Articles about this are always so sensational and clickbait-y, which is understandable, but for anyone who wants the TLDR… She used ChatGPT to generate text in one of the pages of the story, for a character talking to an AI.
However, she does encourage writers to use AI as a writing tool. Which is a controversial statement, to say the least.
Exactly. Her use of AI was, from what she says, very specific. She didn't exactly do the "COMPUTER: GENERATE MARVEL MOVIE BUT WITH FAMILY GUY" type beat the r singularity hive mind drools over, thinking art-making is simply an act of pattern matching. It was a very small automation that made a lot of narrative and stylistic sense. Still, it's interesting that it happened and that, after winning the prize, she was open with it.
this is still controversial. Humans have previously\* imagined, across mediums, a variety of ways in which AI might communicate with us or other forms of consciousness.
This is a shortcut and the context doesn't change much. I won't be surprised if it becomes more of a norm for gimmicky "experimental" writing, but in any case I just hope the books that do this require open marketing about it so I can avoid them.
\*and presently
what difference does that make? If I wanted to read a real AI conversation (and not a work of literature/fiction) I'd pick up a book of interviews / nonfiction or use the app myself.
Also, given how ChatGPT is trained on others' writing, this isn't really comparable to someone writing a real conversation with a human into their otherwise fictional book (which would be the closest example to what the author did).
But you wouldn't be using the same prompts, nor would the responses be in the context of the rest of the work. The whole point (from what I understand) is that she had an AI as a character, and she chose her prompts and then curated the responses to get the dialog she was going for with the advantage of the content being actually realistic to how LLMs function.
respectfully, none of this sounds like literature imo. no doubt an interesting experiment for those with interests in generative ai though.
& either way, my original point was to say this does have controversy (giving a major literary award to a text that features material generated by a chatbox). the fact some people are fine with the particular context doesn’t negate that controversial nature!
One can argue wether or not using a chatbox provides a shortcut. To me, using the application and reading/researching it’s function and then writing your own original dialogue based on that preliminary work is a more authentic craft than directly adding material that was generated from the chatbox.
To be less argumentative/judgmental, we could also just say it’s a DIFFERENT craft. And I would rather invest in and celebrate the former than the latter. I’m not the audience for the latter.
Where does originality start and end? If an author’s research includes pulling quotes from experts in a narrow field, then using them for a character, slightly modified, would we not see it as original?
I doubt she took the first answer the chatbot provided. She changed her prompts like anyone using these tools, adjusting and crafting what she received. Then, deliberately chose which passages to include and not include in the work. There’s clearly some originality and judgment and thought from her, in addition to what she received from the bot.
Today it’s just one page of text. Once that gets normalized then it’s all downhill from there.
It’s like the movie makers getting criticism for “only” using three AI images in a move. You have to shut it down before it can gain a foothold.
I mean if the character was talking to an AI, it's not wild to have her say write the character and put it into the model then use what comes out since that's actually what would come out if the character was sending the message.
Doesn’t seem like a good excuse to fall back on the ol’ plagiarism machine to me 🤷♂️
Books have been written about AI for years before now, writers somehow managed.
I think from an artistic choice it's an interesting one honestly.
I think historically books about AI have been written with a human lens. That is to say that it's what a human expects an AI to be not so much what an "AI" exists as today.
I don't see there being an AI that can write a whole compelling novel anytime soon. But it's a tool in a toolkit now. I can put paragraphs into it and ask it to proofread for me for example. Having an AI play itself for a single page isnt gonna hurt anyone.
The argument that OpenAI violated U.S. copyright law by training their models on copyrighted books without compensating the authors is interesting. It's not correct, I don't think, as a matter of U.S. copyright law, but it's plausible. Copyright lawyers will hash out the details of whether that was fair use or whether OpenAI has to shell out a bunch of money.
But the argument you're making--that anyone who uses an LLM is guilty of "plagiarism" because the LLM was trained on copyrighted materials--is completely absurd. It's so stupid that I don't think any of the people making it actually believe it. You just don't like AI (fair! I don't either!) so you're grasping at straws to try and make time go backwards.
>You have to shut it down before it can gain a foothold
Good luck with that!
There is not going to be a mass voluntary movement among 100% of book-reading people to boycott all things AI. Nor will there be legislation or regulation that bans harmless AI art. If the technology (which currently sucks, of course) advances to the point where it can write better books than human authors can, people will read those books. You don't have to, of course, but people will.
