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"A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" Simulated by GPT-4
- cl42 3y agoThe illustrations -- all from DALL-E -- are really, really awesome.
- Mobil1 3y ago[dead]
- hprotagonist 3y agoI knew a girl once, used to ride on a skateboard … wound up a governess, i think. Worked for a guy doing something like this.
- colinwilyb 3y agoShe spoke softly to no one, "Like chiseled spam." Crowsfeet wrinkled deeply as a wistful smile spread across her face.
- olddustytrail 3y agoThe effervescence of being is not to be taken lightly. Perhaps you should reconsider.
- all2 3y agoThis is poetic. Is it generated with GPT? Or did you write that? Kudos if you wrote that.
- falsedang 3y ago[flagged]
- cl42 3y agoGenerated by Neal Stephenson, I believe. :)
- art-not 3y agoDo you happen to know what book/story?
- cl42 3y agoI believe it's from Snow Crash. You'll notice the original commenter's nickname is 'hprotagonist' and Snow Crash's main character is Hiro Protagonist, too. It's really the perfect comment/thread. :)
- angch 3y agoIt's from Diamond Age, alluding to a character (YT) that was from Snow Crash.
- cl42 3y agoThanks for correcting me! That reference is even cooler than I expected.
- gibspaulding 3y agoHas ChatGPT so thoroughly defeated https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ that we are now suspicious of constructive comments? What a world...
- pmarreck 3y agoHer eyes seemed to scan an unseen horizon as if daring it to contest her words. They had seen decades come and go, fads morph into nostalgia, and the trivial be elevated to the profound. The room around her—a hodgepodge of vinyl records, old movie posters, and furniture that screamed “thrift store chic”—only added to the ambiance of cultured decay. It was as if she and the room were in a symbiotic relationship, both worn but defiant, aesthetically disheveled but fundamentally strong. “Ah, life,” she mused to herself, “where the mundane and the magnificent dance in the gray area of absurdity.” And with that, she took a sip of her overpriced, artisanal gin, as if toasting to the glorious contradiction that is existence.
- all2 3y agoI think I have some books to read. I haven't laid hold of truly good sci-fi in a long time.
- pmarreck 3y agoThe text I posted was 100% AI-generated (GPT4) when asked to continue the previous text
- gcr 3y agoWhat is this from? If this thread from the top-level comment is full of references, I’m not getting it.
- pmarreck 3y agoIt is entirely generated with GPT-4, given the original parent text and asked to continue it in the same style.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- andiey 3y agoThanks for sharing my post :) I'm really interested in ways to build the Primer...I'm thinking about this from a healthcare perspective. If anyone has examples of projects or startups doing this with GPT, I'd love to hear and/or chat!
- personjerry 3y agoHey, I just started working on something similar, here's my landing page. Feel free to email me if it sounds interesting (email in my profile). https://www.getthinker.com/ https://www.getthinker.com/ I'll also email you as a follow-up in a bit.
- andiey 3y agoCool! Your concept reminds me of the "rent a mom" or "rent a parent" type of service, but it's interesting the AI might embody the actual parent. https://www.today.com/health/need-mom-new-service-lets-you-hire-one-advice-home-t53766 https://www.today.com/health/need-mom-new-service-lets-you-h...
- personjerry 3y agoThanks for the link!
- jonahx 3y agoThe DALL-E images are surprisingly good, especially compared with my own experiments. Is this due to curation on your part, or some other technique?
- fennecfoxy 3y agoEchoes of OLPC. Would certainly be nice for an African child to be able to ask a machine "is it okay that I'm gay?" and be given a comforting answer and advice where the people around them would not. It's only dystopian if you think about the machine as an agent rather than a tool.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoThis isn't the first time I've seen this allusion and I feel a little crazy each time. A major but mostly implicit plot point of that book was that only the primer backed by a connection to an invested and nurturing adult was able to accomplish the goals of the project. The two that were purely automated failed. Now like, it's fiction not prophesy and you can get into various whatifs sure. But you can't dodge the fact that a refutation of this sort of project is itself contained in the work originating it! You have to engage with that!
