35 ms·

What Kind of Writer Is ChatGPT?

85 points by mitchbob 2y ago

the_af 2y ago
> "“In the end, the true value of tools like ChatGPT lies not in making academic work easier, but in empowering students to engage more deeply with their ideas and express them with greater confidence,” the chatbot suggested. The author suggests this closing thought by ChatGPT is "not terrible", but "requires some work". But it is terrible. Saying it "requires some work" is a huge understatement. The paragraph is a meaningless platitude, a string of trite and clichéd words that look as if they meant something but they don't. Exactly what I've come to expect from ChatGPT.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mitchbob 2y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20241003145439/https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/what-kind-of-writer-is-chatgpt https://web.archive.org/web/20241003145439/https://www.newyo...
- unshavedyak 2y ago
  Interesting, that still fails for me. I assume it's JavaScript based, so archive loads the JS and JS truncates the page? Of course you could block JS, but still, surprised
  - ideashower 2y ago
    worked for me.
- yawnxyz 2y ago
  The link works for me, thanks! > When ChatGPT came out, many people deemed it a perfect plagiarism tool. “AI seems almost built for cheating,” Ethan Mollick, an A.I. commentator, wrote in his book It's ironic that this article complains about GPT-generated slop, but Ethan Mollick is a Associate Professor at Wharton, not any "generic A.I. commentator." What authors like this fail to realize that they often produce equally-generic slop as ChatGPT. Essays are like babies: you're proud of your own, but others' (including ChatGPT's) are gross.
  - giraffe_lady 2y ago
    I'm not totally sure but I think decisions about how to attribute a source like that are editorial and mostly out of the hands of the author. But aside from that this article is far far better than anything I have seen produced by AI? Is this just standard HN reflexive anti-middlebrow sentiment because we don't like the new yorker's style? My grandfather didn't like it either but it outlasted him and will probably outlast us as well.
    - nxobject 2y ago
      And, for what it’s worth, flexibility and constantly adapting to different house styles are very much important writing skills… so I do think it’s not too relevant to think about which style is nice and which isn’t. (The hard part is getting published at all.) Perhaps one day we’ll figure out how to communicate those subtleties to a chatbot.
    - yawnxyz 2y ago
      I like the New Yorker's (and the author's) writing style! I'm just surprised they went with "AI commentator" as almost a snide remark, which makes you think some AI hallucinated that part. But again, AI doesn't really hallucinate spite, but that's probably what this AI commentator from the New Yorker feels?
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - spondylosaurus 2y ago
    The author is Cal Newport of "Deep Work" fame. Not sure if that's a point for or against the article though, lol.
    - randcraw 2y ago
      It should make him uniquely qualified to discuss whether writing with an LLM can ever be as immersive an experience as writing without one can be.
__mharrison__ 2y ago
I'm finding that I'm using AI for outlining and brainstorming quite a bit. Just getting something on paper to start with can be a great catalyst.
lainga 2y ago
The author's workflow sounds like writing ideas onto a block of post-its and then having them slosh around like they're boats lashed up at harbour. He wasn't actually gaining any new information - nothing that really surprised him - he was just offloading the inherent fluidity of half-formed ideas to a device which reified them. Imagine an LLM-based application which never tells you anything you haven't already told it, but simply takes the statements you give it and, every 8 to 12 seconds, changes around the wording of each one. Like you're in a dream and keep looking away from the page and the text is dancing before you. Would institutions be less uncomfortable with its use? (not wholly comfortable - you're still replacing natural expressivity with random pulls from a computerised phrase-thesaurus)
vunderba 2y ago
There's a difference between coherence and novelty with a lot of people mistaking the former for the latter. That's why people were effusively praising the ability of ChatGPT to produce articulate sounding poems which were inherently rather vapid. Case in point, people were acting like ChatGPT could take the place of a competent DM in dungeons and dragons. Here's a puzzle I came up with for a campaign I'm running. On either opposing side of a strange looking room are shifting looking walls with hands stretched out almost as if beseeching. Grabbing one will result in a player being sucked into the wall and entombed as well. By carefully placing a rope between the two hands on either side, the two originally entrapped humans will end up pulling each other free. I've yet to see a single thing from ChatGPT that came even close to something I'd want to actually use in one of my campaigns.
- crdrost 2y ago