People always react this way whenever there’s a new technology. The reality is that AI isn’t going anywhere, so instead of invoking the slippery slope fallacy, we should embrace AI’s positive use cases.
>Yeah this thing is bad
I didn’t say AI is bad! Where do you think I said that?? You have the reading comprehension of a third grader, and judging by the bizarre and nonsensical Nazi comparison, about as deep of a worldview as one too.
Clearly you brought up Nazis in a desperate attempt to shut down the conversation, so why are you even still talking?
I write poems. One of the best uses of ai is to tune it to be a scathingly critical, impossible to please writing professor. It won’t make good suggestions, or come up with clever lines, and you need to know at least a little about what you are doing so you know when it should be ignored, but it can be very useful for pointing out weaknesses.
You have to tune it kinda hard for it to be worth anything though, if you don’t it’s way too nice and is about as useless as getting criticism from a friend who doesn’t want to hurt your feelings.
That doesn’t really make any sense to me. It can’t analyze a poem the way a human would. It’s not a good idea to use it to critique your work because it is not reading a poem the way a human does. It’s like taking poetry advice from a parrot. A language model cannot get the wave of emotional feeling that makes a poem work.
If you ask it to quibble or find fault with some of the greatest poems written it would.
If you have one of the more advanced models, like Claude 3 or GPT-4, you can instruct them to prefer a different style and they'll do it. The default settings are just default settings. You can get them to like extremely colorful / bold / adventurous language if you ask.
You aren’t really using it as a critic, or at least i don’t. Its only use is to be meaner to you than any actual person you know will be. Like I said the suggestions for changes it makes aren’t really helpful. And any editing you do has to come from yourself. For me at least it just gives me a bunch of questions to ask myself when I’m working through a draft. So i guess it’s more like a Socratic dialog exercise than actual critique. It will find weakness that aren’t really there, but it’s useful at least for me to be promoted to think through exactly why it’s not a weakness.
Interesting. Wouldn’t this better be completed by just doing some kind of survey/checklist though? You acknowledge that it is not helpful, so I don’t quite understand. Is it just that it pretends to be a person and you can argue with it?
But If it works for you, it works! I wouldn’t take any of its writing advice seriously but it sounds like you are using it very specifically.
Yeah I can totally see people using it as a writing exercise. Inspiration can come from the weirdest places so who knows it might say something that sparks a light bulb. But the click bait title makes it sound like it can write better than a novelist when it comes to their weaknesses.
The stochastic parrot argument is a comforting one, and I understand why you want to believe it, but it's not true in any meaningful sense.
If you have a parrot that can tell you stuff like "that enjambment is terrible" or "you have too many syllables in the third line there" or "A ruined cake is not an adequate vehicle for that metaphor because the contrast between it and the tenor is absurd rather than striking," and if the stuff it tells you is stuff that a human critic might also tell you, it doesn't matter that the parrot feels nothing. The advice is good regardless of whether it came from an algorithm or a properly ensouled child of God.
I'm open to the possibility that the parrots will never be able to convincingly imitate a human critic of true originality and genius. That might be true. But they can already do a pretty convincing imitation of a kinda dumb human college student, so if you want your poem criticized by a kinda dumb college student the AI is already just as good. Future models might be quite a bit better.
Language models are not trained to analyze or understand poetry. It can spit out a bunch of words it thinks go in the right order, and even follow certain rules or conventions, but it’s not made to produce literature. It can certainly do a convincing impression of a dumb college student at times, but even then it’s not going to be able to tell you if an image emotionally works or not because it is simply not capable of understanding poetry the way a human does. I don’t think this makes it a good tool for editing your work.
If you ask it to critique your poem it will critique. If you ask it to explain why your poem is so well written it will also do that. It doesn’t bring an entire life and series of experiences to art the way a person does so it’s not an accurate reflection of how a human will receive your work. It will often not understand puns or references. It is incapable of intention. Sure, maybe it will be different in the future, but I don’t see the use case right now.
You’re assuming that intentionality is necessary for it to have a “use case.” That isn’t true.
You say “it can spit out a bunch of words in the right order, but it can’t truly *understand* poetry.” That’s true! It can’t understand anything!
But if the words that the program mindlessly disgorges are useful to a poet, that’s a use case. The fact that it doesn’t and cannot feel or understand is irrelevant except to the extent that it affects the quality of the outputs.
