precisely the usage I find upsetting!
- dwringer 4y ago
  I can see your point but I'm not sure it's that straightforward. Let's say you simply took a hat with your kid's favorite characters from tv/movies/books/whatever on slips of paper, drew some, then did the same for plots, then made up a story to tell your kid. At some level, sure, it's not the same as coming up with a story on your own - there's not going to be anything meaningful in why you selected those particular elements of the story - but that merely constrains those choices to free you up to be creative with other aspects of the story. I think there's still room for someone who wants to be creative to use the tools to provide the same experience you're describing. It's not like one has to give the raw output to one's child. And I think such raw outputs will be generally bland, missing something relative to those with a human touch. However, giving bland and meaningless entertainment to children wouldn't really be something new, and I still see a fair concern in there. I suppose this is already part of what articles on "Kids' YouTube" are talking about.[0] [0]https://www.avclub.com/take-a-trip-to-the-automated-hellscape-of-youtube-video-1820196139 https://www.avclub.com/take-a-trip-to-the-automated-hellscap...
- sanp 4y ago
  perhaps the core idea of the story can still come from you but ChatGPT can help flesh out the details in write it in a compelling manner.
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    That's how I see it. IT could still involve a lot of novel thought and work to get the AI to generate text you want. You nudge it in whatever direction you want it to go.
    - the_af 4y ago
      What actual problem about writing would this solve? This is like coming up with a plot idea and having some hired writer write it. This already existed before computers. So you're essentially using GPT as a ghostwriter, only (unlike human ghostwriters) it has no way to come with something innovative, it just regurgitates whatever it's already in its data in some way or another. "But," I can guess you'll object, "human (ghost)writers are already writing derivative crap, what's the difference?". Exactly. We already know how to hire humans to write derivative crap, and the truly good stuff is out of the question for GPT. So what is this solving? But what about children's bedtime stories? Well, there are tons of really good bedtime stories, lovingly crafted by good authors. Do we need automated ones written by ChatGPT?

snhly 4y ago

It is vaguely dystopian, true, but one thing I remember in order to sleep at night is that ChatGPT and the like are trained on human-written text. So we might currently be looking at ChatGPT at its very best, or close to its very best. Reasoning: from here on out, the stuff it trains on will be polluted with the automatically generated text. Photo copies of photo copies eventually lead to blurrier and crummier images of the real thing. We can keep paying people to come up with optimisations to the algorithm itself, keep paying annotators to manually pepper human common sense into the system, but it's my theory that these payments won't keep up with the spread of automatically generated content in the source dataset and the negative impact that has on the language model that the algorithm outputs. ChatGPT currently enshrines insight and style from 2020-2021 (more-or-less indistinguishable from insight and style from 2022-2023), but now that the system exists, rather than observing a rapid pace of new writing styles and original insights emerging on the web of 2024, we'll potentially see a slightly slower style/original insights emergence rate, then the next year an even slower emergence rate. This will continue until it reaches a stage where the spoken world of language and world wide web world of language have completely diverged, similar to the way 1950s film dialogue bore little resemblance to 1950s speaking styles. Short-term, ChatGPT has called creative pursuits into question, but long term, I think such systems will strongly validate creative pursuits, and only really replace non-creative roles. By turning the web into a wasteland of written cruft, GPT will validate the need for human flourishes, error, divergences from the norm and the arbitrary rewriting of unspoken rules. I think only a strong AI raised like us in our own societies could infuse that kind of culture into its writing, but the process of developing such an AI would basically just be a reinvention of slavery, and we probably don't have the resources here on earth to support it longterm anyway.

great_psy 4y ago
I agree with the premise that content will get more polluted, but there is an element of human vote every time we choose a prompt output and say “this is good enough for me to post/use/turn into a book”. This is just a very convoluted way of manually labeling data as good and bad.
mestelan 4y ago
It would be interesting to see whether a label emerges, to denote content created pre-chatGPT; ex: certified pre-2023 AI-free content. Also, it would be possible to train bots on an archive of such material.(accordingly, out of date; so less useful in numerous ways).

pandemicsoul 4y ago

> But I can't help thinking that this is solving a problem no actual humans have. This. There are 10000 children's books out there with coherent art sets and a storyline that's not just total gibberish. This kind of crap is no better than SEO blogs. Its only purpose is to pump out massive amounts of content in the hopes of earning a small amount of money on each squirt of crap that maybe amounts to something over the long term. Build good things. Solve problems. That's how you make money.

yamtaddle 4y ago

I'm starting to worry that we're going to run pretty short of activities humans find fulfilling to do, that have any notable amount of extrinsic reward or value. What happens when the computer does tell better stories to your kids than you do? When you turn the computer loose on them for a week and, well, god damn, by the end of the week they seem to have taken exactly the lessons they needed and are bringing them up in real-life situations and are even getting better at reading themselves, and raving about how good the stories are, and you can't deny that if you'd done it, the results wouldn't have been as good? Now repeat for all the ways that humans find it satisfying to serve others using their creativity. I very much doubt it's healthy for all the things we find fulfilling and enjoyable to have only intrinsic motivation to drive them. It's hard to turn down better outcomes, but what if a side-effect is that as a species we become psychologically (even spiritually, if you will) lost? So kids are raised more effectively—but for what? So that all the things they enjoy doing are valuable to, and needed or wanted by, exactly no-one? So we get more efficient at producing goods and entertainment—for what? So the brushes and paints we buy for our paintings that nobody cares to see and that your talentless cousin can outdo—in every way, including sublimity and mood and all that—with a lazy prompt on some future image generator, are somewhat cheaper? What's the point?

the_af 4y ago
Everything you mentioned worries me. > What happens when the computer does tell better stories to your kids than you do? Others have answered "but ChatGPT will never get as good at this". Let's, for the sake of argument, suppose that it does: suppose ChatGPT does get better. What then? Why is it a net win for mankind that a computer program can tell better (or "good enough") stories? If mechanical tasks get done by machines, and creative tasks get done by machines, and games get played by machines, and everything under the sun gets done by machines... ...what's left for us, then? Writing is an enjoyable activity for humans. It's not something to "optimize", it's fine as it is. If we optimize humans out of the activity of writing (or composing music, or drawing, etc), have we truly "won"?
- SamPatt 4y ago
  What's left for us is whatever we want to do. People still do all kinds of things which machines and computers can do better than we can. No reason to think that will change.

JoeOfTexas 4y ago

Master writers like Tolkien don't need ChatGPT to help write. Amateurs, however, do need the help. Not everyone is a born story teller, but if you have a story to tell and need help telling it, ChatGPT can fill in those gaps for you. It might not be a work of art like LOTR, but you'll most likely just be getting tips and hints on how to format better.

the_af 4y ago
Nobody needs ChatGPT to help write. Most writers learn by writing. This is a "solved" problem, in the sense that mankind has had writers -- successful and otherwise, good and bad -- for hundreds of years now. We got this, this isn't an activity that needs improving by AI tools. It's not an actual problem that humans have, e.g. "I would write better, if only I had an AI assistant!". Creative writing is also not about speed, it's not something that needs optimizing for that. For art in general, actually: "if only Picasso could paint faster!" is not an actual problem mankind has. I'm talking about creative writing, mind you. Not some technical writing like creating manuals or reports -- I'm all for AI helping us with those.