  So the easiest way to generate a bit more novelty is to ask GPT to generate 10 or 20 examples, and to explicitly direct it that they should run a full gamut -- in this case I'd say "Try to cover the whole spectrum of creativity -- some should be straightforward genre puzzles while some should be so outright goofy that they'd be hard to play in real life." Giving GPT that prompt, the first example it came up with was kind of middling ("The players encounter a circle of stones that hum when approached. Touching them randomly will cause a loud dissonant noise that could attract monsters. Players must replicate a specific melody by touching the stones in the correct order"), some were bad (a maze of mirrors, a sphinx with a riddle, a puzzle box that poisons you if you try to force it), some were actually genuinely fun-sounding (a door which shocks you if you try to open it and then mocks and laughs at you: you have to tell it a joke to get it to laugh enough that it opens on its own; particularly bad jokes will cause it to summon an imp to attack you). Some were bad in the way GPT presented but I could maybe have fun with (a garden of emotion-sensitive plants, thorny if you're angry or helpful if you're gentle; a fountain-statue of a woman weeping real water for tears, the fountain itself is inhabited by a water elemental that lashes out to protect her from being touched while she grieves -- but a token or an apology can still the tears and open her clasped hands to reveal a treasure). The one that I would be most likely to use was "A pool of water that reflects the players’ true selves. Touching the water causes it to ripple and distort the reflection, summoning shadowy duplicates. By speaking a truth about themselves, players can calm the water and reveal a hidden item. Common mistakes include lying, which causes the water to become turbulent, and trying to take the item without calming the water, which summons the duplicates." So like you can get it to have a 5-10% success rate, which can be helpful if you're looking for a random new idea. This reminds me vaguely of when I was a teen writing fanfics in the late 90s and was just learning JavaScript -- I wrote a lot of things that would just choose random characters, random problems for them to solve, random stumbling blocks, random keys-to-solve-the-problem. Combinatorial explosion. Then you'd just click "generate" and you'd get a mediocre plot idea. But you generate 20-30 times or more and you'd get one that kinda sat with you, "Hm, Cloud Strife and Fox McCloud are stuck in intergalactic prison and need to break out, huh, that could be fun, like they're both trying to outplay the other as the silent action hero" and then you could go and write it out and see if it was any good. The difference is that the database of crappy ideas is already built into GPT, you just need to get it to make you some.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
[flagged]
- RIMR 2y ago
  Just an FYI, this kind of ideological anti-AI flippancy isn't really something people are going to appreciate on HN... If you have a criticism of AI/ChatGPT you want to share that relates to this article, feel free to share your thoughts. But I don't think anyone considers this low-effort "AI Bad" attitude to contribute much to any conversation about AI/ML technology.
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    Sorry, most of the time I try to provide better written responses. AI is an emotional topic for me and sometimes I react without being more thoughtful.
molave 2y ago
ChatGPT's style is like an academic writer's. It's tone and word choice are same-ish across various subjects, but it's coherent and easy to understand. In retrospect, I've seen papers that would pass as GPT-created if they're written after 2022.
- wildrhythms 2y ago
  Are we reading the same academic papers? When I read ChatGPT output it reads like pseudo-educational blogspam.
  - RIMR 2y ago
    That's because for the past couple of years models like ChatGPT's have been used to generate psueudo-educational blogspam, and you associate that with writing style with it now. But generally, ChatGPT writes in a very literal direct style. When you write about science, it sounds like a scientific paper. When you write about other subjects, it sounds like a high school book report. When you write creatively, it sounds corny and contrived. You can also adjust the writing style with example or proper descriptions of the writing style. As a basic example, asking it to "dudify" everything it says will make it sound cooler than a polar bear in ray-bans, man...
- nullc 2y ago
  Hardly. It's been RLHFed into sounding like blogspam from foreign content farms, because they used the same people as raters. The non-finetuned models have a much better 'house style' across a wide range of prompting approaches.
extr 2y ago
Great piece actually, I find this really resonates with the way I use LLMs. It works the same way for coding, where often you will not necessarily use the exact output of the model. For me it's useful for things like: * Getting a rough structure in place to refine on. * Coming up with different ways to do the same thing. * Exploring an idea that I don't want to fully commit to yet Coding of course has the advantage where nobody is reading what you wrote for it's artistic substance, a lot of times the boilerplate is the point. But even for challenging tasks where it's not quite there yet, it's a great collaboration tool.
asd33313131 2y ago
I had ChatGPT give me the key points to avoid reading: AI's Role in Writing: Instead of outsourcing the writing process or plagiarizing, students like Chris use ChatGPT as a collaborative tool to refine ideas, test arguments, or generate rough drafts. ChatGPT helps reduce cognitive load by offering suggestions, but the student still does most of the intellectual work. Limited Usefulness of AI: ChatGPT's writing was often bland, inconsistent, and in need of heavy editing. However, it still served as a brainstorming partner, providing starting points that allowed users to improve their writing through further refinement. Complexity of AI Collaboration: The article suggests that AI-assisted writing is not simply "cheating," but a new form of collaboration that changes how writers approach their work. It introduces the idea of "rhetorical load sharing," where AI helps alleviate mental strain but doesn’t replace human creativity. Changing Perspectives on AI in Academia: Many professors and commentators initially feared that AI would enable rampant plagiarism. However, the article argues that in-depth assignments still require critical thinking, and using AI tools like ChatGPT might actually help students engage more deeply with their work.
Tiberium 2y ago
Hopefully he also tries Claude. It's much better suited for creative writing than GPT models, especially Opus.