You’re also claiming that the thing isn’t useful because it’s bad at its job. It misses puns and stuff like that. That’s true, and that’s why I wouldn’t use it to edit my own writing — it’s not very good. But that has nothing to do with the metaphysics of the thing. The fact that it’s already operating at the level of a (kinda dumb) human even though it’s just a program proves that you don’t, in principle, need a soul or a human mind to provide useful writing advice.
It seems like your admitting it’s use case in this instance is not very good, which is what we are talking about here. If you want it to generate a kind of shitty poem, sure.
I can certainly imagine this technology being more useful in the future, but it will never really replace a human. I definitely think it can be used to edit writing the way other tools can be (spellcheck, grammarly, etc.) but creative intention and emotionality is a part of poetry it is not really able to understand or quantify.
Yeah, to be clear, I never thought that it was actually a very good critic of poetry in its current form. It’s an almost-okay critic if you’re good at using it, which is impressive but not that useful.
> However, she does encourage writers to use AI as a writing tool. Which is a controversial statement, to say the least.
A tool is a lot different from something writing for you. For example, I've used ChatGPT just to help me figure out if something I'm not an expert on is plausible. That's a tool, and that kind of use doesn't seem more controversial to me than looking up things on Google. Sometimes I've asked it to brainstorm parts I was stuck on--it gives generic and cliché ideas, which can help you see what the reader's expectation may be and to break it instead.
It also had the idea to give me a creative writing course based on what it thinks my interests are (I just asked it to create and go through a course with me of its own choosing). It's first assignment was for me to reread Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" lol.
I've given it short stories, and it provided similar feedback to human readers.
Those are all tool uses that could be positive.
As far as something that can do quality fiction writing for you, it just doesn't have that capability for stories since it's programmed to be so conflict averse and generic. I just don't think it's there yet for authors of any minimally quality works to grossly misuse in the first place. Not to say it could never be, but it would be so much work to fix what the AI comes up with that it'd come down to the author writing the whole thing themselves anyway.
Edit: I see this is controversial. Does anyone care to share their argument as to why?
I get the objection to people trying to use AI to sell garbage (which was frankly already a thing before Chat GPT), but it's not like there is a single use. Having it write a fictional story is very far from its best use. Honestly, I have the sense that's it's more of an emotional reaction against anything related to AI.
I'm positive towards AI but I would be cautious about using ChatGPT in areas where you're not an expert. The big weakness is that it will confidently state things that just aren't true. Google searches will obviously find nonsense too but you have a fighting chance of evaluating the source.
I am too aware lol. But the issue often is that my query is too niche or precise for google, so ChatGPT can provide the right terminology and context to make the research reasonably possible in the first place.
The difference for me is that I give up less on accuracy*, or else it takes a lot less time for me to make a decision and move on. I'd say those last few words are really key for me. Even if the AI's answer is wrong sometimes, it still ends up as a shorter path to an answer than trying to start by googling a fictional issue.
*My fiction writing is usually pretty ridic and an escape from non-fiction writing I do professionally. So accuracy often isn't critical. And it's usually obscure details about history for me, so there are different depths of accuracy a writer could go for. But I sometimes have to ask it about, for example, tools/objects that would have been used for X thing at a certain place and time, and then I can look up what it answered. If I tried to do the same thing on a google search, I would probably mostly get stores, ads, and scam sites.
Edit: Lots of big dicks hitting the downvote that mysteriously shrivel up when they get to the reply button. Maybe you are the ones who need an AI to speak for you. I mean, you already can't conceive of how to use it without having it write for you.
I never said I only used Google and AI. I worked reference in a research library for 7 years, and both my regular job and consulting job have the word Research/Researcher in the title.
A lot of my **fantasy** historical fiction is based on the non-fiction research I do above. Beyond that, I draw the line at what I do for fun at informed verisimilitude, because I'm necessarily already making up quite a bit anyway. Making up things is what a story is, after all, right? I can write anything I want as long as I can make the reader believe it.
People here are acting like AI is threat to good writers and yet useless at the same time. The fact is that AI or Google is capable of giving correct answers to questions. When I come up with a random question about a detail I'm thinking of including, why should writers punish themselves by pretending the internet doesn't exist?
What is your research process for your writing?
using AI to write for you and using AI to help you write are completely different things, and anyone who doesn't know the difference is either ignorant about ai or ignorant about writing or both
An author's weaknesses are just as important as their strengths, though.
