4 ms·

Even if 99% of generations are trash, why does that matter? Just throw out the failures and keep the good ones, like any writer. Here is the text of the winning

Even if 99% of generations are trash, why does that matter? Just throw out the failures and keep the good ones, like any writer. Here is the text of the winning story: https://granta.com/the-serpent-in-the-grove/ https://granta.com/the-serpent-in-the-grove/ If you've ever used ChatGPT to generate stories, you will find the style unmistakable. It's cloying to me, but it did manage to fool some stuffy literary judges.

altmanaltman 2mo ago
If 99% generations are trash then it means it sucks at storytelling and is not good at it contary to what was claimed in the comment.
- Forgeties79 2mo ago
  And I think what people don’t appreciate is that when people write/make something, they generally don’t just throw it out there and expect praise. They edit and sculpt it for public release or abandon it. But for some reason when it’s made with an LLM there is this assumption that you need to put it out there because everyone would be so excited to see it. Then when people say it’s not good, everyone starts getting into an argument about AI generated content. I just don’t see the point to this dance anymore. It was interesting for like…the first couple of months maybe. Alternatively: “Here’s my fragile app I made in a few hours that’s 10x too long and won’t survive iteration but it kind of works. Everyone should thank me.” I love tinkering, I love messing with things and doing cool projects, but 99% of what I make never goes beyond the room I made it in. Maybe I will show it to a friend when they come over. But ultimately they’re not fit for mass consumption and I don’t expect praise and use.
  - altmanaltman 2mo ago
    Yes, we like tinkering because the process itself is rewarding. The outcome is usually not that important as long as the process is fun. But with AI, the process cannot be fun (because one technically skips it) if one uses it as a way to just spam out content/code. I still say there is a good argument to be made that ai can help in the process of tinkering as well but approach matters a lot and obviously the showcase part of it is not really that important in this context so we most only see short term outcome focused ai projects out in the wild
    - Forgeties79 2mo ago
      Completely agree. I run 27B qwen 3.6 regularly at home with web search tool calls for simple script kiddy stuff and troubleshooting. I have occasionally made something that actually really did help me out, but I am under no illusion that it will be particularly useful to other people. They’re usually pretty specific to what I need and would fall apart at the moment they touch a different machine, mainly because the scripts themselves are straight up just referencing my file structure. I am not a coder, I am not an engineer, I do not know how to make something that can be applied to a bunch of different machines with different hardware and software and configs. I can just barely put together something that specifically works for me in that moment. I needed to use ChatGPT to finish setting up idrive once ffs. Why on earth would I share that with other people lmao I mean let’s be real, all I’ve built is some crappy clone of something that already exists most likely. But making a quick script on my computer is faster than using Google’s increasingly degraded search to try and find the thing that will work for me, so here we are, me tinkering and screwing around for a couple of hours every month and occasionally getting something that helps me out. That’s enough!
silvester23 2mo ago
Can you point to some aspects of the style that are typical of ChatGPT? I have never done any story generation and after reading the first couple of paragraphs, I could not tell whether this was AI-generated or not.
- svachalek 2mo ago
  AI tends to really like staccato writing, a series of sentences that are too short and simple. It's evident here, although broken up with really long sentences. Tortured and near-miss metaphors are another thing it likes and it's loaded here. "groaned like a drumskin too tight for the heat" sounds cool but then you think, do drum skins "groan"? And what does heat have to do with it? Or "breath of hills holding their heat like a secret", are they holding the heat or breathing it? At least for me there's the tendency to at first feel like I'm reading something really clever, words that are really tuned and carefully chosen, and then to start feeling like I've been pranked. Ultimately I don't think there's any way to really be sure though, whether it's AI or just a human but annoying style. This doesn't really read as what GPT would typically drop from a basic writing prompt though, I would guess it's heavily prompted on style or reworked repeatedly. FWIW though I experiment quite a bit with AI writing for fun, and I think Opus writes pretty nicely in its default voice (prompted mostly for content with little guidance about "how" to write). I'm an engineer so I don't know if real literary connoisseurs would see the slop right through this, but it's coherent, well paced, a little heavy on similes and metaphors but they land unlike the linked passage. Just a sample: --- Off the port quarter, the darkness lights up orange in a rolling line, gun by gun, and the sound arrives a full second behind the light. Broadside. Most of it goes over — a ripping, tearing sound in the air above, like heavy cloth torn by God. Two don’t. One takes the bulwark forward and turns eight feet of oak into a spray of splinters a foot long. One goes into the hull at the waterline abaft the fore chains with a sound you feel through your boot soles, and the sugar barrels in the hold scream as they shift. A man is down by the foremast, shrieking, and another is not shrieking, and Homer is already running toward both with his hands out. And Micheal is still aloft. He’s on the fore topmast crosstrees with the stay gone under him, forty feet up, hanging off a spar that is swinging in a fifteen-degree arc and thumping the mast each time it comes back. You can hear him from the deck. Not screaming. Talking — fast, high, unbroken, reciting the rules to himself. "Touch wood don’t whistle don’t whistle spit to leeward—"
Forgeties79 2mo ago
It matters because when people hack out a rough draft of a short story overnight or a few days, typically they don’t push it out to the world and expect to be praised for their writing. They edit, they refine, they turn into something that is actually of some quality. Yet for some strange reason when people try a few prompts and an LLM spits out something maybe vaguely passable after 30 minutes of effort, that expectation goes out the window. They publish it for all the world to see and get upset when people aren’t thrilled at the results. Why? Why on earth do the rules suddenly change when the effort is even less than something they wouldn’t publish to the world for review? They can barely even call it their own work. I refuse to believe that a short story you generated in 30 minutes represents anything resembling quality work. It’s vacuous, repetitive trash that I would be embarrassed to say represents my skills as a writer. Yet here we are, people constantly doing it. Code, writing, music, whatever.

altmanaltman 2mo ago

If 99% generations are trash then it means it sucks at storytelling and is not good at it contary to what was claimed in the comment.

