4 ms·

ChatGPT is really good and it also isnt. It can do all the things mentioned - rephrase in different styles, etc, but it's still generally shallow, even if styli

ChatGPT is really good and it also isnt. It can do all the things mentioned - rephrase in different styles, etc, but it's still generally shallow, even if stylistically correct, and leans hard towards the high school essay version of things. It doesn't really replace good writing. Re: being sporting, it reminds me of wikipedia or similar internet facts. You know when you want to discuss something (I wonder why X) and somebody jumps into the internet and reads off the first google hit and ruins the discussion. The point was some light intellectual stimulation which was destroyed by just spitting out some partial "fact" copied from the internet. Writing with llms is similar.

simonw 3y ago
"It doesn't really replace good writing." Sure, but the majority of writing out there isn't good writing. I write a lot. I use ChatGPT heavily for all sorts of things (code, brainstorming, helping me understand different topics) but I hardly ever copy and paste its output directly into writing that I'm doing. But that's because I have 20+ years of writing experience! I would imagine that, for people who don't write naturally on a daily basis, the boost this gives them is incredibly meaningful.
- tptacek 3y ago
  Bad writing can be fine if it expresses interesting ideas or a unique point of view. Banal ideas can be fine when they're exceptionally well written. Badly written banalities can be tolerable when they're not proliferating, and when they're accompanied by better stuff. What we have now though is a firehose of badly written banality, with companies using LLMs to predict huge numbers of Google queries and generate the matching pages. That strategy had a name back in the heyday of SEO: "content spinning". It wasn't a good thing. It's not that complicated an issue. It's the same reason we flag ChatGPT copy off the site here.
  - micromacrofoot 3y ago
    some use a hammer to build a house, some use a hammer to tear it down
  - simonw 3y ago
    I think it is a complicated issue. I agree that content spinning garbage is harmful to society. But... someone who has English as a second language being able to write a letter to an organization that still insists on written letters for things feels like a big win to me. The open question for me is if the positive applications of ChatGPT-for-writing will outweigh the negative applications. I'm currently still optimistic.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      Absolutely. I'm thinking mostly of the things "professional writers" complain about; I think "professional writers" are, for the most part, in the right about this stuff.
    - crabmusket 3y ago
      > being able to write a letter to an organization that still insists on written letters for things Maybe I'm especially attuned to this due to my personal biases, but I see a lot of cases where AI is the "solution" to a problem that shouldn't exist. A real nuisance from my dayjob involves using AI to parse information out of PDF datasheets. If manufacturers would provide machine-readable datasheets, we could simply write code. But no, they for some reason only provide awfully-formatted PDFs at best, forcing the burden onto everyone aside from themselves, the people who have the data already. It's wonderful that we can make AI do this tedious and difficult data entry work now. But the problem should not exist in the first place.
      - simonw 3y ago
        Yeah, absolutely. I expect we'll increasingly notice that LLMs are being applied as stop-gap solutions to problems that would ideally be solved some other way.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- danenania 3y ago
  "I use ChatGPT heavily for all sorts of things (code, brainstorming, helping me understand different topics) but I hardly ever copy and paste its output directly into writing that I'm doing." My experience is similar. I think ChatGPT's main flaw as a writer is that it lacks personality and a compelling voice. It may have excellent grammar and sentence structure, but that usually isn't enough to hold someone's attention or make them really enjoy a piece of writing. The tricky part is that developing a voice is an advanced writing skill and takes a lot of practice. So I suppose the downside of this boost that ChatGPT can give to people who aren't strong writers is that ChatGPT could also easily become the ceiling of their writing abilities if it causes them to stop practicing and improving. Of course, this all becomes moot if AI improves to the point that it can fully emulate an authentic human voice and produce content at the level of the best writers. I used to think this was really far off, but with the current pace of progress, I'm not so sure.
  - svachalek 3y ago
    It's not terribly far off. ChatGPT is so bound up in muzzles and straitjackets it's surprising it can write at all. Its wet toast style of writing is heavily enforced, i.e. it's a "feature".
SubiculumCode 3y ago
I tried to use chatgpt4 to speed up my science writing (no, not by relying on it to read papers for me) as a kind of polisher....but it never seemed to hit the mark. Either too bland diplomatic PR speak, or without the needed nuance/precision. Maybe I wasnt good at prompting...but I gave up on it.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  It's not that you're not good at it, there's just a lot of hidden functionality that isn't obvious, and it's a terrible UI for long-form writing of any sort due to the context size limitations. If you tell it "write a story..." it will write in the style of a children's fairy tale (opening with "once upon a time" and everything). Telling it "write a professional fiction novel in the style of Tom Clancy..." would improve that. Had you told it to "write an academic paper about ___," you should not have received diplomatic PR speak. The lack of precision is addressed in a second pass. For each subsection, you tell it "isolate section ___ and expand it to include x, y and z." Now you have to start copying responses out of the chat window and into a different document, otherwise it'll turn demented and start changing earlier parts of the paper. This sort of workflow has not been worth it for me so far, but YMMV.
  - SubiculumCode 3y ago
    The one thing I did like was providing chatgpt a table of means and CI and regression outputs from R for an interaction and asking it to summarize where the differences were.
- tkgally 3y ago
  If you’re writing in your native language and you are already reasonably literate, GPT-4 won’t help much. But if you are a scientist whose first language is Japanese or Polish or Tamil, you need to write papers in natural-sounding scientific English with few or no mistakes in tense, number, or article usage, and you can’t afford to pay a professional editor, then GPT-4 and similar tools can make the difference between being published and not.
famouswaffles 3y ago
In my experience, GPT writing/prose is generally fine if you move past boilerplate instructions. Pasting a large excerpt of text you want emulated is smoothest. More targeted/specific words/instructions also work. But it's hard to know what those words might be. Pasting an excerpt and asking GPT what words describe the passage clue you in.