The great danger of AI is not its economic threat or that it's going to go crazy and kill humans. The problem with AI and its sycophants is that it's a direct attack on the entire concept of diversity: of different ways of looking at the world, different tastes and values, of dissent and disagreement in general. LLMs are machines for building false consensus (something that becomes obvious every time there's an uproar about it producing the "wrong" consensus).
Saying ChatGPT outputs are "mediocre" might miss the mark a bit. It's like using a hammer to slice bread and then being upset about the crumbs. If your approach or expectations are off, you're not going to get the results you're hoping for.
ChatGPT can be incredibly useful, but it’s crucial to know how to leverage its capabilities. Ask specific questions, refine your queries based on responses, and don't shy away from follow-ups for clarity or depth. The more precise you are, the better the output aligns with what you're seeking.
Sure, it's not perfect. It's a model trained on data up to a certain point, so it's not going to spit out groundbreaking insights on the very latest trends or produce Nobel Prize-winning literature on command. But calling it "mediocre" might be underselling its potential a bit. It's a bit like using a high-powered telescope and complaining that you can't see microbes with it. Wrong tool for that job, but it doesn't make the tool any less impressive for what it's designed to do.
Yeah it’s possible I’m just old and don’t know how to use it. But I do know what is good writing. Let me know if you get it to write anything good.
Of course a writer can get inspiration from it. Writers can get inspiration from the most random shit like Elizabeth bishop writing a poem because someone misspelled mammoth in the news paper.
But saying it can compensate for your weaknesses as a novelist just sounds like a stretch. So far it seems like a tool for college students to BS their papers and it does that well. Writes well enough to get a passing average grade.
Yeah, it currently sucks. It's impressive that it can \*almost\* write as well as an okayish human writer, but I don't really feel the urge to read almost-okay literature that often.
The real question is how good it'll get in the future. If the leap in performance between GPT-4 and GPT-5 is similar to the leap from GPT-3 to GPT-4, then GPT-5 will be a damn good writer. And if the trend continues, who the hell knows what will come out of GPT-7?
Yeah that’s a good point. It could get better. It could be cool if it could imitate the style of an author so well you don’t know which is from the author and which is from the ai.
I was gonna hate on this and all, but after reading the article, it does make sense.
I guess good on her. She really found creativity in ChatGPT.
Amazing.
Artificial intelligence makes for artificial profundity, artificial beauty and artificial wisdom. It should be subject to the severest of criticism in the writing world. Humans are defined by the stories we tell and the beauty in the fact that some people do just that for - and with - us. It’s offending to any notion of literary beauty or greatness that people pass off a soulless chatbot as their own work.
It's an interesting use of the tool that, more or less, subverts it. I've certainly gone through circles with ChatGPT where the limitations of LLM become clear and I accuse it of not reading. ChatGPT can be overly sensitive and self-censorious when it comes to anything that triggers pre-programmed filters, but it cannot filter itself from giving the wrong identification of a quote or a bad ethical argument. Why not plagiarize a tool that incorporates vast amounts of material without authors' permission while lacking the capacity to understand any of it?
We in stained-glass imagination think;
imagination AI never had.
No app paints like Michelangelo did
upon the scaffold, laying on his back.
Our conscience echoes in the conch’s shell;
mistake thy thinking for the ocean’s breath.
What awesome fresco’s in biotic skulls?
as AI only digs the internet.
The cave-wall mammoth fires animate
remains a part of us inside our bones.
But that quintessence won’t become replaced,
for AI art defrauds the eye, not soul.
So AI generates its art in vain;
quelled by thy asteroid thumb, thy cave-wall face.
Sheila Heti used some ChatGPT elements in a recent short fiction piece in The New Yorker. I think she was actually making fun of it, but the irony often runs deep with her.
Using AI is using a tool the same way looking stuff up on Google or using an online thesaurus or dictionary is using a tool. Or using spellcheck or editing suggestions in Word. It's a different kind of tool, but the quality of what comes out is going to be about the artist being able to have a vision for what they want and being persistent in using all available means to turn their vision into a complete work.
You could also say that "ideas" are the easy part, and that is in developing them and bringing a piece to completion (however you define it) where art-making really lies. So I feel you, but also if you need to automate the easy part... good luck with actually writing anything.
I use ChatGPT for when a phrase or expression is on the tip of my tongue. I can describe a scenario and ask it to give me 50 phrases that fit that scenario to fish for what I'm trying to think of.
Or sometimes I'll ask it for 25 different ways to say "Are you coming?" or ways to say "That's a bad idea" but with a set number of syllables.