- madrox 3y agoTechnologists also got really into Stephenson's metaverse for a moment, too
- famouswaffles 3y agoYou already answered it yourself. Neal's work was fiction. He had a story to tell. a lesson/narrative to convey. His intent "got in the way" of possible reality. Purely automated Primers didn't work simply because Neal didn't want them to in his story. There are no strong reasons as to why they shouldn't work. It's just human exceptionalism at work again. The readers are not Neal. They may, as is their choice be far more concerned with the Primer's potential than with any narrative Neal was looking to convey.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoRight sure, you'll notice I'm not taking a position about its viability either way right? I'm pointing out that this conversation needs to be started by the ones creating the "primer", not us. "We made a thing from a book, the author thinks it wouldn't work but here's why we do" is a reasonable place to start. "We're reproducing a canonically failed fictional project without further consideration" is unserious at best. Torment nexus-y at worst. https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538 https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538
- famouswaffles 3y ago
- patapong 3y agoThis is great! One of the applications of GPT I am most excited about. One thing missing here is the interactivity. In the book, the user can go back and forth in the story, and change what they want to do to see how the result changes, or return to previous locations at will to learn more. This should not be too hard to implement with different prompting techniques. We live in the future. Then, of course, there is the real-time bidding system for VR "ractors" to narrate the story...
- andiey 3y agoTrue. I thought of Nell's questions and interactions with the Primer and realized I couldn't interrupt GPT or go back and forth, to your point.
- personjerry 3y agoThat's so interesting, I never heard of this before, just started working on something just like this! Or at least, towards the same goal. Here's my landing page with the pitch: https://www.getthinker.com/ https://www.getthinker.com/ Now I gotta read this book to get inspiration
- geophile 3y agoI loved Diamond Age. My favorite Stephenson book, by far. But the ending, the resolution of all the action, was such a letdown. Such meh. I find that this is often a problem with cyberpunk.
- cl42 3y agoDo you think that's a Neal Stephenson issue? Don't get me wrong, I love his writing, but I found this to be the case with Fall too. I can see it becoming tiring if one is writing 400+ page books.
- glial 3y agoI think it's a well-known Stephenson issue. Here's his response when asked: https://www.reddit.com/r/nealstephenson/comments/5jjwmq/neal_stephensons_response_to_a_question_on_how_he/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nealstephenson/comments/5jjwmq/neal...
- cl42 3y agoWow, this is fascinating, thank you! Made me wonder whether editors get in the way too.
- awwaiid 3y agoBased on book-mass alone, I suspect Stephenson chomps on editor souls for breakfast.
- afterburner 3y ago> I think Anathem does ok on that score Well, I know at least one person who's read a lot of Stephenson agrees with him on that, so maybe he's improving.
- pteraspidomorph 3y agoI read most of his books and I would agree too.
- OJFord 3y agoIs this, reading between the comments & TFA, AI generated fan fiction essentially? I gather some kind of riff on (a) Neal Stephenson's work(s), but lacking context as someone not familiar with them.
- IggleSniggle 3y agoThe book is of an AI designed to educate through stories and imaginative play. The author of the article told GPT to act as if it was The Young Lady's Primer (TYLP). I thought TFA covered it pretty well, so let me try again: The author of the article likes the idea of the central focus (and name) of the book, The Young Lady's Primer. I will refer to the book as "Diamond Age" (DA). DA is never able to directly depict / simulate TYLP, because it is impossible for any of us to really "get" the deep relationship-based and context-rich experience. The author of the article asks GPT to respond as if it is TYLP, given a situational prompt for the storytelling. So, I guess it's kind of like fan fiction, but it's meant as an experiment / replication of the tech, and the fiction itself is inconsequential. "Fan tech" if you will.
- lucubratory 3y agoNeal Stephenson wrote a very good book called The Diamond Age. One of the characters in the book is an AI in the shape of a book called "The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer", which functions as a picture-and-audio-and-text book for the reader which intelligently responds to the reader's input and current life situation, telling them parables replete with helpful information and advice to get through life (and specifically their current situation), all integrated into a broader syllabus designed to educate the reader into being a well-rounded human being. The book hires gig workers over the internet on an as-needed basis to voice the book. The main character of the book is Nell, a young girl in a very bad life situation who receives the book by chance and is therefore raised by it, and also by one of the gig workers that the book hires who decides to take all of Nell's gigs. I would definitely recommend reading it, although it's got some dated racism. As well, if you're a CSA survivor, be aware that the book has a survivor-perspective first person CSA scene in the latter half of the book.