85 points by mitchbob 2y ago

> "“In the end, the true value of tools like ChatGPT lies not in making academic work easier, but in empowering students to engage more deeply with their ideas and express them with greater confidence,” the chatbot suggested. The author suggests this closing thought by ChatGPT is "not terrible", but "requires some work". But it is terrible. Saying it "requires some work" is a huge understatement. The paragraph is a meaningless platitude, a string of trite and clichéd words that look as if they meant something but they don't. Exactly what I've come to expect from ChatGPT.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mitchbob 2y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20241003145439/https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/what-kind-of-writer-is-chatgpt https://web.archive.org/web/20241003145439/https://www.newyo...

unshavedyak 2y ago
Interesting, that still fails for me. I assume it's JavaScript based, so archive loads the JS and JS truncates the page? Of course you could block JS, but still, surprised
- ideashower 2y ago
  worked for me.
yawnxyz 2y ago
The link works for me, thanks! > When ChatGPT came out, many people deemed it a perfect plagiarism tool. “AI seems almost built for cheating,” Ethan Mollick, an A.I. commentator, wrote in his book It's ironic that this article complains about GPT-generated slop, but Ethan Mollick is a Associate Professor at Wharton, not any "generic A.I. commentator." What authors like this fail to realize that they often produce equally-generic slop as ChatGPT. Essays are like babies: you're proud of your own, but others' (including ChatGPT's) are gross.
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  I'm not totally sure but I think decisions about how to attribute a source like that are editorial and mostly out of the hands of the author. But aside from that this article is far far better than anything I have seen produced by AI? Is this just standard HN reflexive anti-middlebrow sentiment because we don't like the new yorker's style? My grandfather didn't like it either but it outlasted him and will probably outlast us as well.
  - nxobject 2y ago
    And, for what it’s worth, flexibility and constantly adapting to different house styles are very much important writing skills… so I do think it’s not too relevant to think about which style is nice and which isn’t. (The hard part is getting published at all.) Perhaps one day we’ll figure out how to communicate those subtleties to a chatbot.
  - yawnxyz 2y ago
    I like the New Yorker's (and the author's) writing style! I'm just surprised they went with "AI commentator" as almost a snide remark, which makes you think some AI hallucinated that part. But again, AI doesn't really hallucinate spite, but that's probably what this AI commentator from the New Yorker feels?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- spondylosaurus 2y ago
  The author is Cal Newport of "Deep Work" fame. Not sure if that's a point for or against the article though, lol.
  - randcraw 2y ago
    It should make him uniquely qualified to discuss whether writing with an LLM can ever be as immersive an experience as writing without one can be.