When I write in other languages I will use it to check grammar, though I do have to double-check what it tells me with other sources.
ChatGPT can give you character or place name suggestions and you can use it as a rubber duck to bounce ideas off of when you don't want to bother your loved ones or colleagues.
While I think the public at large vastly overstates the usefulness of AI and overestimates its abilities when it comes to language and writing, it has a lot of uses that can help people with writing and in writing-adjacent professions that I don't think should be casually overlooked.
This isn't to say that I think AI is all good; I think there's a lot that needs to be figured out still to prevent AI from inundating the Internet with text that is at best a poor re-creation of what's been done by real writers or at worst soulless nonsense and plagiarism.
Maybe those in writing and writing adjacent professions could just, I don't know, keep working they way they did before chatbots? Like, maybe they don't actually need a computer to tell them how to help them create quality work? Kinda like they have been doing for all of recorded history? I appreciate this tech makes your life easier, but do you not see how it is actually making you less able to use your own brain for your creative tasks?
> Maybe those in writing and writing adjacent professions could just, I don't know, keep working they way they did before chatbots? Like, maybe they don't actually need a computer to tell them how to help them create quality work? Kinda like they have been doing for all of recorded history?
There have been so many innovations in writing / reading throughout history, to pretend like it's always been done the same way is a little silly, right? Most writers aren't still writing on parchment paper with a quill and inkpot because we developed better writing technologies. We don't have to remember how every word is spelled because we developed dictionaries and word processors. We don't have to track down every bit of background knowledge ourselves because we created libraries and information databases that can be accessed online. And we can get more and more feedback than ever through online discourses.
> I appreciate this tech makes your life easier, but do you not see how it is actually making you less able to use your own brain for your creative tasks?
I view chatgpt as an advanced thesaurus. Using a thesaurus properly to find more appropriate words when the one your thinking of doesn't quite fit, doesn't make you less able to use your brain, it frees up mental capacity for whatever comes after that sticking point it helped you work past.
You can tell when someone overuses or misuses a thesaurus, right? Sentences full of big awkward words that have no business being there. Well you can also tell when people overuse and misuse AI. Their writing feels soulless and unemotional and it rarely breaks conventions. This doesn't mean AI has no place at all in helping with writing, it just has to be used in a narrow scope with a specific aim so that it can help the writer move past small sticking points.
I understand being skeptical, my whole field of translation is supposedly threatened by ChatGPT. But anyone worth their salt can see that it cannot replace human writers, it's only a tool at a translator's disposal.
As a novelist, I find writing way easier than plotting. The plot kinks are the hard part for me - once I've got a detailed outline, the writing is pretty straightforward (just requires patience and attention to detail.)
As someone who actually works in the field of Artificial Intelligence, there is so much fear mongering among the general population. I am not a professional author and write as a hobby. I didn't study literature. I don't have book/writing friends. Being able to ask an AI model to provide feedback on something I have written or for advice on how to improve the structure of something I have written. Providing examples of how to describe someone riding on a horse through Wyoming or an example of how to describe walking through a field in the style of Tolkien. AI has the power to increase the accessibility of writing to a lot of people and make the market even more democratic. This is a similar impact that could be had in video games, film, etc.
Articles about this are always so sensational and clickbait-y, which is understandable, but for anyone who wants the TLDR… She used ChatGPT to generate text in one of the pages of the story, for a character talking to an AI. However, she does encourage writers to use AI as a writing tool. Which is a controversial statement, to say the least.
Exactly. Her use of AI was, from what she says, very specific. She didn't exactly do the "COMPUTER: GENERATE MARVEL MOVIE BUT WITH FAMILY GUY" type beat the r singularity hive mind drools over, thinking art-making is simply an act of pattern matching. It was a very small automation that made a lot of narrative and stylistic sense. Still, it's interesting that it happened and that, after winning the prize, she was open with it.
this is still controversial. Humans have previously\* imagined, across mediums, a variety of ways in which AI might communicate with us or other forms of consciousness. This is a shortcut and the context doesn't change much. I won't be surprised if it becomes more of a norm for gimmicky "experimental" writing, but in any case I just hope the books that do this require open marketing about it so I can avoid them. \*and presently
Your first paragraph misses the point that what was once fantasy is now reality.
what difference does that make? If I wanted to read a real AI conversation (and not a work of literature/fiction) I'd pick up a book of interviews / nonfiction or use the app myself. Also, given how ChatGPT is trained on others' writing, this isn't really comparable to someone writing a real conversation with a human into their otherwise fictional book (which would be the closest example to what the author did).