Forgeties79 2mo ago
And I think what people don’t appreciate is that when people write/make something, they generally don’t just throw it out there and expect praise. They edit and sculpt it for public release or abandon it. But for some reason when it’s made with an LLM there is this assumption that you need to put it out there because everyone would be so excited to see it. Then when people say it’s not good, everyone starts getting into an argument about AI generated content. I just don’t see the point to this dance anymore. It was interesting for like…the first couple of months maybe. Alternatively: “Here’s my fragile app I made in a few hours that’s 10x too long and won’t survive iteration but it kind of works. Everyone should thank me.” I love tinkering, I love messing with things and doing cool projects, but 99% of what I make never goes beyond the room I made it in. Maybe I will show it to a friend when they come over. But ultimately they’re not fit for mass consumption and I don’t expect praise and use.
- altmanaltman 2mo ago
  Yes, we like tinkering because the process itself is rewarding. The outcome is usually not that important as long as the process is fun. But with AI, the process cannot be fun (because one technically skips it) if one uses it as a way to just spam out content/code. I still say there is a good argument to be made that ai can help in the process of tinkering as well but approach matters a lot and obviously the showcase part of it is not really that important in this context so we most only see short term outcome focused ai projects out in the wild
  - Forgeties79 2mo ago
    Completely agree. I run 27B qwen 3.6 regularly at home with web search tool calls for simple script kiddy stuff and troubleshooting. I have occasionally made something that actually really did help me out, but I am under no illusion that it will be particularly useful to other people. They’re usually pretty specific to what I need and would fall apart at the moment they touch a different machine, mainly because the scripts themselves are straight up just referencing my file structure. I am not a coder, I am not an engineer, I do not know how to make something that can be applied to a bunch of different machines with different hardware and software and configs. I can just barely put together something that specifically works for me in that moment. I needed to use ChatGPT to finish setting up idrive once ffs. Why on earth would I share that with other people lmao I mean let’s be real, all I’ve built is some crappy clone of something that already exists most likely. But making a quick script on my computer is faster than using Google’s increasingly degraded search to try and find the thing that will work for me, so here we are, me tinkering and screwing around for a couple of hours every month and occasionally getting something that helps me out. That’s enough!

silvester23 2mo ago

Can you point to some aspects of the style that are typical of ChatGPT? I have never done any story generation and after reading the first couple of paragraphs, I could not tell whether this was AI-generated or not.

svachalek 2mo ago
AI tends to really like staccato writing, a series of sentences that are too short and simple. It's evident here, although broken up with really long sentences. Tortured and near-miss metaphors are another thing it likes and it's loaded here. "groaned like a drumskin too tight for the heat" sounds cool but then you think, do drum skins "groan"? And what does heat have to do with it? Or "breath of hills holding their heat like a secret", are they holding the heat or breathing it? At least for me there's the tendency to at first feel like I'm reading something really clever, words that are really tuned and carefully chosen, and then to start feeling like I've been pranked. Ultimately I don't think there's any way to really be sure though, whether it's AI or just a human but annoying style. This doesn't really read as what GPT would typically drop from a basic writing prompt though, I would guess it's heavily prompted on style or reworked repeatedly. FWIW though I experiment quite a bit with AI writing for fun, and I think Opus writes pretty nicely in its default voice (prompted mostly for content with little guidance about "how" to write). I'm an engineer so I don't know if real literary connoisseurs would see the slop right through this, but it's coherent, well paced, a little heavy on similes and metaphors but they land unlike the linked passage. Just a sample: --- Off the port quarter, the darkness lights up orange in a rolling line, gun by gun, and the sound arrives a full second behind the light. Broadside. Most of it goes over — a ripping, tearing sound in the air above, like heavy cloth torn by God. Two don’t. One takes the bulwark forward and turns eight feet of oak into a spray of splinters a foot long. One goes into the hull at the waterline abaft the fore chains with a sound you feel through your boot soles, and the sugar barrels in the hold scream as they shift. A man is down by the foremast, shrieking, and another is not shrieking, and Homer is already running toward both with his hands out. And Micheal is still aloft. He’s on the fore topmast crosstrees with the stay gone under him, forty feet up, hanging off a spar that is swinging in a fifteen-degree arc and thumping the mast each time it comes back. You can hear him from the deck. Not screaming. Talking — fast, high, unbroken, reciting the rules to himself. "Touch wood don’t whistle don’t whistle spit to leeward—"

Forgeties79 2mo ago

It matters because when people hack out a rough draft of a short story overnight or a few days, typically they don’t push it out to the world and expect to be praised for their writing. They edit, they refine, they turn into something that is actually of some quality. Yet for some strange reason when people try a few prompts and an LLM spits out something maybe vaguely passable after 30 minutes of effort, that expectation goes out the window. They publish it for all the world to see and get upset when people aren’t thrilled at the results. Why? Why on earth do the rules suddenly change when the effort is even less than something they wouldn’t publish to the world for review? They can barely even call it their own work. I refuse to believe that a short story you generated in 30 minutes represents anything resembling quality work. It’s vacuous, repetitive trash that I would be embarrassed to say represents my skills as a writer. Yet here we are, people constantly doing it. Code, writing, music, whatever.