3 ms·
> But they generate objectively bad text. They don't. I don't think people are taking full advantage of their capabilities. They produce perfectly functional p
by sieve 2mo ago
> But they generate objectively bad text.
They don't. I don't think people are taking full advantage of their capabilities. They produce perfectly functional prose. Sometimes, they produce something genuinely amazing to read. But that is quite rare.
People should stop expecting brilliant prose from LLMs without doing the preparatory work themselves first. Very few human authors can manage that in any case
- illwrks 2mo agoI’d partially agree. They can generate very good descriptive text however the issue I’ve found is that when something is implied it’s not fully ‘understood’ in the context of everything else and then gets ignored by the agent.
- sieve 2mo agoMy solution to this, as the human-in-the-loop, is pretty simple. If the generated draft is missing something that was implicit in the chapter outline, I ask the LLM to incorporate it and rewrite the para/section. Then I fix the outline to make the point explicit so that a reroll does not make the same mistake again
- grey-area 2mo agoShow me some examples of good long form text please. Your hedging in reply (perfectly functional) does not inspire confidence.
- sieve 2mo agoThis is something from early 2025. The situation and my own way of driving the models has improved somewhat in the intervening period. Variations on a Theme of Saki https://gist.github.com/s-i-e-v-e/b4d696bfb08488aeb893cce3a4c174cd https://gist.github.com/s-i-e-v-e/b4d696bfb08488aeb893cce3a4...
- grey-area 2mo agoI’m sorry but this isn’t very good, problems from a cursory look: Stuffed full of adjectives, a common problem when LLMs attempt to make the text literary. Stuffed full of incidental detail (window inexplicably open), which doesn’t quite make sense - why would you leave a window open for people to return? Things which suddenly loom large in the narrative without any previous mention (roaring fire). Overuse of certain mechanisms (for example here ellipsis). Meanders without any discernable goal from one scene to the next. So in short, it’s a tale told by an idiot savant, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Take this sentence as an example: A biting incident, if I'm to be perfectly honest. Involving… several toes. The ellipsis just gets in the way, the ‘perfectly honest’ likewise and this should be one better formed sentence. The several toes bit is overly explicit without being clear (he lost several toes, or toes were bitten?). Most of the text is like this - infuriatingly vague, clumsy in construction and full of non-sequiturs. Compare this with real writing: https://archive.org/stream/GrahamGreeneShorts/21%20Stories_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GrahamGreeneShorts/21%20Stories_d... https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3077/3077-h/3077-h.htm#link2H_4_0003 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3077/3077-h/3077-h.htm#link2...
- sieve 2mo agoDid you read the original by Saki (Exhibit 12)? Ideally, you should read all 14 exhibits. Each has been produced by a different LLM, some local, others frontier models of the time. E4 = Claude E6 = ChatGPT E8 = Mistral E11 = DeepSeek V3 E12 = Original
- grey-area 2mo agoSorry, I'm not doing all that work for you, I read the first one and was sick of parsing it for meaning by the end. The work you posted was distinctly unimpressive, particularly as it had a seed text to impersonate and improve. The 'window' is I assume a french door, which I suspect is a mistranslation. If you want to seed LLMs I'd start with texts that are not translated! Honestly compare it to the human writing examples I showed you and consider the differences in intent and style, which are vast. I see why you're interested in this, I myself am interested in what these models can do and have tried similar experiments, but you should always be aware when you're asking others to waste their time on word generator output.