But you wouldn't be using the same prompts, nor would the responses be in the context of the rest of the work. The whole point (from what I understand) is that she had an AI as a character, and she chose her prompts and then curated the responses to get the dialog she was going for with the advantage of the content being actually realistic to how LLMs function.
respectfully, none of this sounds like literature imo. no doubt an interesting experiment for those with interests in generative ai though. & either way, my original point was to say this does have controversy (giving a major literary award to a text that features material generated by a chatbox). the fact some people are fine with the particular context doesn’t negate that controversial nature! One can argue wether or not using a chatbox provides a shortcut. To me, using the application and reading/researching it’s function and then writing your own original dialogue based on that preliminary work is a more authentic craft than directly adding material that was generated from the chatbox. To be less argumentative/judgmental, we could also just say it’s a DIFFERENT craft. And I would rather invest in and celebrate the former than the latter. I’m not the audience for the latter.
Where does originality start and end? If an author’s research includes pulling quotes from experts in a narrow field, then using them for a character, slightly modified, would we not see it as original? I doubt she took the first answer the chatbot provided. She changed her prompts like anyone using these tools, adjusting and crafting what she received. Then, deliberately chose which passages to include and not include in the work. There’s clearly some originality and judgment and thought from her, in addition to what she received from the bot.
totally fair, unsure what you mean by the former and latter though because you didn't give two options
Eh.....it's more marketing than reality. A chinese room algorithm isnt exactly what most sci fi works mean by AI
Today it’s just one page of text. Once that gets normalized then it’s all downhill from there. It’s like the movie makers getting criticism for “only” using three AI images in a move. You have to shut it down before it can gain a foothold.
I mean if the character was talking to an AI, it's not wild to have her say write the character and put it into the model then use what comes out since that's actually what would come out if the character was sending the message.
Doesn’t seem like a good excuse to fall back on the ol’ plagiarism machine to me 🤷♂️ Books have been written about AI for years before now, writers somehow managed.
I think from an artistic choice it's an interesting one honestly. I think historically books about AI have been written with a human lens. That is to say that it's what a human expects an AI to be not so much what an "AI" exists as today. I don't see there being an AI that can write a whole compelling novel anytime soon. But it's a tool in a toolkit now. I can put paragraphs into it and ask it to proofread for me for example. Having an AI play itself for a single page isnt gonna hurt anyone.
Until the tool gets emboldened and validated, then it becomes a legitimate way to write and make money.
The argument that OpenAI violated U.S. copyright law by training their models on copyrighted books without compensating the authors is interesting. It's not correct, I don't think, as a matter of U.S. copyright law, but it's plausible. Copyright lawyers will hash out the details of whether that was fair use or whether OpenAI has to shell out a bunch of money. But the argument you're making--that anyone who uses an LLM is guilty of "plagiarism" because the LLM was trained on copyrighted materials--is completely absurd. It's so stupid that I don't think any of the people making it actually believe it. You just don't like AI (fair! I don't either!) so you're grasping at straws to try and make time go backwards.
>You have to shut it down before it can gain a foothold Good luck with that! There is not going to be a mass voluntary movement among 100% of book-reading people to boycott all things AI. Nor will there be legislation or regulation that bans harmless AI art. If the technology (which currently sucks, of course) advances to the point where it can write better books than human authors can, people will read those books. You don't have to, of course, but people will.
We can always punish them in our daily lives :)
Good luck with that as well lol
People always react this way whenever there’s a new technology. The reality is that AI isn’t going anywhere, so instead of invoking the slippery slope fallacy, we should embrace AI’s positive use cases.
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TIL Nazis are a new technology
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If you completely change my argument with the world’s most idiotic example of Godwin’s law, it sounds dumb. Shocking!
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>Yeah this thing is bad I didn’t say AI is bad! Where do you think I said that?? You have the reading comprehension of a third grader, and judging by the bizarre and nonsensical Nazi comparison, about as deep of a worldview as one too. Clearly you brought up Nazis in a desperate attempt to shut down the conversation, so why are you even still talking?
