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At very minimum, better novels. Current text transformers are horrendous in writing long form stories (ie, longer than 1 page). Because they don't have a conc

At very minimum, better novels. Current text transformers are horrendous in writing long form stories (ie, longer than 1 page). Because they don't have a concept of long-term memory. It has to keep everything in its short term memory (the context window), which is at most 2k words right now. Everything else is discarded, so the AI is unable to keep track of past events. This AI probably tries to summarise past events into short summaries. Sort of like how humans don't remember details of past events (What did you eat last week), only tracking important or unusual events. This helps massively optimize the memory of the AI Novels are probably the grand challenge in text-AIs, because they require multiple things. 1. Long term memory 2. Multi-party state tracking (What happened to whom, how is relationship graph between multiple characters changing, what is happening in the background, or the world, despite not being mentioned in the text explicitly) 3. Multi-party theory of mind (The AI must infer the internal mental state of characters despite not being explicit in text) 4. Accurate understanding of human motivations/desires, which are the driving force behind stories. As such, AIs that can write long fictional stories is also capable of: 1. Deception (Plot twist/surprises) 2. Emotional manipulation (Pulling your heart strings) 3. Long term planning (The simulated characters need to plan long term, with an effect on the world-state) Needless to say, it will be extremely dangerous. But that AI will also master therapy, sales, supervising children, customer service etc, as it now has an strong understanding of human behaviour. Still, all of that is quite a few years away. In the meantime, AIs that can assist human fiction writers is very possible, humans do the long term tracking and comprehension, the AI can help fill in dialogue, polish up writing styles, describe scenery or objects etc. Novel writers are a great testing ground despite limited economic value, because novel writing AIs are risk-free and error-tolerant. Novel writers are generally also extremely excited about AIs, unlike artists.

aprinsen 4y ago
Why would we want an AI that writes novels though? Is this a "to see if we can" thing? Let's say this or some future AI system writes better novels than any human author at a fraction of the cost. Novel writing is solved. What will we have achieved? I wish I could opt out of this world you want to create, where if you achieve your vision, I will be utterly useless and obsolete.
- aiappreciator 4y ago
  As I said: "that AI will also master therapy, sales, supervising children, customer service etc, as it now has an strong understanding of human behaviour." Novel writing is like the training ground for emotional intelligence in AIs. Fiction writing itself is not economically important, but the skills learnt from it is. As a passionate hobby writer myself. I say you should actually go and try the writing tools, sudowrite/verb.ai are examples. Once you start using them, you start realizing how much they suck at writing stories, and your worries will go away. Unlike art AI, fiction writing AI has not really improved significantly. The core challenges are unsolved since the days of GPT-2. There's also little research money coming in. Having a truthful, helpful, inoffensive AI is the polar opposite of what you want in a story AI, which should be deceitful, aggressive, and offensive.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    I tried pasting some paragraphs from my work in progress novel into ChatGPT, and asked it to "improve the writing". The output was exactly the kind of crap you'd expect from someone well read but with no writing experience. E.g. way too many adjectives, and reading as if it had been written by looking up every other word in a thesaurus. I tried having it add some paragraphs, and similar thing: A whole lot of beginner-level writing of the "first he did X, and then he did Y. A bit later he did Z" type of writing. And that's testing just the very superficial language issues and ignoring plot entirely It's impressive it can even do that, and it'll improve, but anyone looking to these tools to generate good fiction at this point will be disappointed.
- deleted 4y ago
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- jamilton 4y ago
  Personally, I like reading and usually prefer to read a book I like instead of a book I don't like, so the existence of more books I like would be cool. I expect I would still read human-written fiction, too. Many authors are already "obsolete" in that they're not paid a living wage for the job of writing creative fiction. It's understandable to prefer being paid for it, and in an ideal world being obsolete would just mean you get to do it for fun and fulfillment and not worry about the money.

aprinsen 4y ago

Why would we want an AI that writes novels though? Is this a "to see if we can" thing? Let's say this or some future AI system writes better novels than any human author at a fraction of the cost. Novel writing is solved. What will we have achieved? I wish I could opt out of this world you want to create, where if you achieve your vision, I will be utterly useless and obsolete.

aiappreciator 4y ago
As I said: "that AI will also master therapy, sales, supervising children, customer service etc, as it now has an strong understanding of human behaviour." Novel writing is like the training ground for emotional intelligence in AIs. Fiction writing itself is not economically important, but the skills learnt from it is. As a passionate hobby writer myself. I say you should actually go and try the writing tools, sudowrite/verb.ai are examples. Once you start using them, you start realizing how much they suck at writing stories, and your worries will go away. Unlike art AI, fiction writing AI has not really improved significantly. The core challenges are unsolved since the days of GPT-2. There's also little research money coming in. Having a truthful, helpful, inoffensive AI is the polar opposite of what you want in a story AI, which should be deceitful, aggressive, and offensive.
- vidarh 4y ago
  I tried pasting some paragraphs from my work in progress novel into ChatGPT, and asked it to "improve the writing". The output was exactly the kind of crap you'd expect from someone well read but with no writing experience. E.g. way too many adjectives, and reading as if it had been written by looking up every other word in a thesaurus. I tried having it add some paragraphs, and similar thing: A whole lot of beginner-level writing of the "first he did X, and then he did Y. A bit later he did Z" type of writing. And that's testing just the very superficial language issues and ignoring plot entirely It's impressive it can even do that, and it'll improve, but anyone looking to these tools to generate good fiction at this point will be disappointed.
deleted 4y ago
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jamilton 4y ago
Personally, I like reading and usually prefer to read a book I like instead of a book I don't like, so the existence of more books I like would be cool. I expect I would still read human-written fiction, too. Many authors are already "obsolete" in that they're not paid a living wage for the job of writing creative fiction. It's understandable to prefer being paid for it, and in an ideal world being obsolete would just mean you get to do it for fun and fulfillment and not worry about the money.