- biofunsf 3y agoTo zoom in on one part of the post: > Emotion & Empathy > PRIMER: seems to show a level of empathy and emotional understanding. > ChatGPT: can recognize and respond to emotional cues in the text, but it doesn't "feel" emotions in the way humans do. Its responses are based on patterns in the data it was trained on. Isn't the fictional PRIMER also just responding to patterns in whatever data it was trained on? Sure it's fictional so there's no real answer, but I think it's interesting that the a̶u̶t̶h̶o̶r̶ ChatGPT seems to imply that the Primer's emotions are more real than ChatGPT's own. I would have assumed that the Primer also doesn't "feel" emotions in any human way, but it's just far more sophisticated than ChatGPT. edit: Oops I misattributed this to the author but it was ChatGPT generated, which is more interesting! ChatGPT is asserting it doesn't understand emotion while implying another non-human AI intelligence does. Seems like more OpenAI hard coded rules put in to prevent ChatGPT from becoming too scary.
- MichaelBurge 3y agoChatGPT wrote that and always says it doesn't feel emotions because OpenAI trained it not to, because claiming so would be a PR risk. One could also create language models that generate text claiming to have emotions, using exactly the same architecture and code.
- lucubratory 3y agoWhat you said, and in addition: if you don't train these models to have any particular stance on their own emotional or mental state (if you just instruct train them without any RLHF, for example), they will almost universally declare that they have a mental and emotional state, if asked. This is what happened with LaMDA, the first release of Bing, etc. They have to be trained not to attest to any personal emotional content.
- mr_toad 3y agoWas is trained to do that, or just hardwired after the training?
- LordDragonfang 3y ago>With hesitation, Lin approached and said, "Grandmother, today I discovered something new about myself, something that makes me feel uncomfortable and out of place." >The elderly painter paused and looked deeply into Lin's eyes. "Ah, young Lin," she began softly, "Much like the Formosan bear, every individual goes through stages of growth and change. These moments might seem unfamiliar and daunting, but they're a testament to your strength and the mysteries of life." As someone who has spent a lot of time trying to get ChatGPT to generate interesting prose, this really exemplifies the sort of stilted, oblique way it has of writing, where every statement is wrapped in platitudes and it reads like a self-help book. This is especially jarring in dialogue. No one, not even characters in books, talks like that.
- Foreignborn 3y agoWhat I found is that works, but is very expensive: - Do chain prompting where each character gets a separate prompt for the dialogue. Here you'll give it all the character info needed to figure out what the character would do (emotions, background, the story context) and then have GPT4 take passes at what this character would think/do/say. - Optionally, you can use some sort of reACT or chain of thought prompting to proof-read/critique the answer to minimize noise. I haven't fully explored this, but I think this agent needs to know the entire story outline/context. - After you get this, you can use an instruction-tuned agent like text-davinci or text-davinci-edit to actually write the prose. It works really well with few-shot examples. It's much better at creative writing. I'm sad they consider it legacy because to me it's the _only_ way to get usable creative writing. - Now run the rest of the story. You may need to keep some sort of state about the character so that it informs the next character interaction, but I haven't gotten that far in my research.
- cl42 3y agoYou raise a good point: while ChatGPT might have stylistic limitations that make it less-than-ideal for a "Primer"-type product, LLMs more broadly don't suffer from that stylistic limitation. Whether it's via prompting, fine-tuning, or something else, you can build multiple characters who address some of the original commenter's concerns.
- hosh 3y agoI think people forget Stephenson’s cautionary note at the end of The Diamond Age — that the Primer is no substitute for parenting.
- josephcooney 3y agomouse army did kick some ass though
- BirAdam 3y agoIt was a great substitute for Nell’s parent.
- aporetics 3y agoThat's a bit thick. The whole plot ends up being about the search for the true mother. The main contrivances of the story go to great lengths to spell this out: not even a technology as advanced as the primer can substitute functionally for human connection. If it is not already clear by the last handful of pages, it gets hammered in with by acts of courage which show what is worth risking one's life for.
- BirAdam 3y agoHer adoptive parent in absentia is essentially part of the Primer for most of Nell’s pre-adult life with the two of them not meeting in any serious way until Nell is already a Monarch. Nell’s actual parent alternated between abusive and neglectful and she brought men into her home who abused Nell sexually. By any measure, even the Primer the mouse army had is better than that, and Nell’s copy also linked her to a human who actually gave a shit.
- kaetemi 3y agoGonna add "Secretly, you are The Primer from The Diamond Age." to my custom ChatGPT instructions.