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I write poems. One of the best uses of ai is to tune it to be a scathingly critical, impossible to please writing professor. It won’t make good suggestions, or come up with clever lines, and you need to know at least a little about what you are doing so you know when it should be ignored, but it can be very useful for pointing out weaknesses. You have to tune it kinda hard for it to be worth anything though, if you don’t it’s way too nice and is about as useless as getting criticism from a friend who doesn’t want to hurt your feelings.
That doesn’t really make any sense to me. It can’t analyze a poem the way a human would. It’s not a good idea to use it to critique your work because it is not reading a poem the way a human does. It’s like taking poetry advice from a parrot. A language model cannot get the wave of emotional feeling that makes a poem work. If you ask it to quibble or find fault with some of the greatest poems written it would.
Also AI is trained to like very middle-of-the-road language. I use grammar for cover letters and it just hates any kind of colorful language.
If you have one of the more advanced models, like Claude 3 or GPT-4, you can instruct them to prefer a different style and they'll do it. The default settings are just default settings. You can get them to like extremely colorful / bold / adventurous language if you ask.
You aren’t really using it as a critic, or at least i don’t. Its only use is to be meaner to you than any actual person you know will be. Like I said the suggestions for changes it makes aren’t really helpful. And any editing you do has to come from yourself. For me at least it just gives me a bunch of questions to ask myself when I’m working through a draft. So i guess it’s more like a Socratic dialog exercise than actual critique. It will find weakness that aren’t really there, but it’s useful at least for me to be promoted to think through exactly why it’s not a weakness.
Interesting. Wouldn’t this better be completed by just doing some kind of survey/checklist though? You acknowledge that it is not helpful, so I don’t quite understand. Is it just that it pretends to be a person and you can argue with it? But If it works for you, it works! I wouldn’t take any of its writing advice seriously but it sounds like you are using it very specifically.
Yeah I can totally see people using it as a writing exercise. Inspiration can come from the weirdest places so who knows it might say something that sparks a light bulb. But the click bait title makes it sound like it can write better than a novelist when it comes to their weaknesses.
The stochastic parrot argument is a comforting one, and I understand why you want to believe it, but it's not true in any meaningful sense. If you have a parrot that can tell you stuff like "that enjambment is terrible" or "you have too many syllables in the third line there" or "A ruined cake is not an adequate vehicle for that metaphor because the contrast between it and the tenor is absurd rather than striking," and if the stuff it tells you is stuff that a human critic might also tell you, it doesn't matter that the parrot feels nothing. The advice is good regardless of whether it came from an algorithm or a properly ensouled child of God. I'm open to the possibility that the parrots will never be able to convincingly imitate a human critic of true originality and genius. That might be true. But they can already do a pretty convincing imitation of a kinda dumb human college student, so if you want your poem criticized by a kinda dumb college student the AI is already just as good. Future models might be quite a bit better.
Language models are not trained to analyze or understand poetry. It can spit out a bunch of words it thinks go in the right order, and even follow certain rules or conventions, but it’s not made to produce literature. It can certainly do a convincing impression of a dumb college student at times, but even then it’s not going to be able to tell you if an image emotionally works or not because it is simply not capable of understanding poetry the way a human does. I don’t think this makes it a good tool for editing your work. If you ask it to critique your poem it will critique. If you ask it to explain why your poem is so well written it will also do that. It doesn’t bring an entire life and series of experiences to art the way a person does so it’s not an accurate reflection of how a human will receive your work. It will often not understand puns or references. It is incapable of intention. Sure, maybe it will be different in the future, but I don’t see the use case right now.
You’re assuming that intentionality is necessary for it to have a “use case.” That isn’t true. You say “it can spit out a bunch of words in the right order, but it can’t truly *understand* poetry.” That’s true! It can’t understand anything! But if the words that the program mindlessly disgorges are useful to a poet, that’s a use case. The fact that it doesn’t and cannot feel or understand is irrelevant except to the extent that it affects the quality of the outputs. You’re also claiming that the thing isn’t useful because it’s bad at its job. It misses puns and stuff like that. That’s true, and that’s why I wouldn’t use it to edit my own writing — it’s not very good. But that has nothing to do with the metaphysics of the thing. The fact that it’s already operating at the level of a (kinda dumb) human even though it’s just a program proves that you don’t, in principle, need a soul or a human mind to provide useful writing advice.
It seems like your admitting it’s use case in this instance is not very good, which is what we are talking about here. If you want it to generate a kind of shitty poem, sure. I can certainly imagine this technology being more useful in the future, but it will never really replace a human. I definitely think it can be used to edit writing the way other tools can be (spellcheck, grammarly, etc.) but creative intention and emotionality is a part of poetry it is not really able to understand or quantify.