__mharrison__ 2y ago

I'm finding that I'm using AI for outlining and brainstorming quite a bit. Just getting something on paper to start with can be a great catalyst.

lainga 2y ago

The author's workflow sounds like writing ideas onto a block of post-its and then having them slosh around like they're boats lashed up at harbour. He wasn't actually gaining any new information - nothing that really surprised him - he was just offloading the inherent fluidity of half-formed ideas to a device which reified them. Imagine an LLM-based application which never tells you anything you haven't already told it, but simply takes the statements you give it and, every 8 to 12 seconds, changes around the wording of each one. Like you're in a dream and keep looking away from the page and the text is dancing before you. Would institutions be less uncomfortable with its use? (not wholly comfortable - you're still replacing natural expressivity with random pulls from a computerised phrase-thesaurus)

vunderba 2y ago

There's a difference between coherence and novelty with a lot of people mistaking the former for the latter. That's why people were effusively praising the ability of ChatGPT to produce articulate sounding poems which were inherently rather vapid. Case in point, people were acting like ChatGPT could take the place of a competent DM in dungeons and dragons. Here's a puzzle I came up with for a campaign I'm running. On either opposing side of a strange looking room are shifting looking walls with hands stretched out almost as if beseeching. Grabbing one will result in a player being sucked into the wall and entombed as well. By carefully placing a rope between the two hands on either side, the two originally entrapped humans will end up pulling each other free. I've yet to see a single thing from ChatGPT that came even close to something I'd want to actually use in one of my campaigns.

crdrost 2y ago
So the easiest way to generate a bit more novelty is to ask GPT to generate 10 or 20 examples, and to explicitly direct it that they should run a full gamut -- in this case I'd say "Try to cover the whole spectrum of creativity -- some should be straightforward genre puzzles while some should be so outright goofy that they'd be hard to play in real life." Giving GPT that prompt, the first example it came up with was kind of middling ("The players encounter a circle of stones that hum when approached. Touching them randomly will cause a loud dissonant noise that could attract monsters. Players must replicate a specific melody by touching the stones in the correct order"), some were bad (a maze of mirrors, a sphinx with a riddle, a puzzle box that poisons you if you try to force it), some were actually genuinely fun-sounding (a door which shocks you if you try to open it and then mocks and laughs at you: you have to tell it a joke to get it to laugh enough that it opens on its own; particularly bad jokes will cause it to summon an imp to attack you). Some were bad in the way GPT presented but I could maybe have fun with (a garden of emotion-sensitive plants, thorny if you're angry or helpful if you're gentle; a fountain-statue of a woman weeping real water for tears, the fountain itself is inhabited by a water elemental that lashes out to protect her from being touched while she grieves -- but a token or an apology can still the tears and open her clasped hands to reveal a treasure). The one that I would be most likely to use was "A pool of water that reflects the players’ true selves. Touching the water causes it to ripple and distort the reflection, summoning shadowy duplicates. By speaking a truth about themselves, players can calm the water and reveal a hidden item. Common mistakes include lying, which causes the water to become turbulent, and trying to take the item without calming the water, which summons the duplicates." So like you can get it to have a 5-10% success rate, which can be helpful if you're looking for a random new idea. This reminds me vaguely of when I was a teen writing fanfics in the late 90s and was just learning JavaScript -- I wrote a lot of things that would just choose random characters, random problems for them to solve, random stumbling blocks, random keys-to-solve-the-problem. Combinatorial explosion. Then you'd just click "generate" and you'd get a mediocre plot idea. But you generate 20-30 times or more and you'd get one that kinda sat with you, "Hm, Cloud Strife and Fox McCloud are stuck in intergalactic prison and need to break out, huh, that could be fun, like they're both trying to outplay the other as the silent action hero" and then you could go and write it out and see if it was any good. The difference is that the database of crappy ideas is already built into GPT, you just need to get it to make you some.