simonw 3y ago

"It doesn't really replace good writing." Sure, but the majority of writing out there isn't good writing. I write a lot. I use ChatGPT heavily for all sorts of things (code, brainstorming, helping me understand different topics) but I hardly ever copy and paste its output directly into writing that I'm doing. But that's because I have 20+ years of writing experience! I would imagine that, for people who don't write naturally on a daily basis, the boost this gives them is incredibly meaningful.

tptacek 3y ago
Bad writing can be fine if it expresses interesting ideas or a unique point of view. Banal ideas can be fine when they're exceptionally well written. Badly written banalities can be tolerable when they're not proliferating, and when they're accompanied by better stuff. What we have now though is a firehose of badly written banality, with companies using LLMs to predict huge numbers of Google queries and generate the matching pages. That strategy had a name back in the heyday of SEO: "content spinning". It wasn't a good thing. It's not that complicated an issue. It's the same reason we flag ChatGPT copy off the site here.
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  some use a hammer to build a house, some use a hammer to tear it down
- simonw 3y ago
  I think it is a complicated issue. I agree that content spinning garbage is harmful to society. But... someone who has English as a second language being able to write a letter to an organization that still insists on written letters for things feels like a big win to me. The open question for me is if the positive applications of ChatGPT-for-writing will outweigh the negative applications. I'm currently still optimistic.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Absolutely. I'm thinking mostly of the things "professional writers" complain about; I think "professional writers" are, for the most part, in the right about this stuff.
  - crabmusket 3y ago
    > being able to write a letter to an organization that still insists on written letters for things Maybe I'm especially attuned to this due to my personal biases, but I see a lot of cases where AI is the "solution" to a problem that shouldn't exist. A real nuisance from my dayjob involves using AI to parse information out of PDF datasheets. If manufacturers would provide machine-readable datasheets, we could simply write code. But no, they for some reason only provide awfully-formatted PDFs at best, forcing the burden onto everyone aside from themselves, the people who have the data already. It's wonderful that we can make AI do this tedious and difficult data entry work now. But the problem should not exist in the first place.
    - simonw 3y ago
      Yeah, absolutely. I expect we'll increasingly notice that LLMs are being applied as stop-gap solutions to problems that would ideally be solved some other way.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
danenania 3y ago
"I use ChatGPT heavily for all sorts of things (code, brainstorming, helping me understand different topics) but I hardly ever copy and paste its output directly into writing that I'm doing." My experience is similar. I think ChatGPT's main flaw as a writer is that it lacks personality and a compelling voice. It may have excellent grammar and sentence structure, but that usually isn't enough to hold someone's attention or make them really enjoy a piece of writing. The tricky part is that developing a voice is an advanced writing skill and takes a lot of practice. So I suppose the downside of this boost that ChatGPT can give to people who aren't strong writers is that ChatGPT could also easily become the ceiling of their writing abilities if it causes them to stop practicing and improving. Of course, this all becomes moot if AI improves to the point that it can fully emulate an authentic human voice and produce content at the level of the best writers. I used to think this was really far off, but with the current pace of progress, I'm not so sure.
- svachalek 3y ago
  It's not terribly far off. ChatGPT is so bound up in muzzles and straitjackets it's surprising it can write at all. Its wet toast style of writing is heavily enforced, i.e. it's a "feature".

SubiculumCode 3y ago

I tried to use chatgpt4 to speed up my science writing (no, not by relying on it to read papers for me) as a kind of polisher....but it never seemed to hit the mark. Either too bland diplomatic PR speak, or without the needed nuance/precision. Maybe I wasnt good at prompting...but I gave up on it.

jstarfish 3y ago
It's not that you're not good at it, there's just a lot of hidden functionality that isn't obvious, and it's a terrible UI for long-form writing of any sort due to the context size limitations. If you tell it "write a story..." it will write in the style of a children's fairy tale (opening with "once upon a time" and everything). Telling it "write a professional fiction novel in the style of Tom Clancy..." would improve that. Had you told it to "write an academic paper about ___," you should not have received diplomatic PR speak. The lack of precision is addressed in a second pass. For each subsection, you tell it "isolate section ___ and expand it to include x, y and z." Now you have to start copying responses out of the chat window and into a different document, otherwise it'll turn demented and start changing earlier parts of the paper. This sort of workflow has not been worth it for me so far, but YMMV.
- SubiculumCode 3y ago
  The one thing I did like was providing chatgpt a table of means and CI and regression outputs from R for an interaction and asking it to summarize where the differences were.
tkgally 3y ago
If you’re writing in your native language and you are already reasonably literate, GPT-4 won’t help much. But if you are a scientist whose first language is Japanese or Polish or Tamil, you need to write papers in natural-sounding scientific English with few or no mistakes in tense, number, or article usage, and you can’t afford to pay a professional editor, then GPT-4 and similar tools can make the difference between being published and not.

famouswaffles 3y ago

In my experience, GPT writing/prose is generally fine if you move past boilerplate instructions. Pasting a large excerpt of text you want emulated is smoothest. More targeted/specific words/instructions also work. But it's hard to know what those words might be. Pasting an excerpt and asking GPT what words describe the passage clue you in.