vouaobrasil 2y ago

[flagged]

RIMR 2y ago
Just an FYI, this kind of ideological anti-AI flippancy isn't really something people are going to appreciate on HN... If you have a criticism of AI/ChatGPT you want to share that relates to this article, feel free to share your thoughts. But I don't think anyone considers this low-effort "AI Bad" attitude to contribute much to any conversation about AI/ML technology.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  Sorry, most of the time I try to provide better written responses. AI is an emotional topic for me and sometimes I react without being more thoughtful.

molave 2y ago

ChatGPT's style is like an academic writer's. It's tone and word choice are same-ish across various subjects, but it's coherent and easy to understand. In retrospect, I've seen papers that would pass as GPT-created if they're written after 2022.

wildrhythms 2y ago
Are we reading the same academic papers? When I read ChatGPT output it reads like pseudo-educational blogspam.
- RIMR 2y ago
  That's because for the past couple of years models like ChatGPT's have been used to generate psueudo-educational blogspam, and you associate that with writing style with it now. But generally, ChatGPT writes in a very literal direct style. When you write about science, it sounds like a scientific paper. When you write about other subjects, it sounds like a high school book report. When you write creatively, it sounds corny and contrived. You can also adjust the writing style with example or proper descriptions of the writing style. As a basic example, asking it to "dudify" everything it says will make it sound cooler than a polar bear in ray-bans, man...
nullc 2y ago
Hardly. It's been RLHFed into sounding like blogspam from foreign content farms, because they used the same people as raters. The non-finetuned models have a much better 'house style' across a wide range of prompting approaches.

extr 2y ago

Great piece actually, I find this really resonates with the way I use LLMs. It works the same way for coding, where often you will not necessarily use the exact output of the model. For me it's useful for things like: * Getting a rough structure in place to refine on. * Coming up with different ways to do the same thing. * Exploring an idea that I don't want to fully commit to yet Coding of course has the advantage where nobody is reading what you wrote for it's artistic substance, a lot of times the boilerplate is the point. But even for challenging tasks where it's not quite there yet, it's a great collaboration tool.

asd33313131 2y ago

I had ChatGPT give me the key points to avoid reading: AI's Role in Writing: Instead of outsourcing the writing process or plagiarizing, students like Chris use ChatGPT as a collaborative tool to refine ideas, test arguments, or generate rough drafts. ChatGPT helps reduce cognitive load by offering suggestions, but the student still does most of the intellectual work. Limited Usefulness of AI: ChatGPT's writing was often bland, inconsistent, and in need of heavy editing. However, it still served as a brainstorming partner, providing starting points that allowed users to improve their writing through further refinement. Complexity of AI Collaboration: The article suggests that AI-assisted writing is not simply "cheating," but a new form of collaboration that changes how writers approach their work. It introduces the idea of "rhetorical load sharing," where AI helps alleviate mental strain but doesn’t replace human creativity. Changing Perspectives on AI in Academia: Many professors and commentators initially feared that AI would enable rampant plagiarism. However, the article argues that in-depth assignments still require critical thinking, and using AI tools like ChatGPT might actually help students engage more deeply with their work.

Tiberium 2y ago

Hopefully he also tries Claude. It's much better suited for creative writing than GPT models, especially Opus.