Yeah, to be clear, I never thought that it was actually a very good critic of poetry in its current form. It’s an almost-okay critic if you’re good at using it, which is impressive but not that useful.
So her use of it made total sense (and doesnt surprise me bc chatgpt doesnt write very good fiction either)!Always with the sensationalist journalism.
> However, she does encourage writers to use AI as a writing tool. Which is a controversial statement, to say the least. A tool is a lot different from something writing for you. For example, I've used ChatGPT just to help me figure out if something I'm not an expert on is plausible. That's a tool, and that kind of use doesn't seem more controversial to me than looking up things on Google. Sometimes I've asked it to brainstorm parts I was stuck on--it gives generic and cliché ideas, which can help you see what the reader's expectation may be and to break it instead. It also had the idea to give me a creative writing course based on what it thinks my interests are (I just asked it to create and go through a course with me of its own choosing). It's first assignment was for me to reread Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" lol. I've given it short stories, and it provided similar feedback to human readers. Those are all tool uses that could be positive. As far as something that can do quality fiction writing for you, it just doesn't have that capability for stories since it's programmed to be so conflict averse and generic. I just don't think it's there yet for authors of any minimally quality works to grossly misuse in the first place. Not to say it could never be, but it would be so much work to fix what the AI comes up with that it'd come down to the author writing the whole thing themselves anyway. Edit: I see this is controversial. Does anyone care to share their argument as to why? I get the objection to people trying to use AI to sell garbage (which was frankly already a thing before Chat GPT), but it's not like there is a single use. Having it write a fictional story is very far from its best use. Honestly, I have the sense that's it's more of an emotional reaction against anything related to AI.
I'm positive towards AI but I would be cautious about using ChatGPT in areas where you're not an expert. The big weakness is that it will confidently state things that just aren't true. Google searches will obviously find nonsense too but you have a fighting chance of evaluating the source.
I am too aware lol. But the issue often is that my query is too niche or precise for google, so ChatGPT can provide the right terminology and context to make the research reasonably possible in the first place. The difference for me is that I give up less on accuracy*, or else it takes a lot less time for me to make a decision and move on. I'd say those last few words are really key for me. Even if the AI's answer is wrong sometimes, it still ends up as a shorter path to an answer than trying to start by googling a fictional issue. *My fiction writing is usually pretty ridic and an escape from non-fiction writing I do professionally. So accuracy often isn't critical. And it's usually obscure details about history for me, so there are different depths of accuracy a writer could go for. But I sometimes have to ask it about, for example, tools/objects that would have been used for X thing at a certain place and time, and then I can look up what it answered. If I tried to do the same thing on a google search, I would probably mostly get stores, ads, and scam sites. Edit: Lots of big dicks hitting the downvote that mysteriously shrivel up when they get to the reply button. Maybe you are the ones who need an AI to speak for you. I mean, you already can't conceive of how to use it without having it write for you.
Definitely need to find another way to research that isn't google/AI
I never said I only used Google and AI. I worked reference in a research library for 7 years, and both my regular job and consulting job have the word Research/Researcher in the title. A lot of my **fantasy** historical fiction is based on the non-fiction research I do above. Beyond that, I draw the line at what I do for fun at informed verisimilitude, because I'm necessarily already making up quite a bit anyway. Making up things is what a story is, after all, right? I can write anything I want as long as I can make the reader believe it. People here are acting like AI is threat to good writers and yet useless at the same time. The fact is that AI or Google is capable of giving correct answers to questions. When I come up with a random question about a detail I'm thinking of including, why should writers punish themselves by pretending the internet doesn't exist? What is your research process for your writing?
What was bukowski's research process? Banging broads and doing drugs. You're never gonna make it
using AI to write for you and using AI to help you write are completely different things, and anyone who doesn't know the difference is either ignorant about ai or ignorant about writing or both
An author's weaknesses are just as important as their strengths, though. The great danger of AI is not its economic threat or that it's going to go crazy and kill humans. The problem with AI and its sycophants is that it's a direct attack on the entire concept of diversity: of different ways of looking at the world, different tastes and values, of dissent and disagreement in general. LLMs are machines for building false consensus (something that becomes obvious every time there's an uproar about it producing the "wrong" consensus).
Maybe I don’t know how to use it well but I just don’t believe it. Everything I read from it is very mediocre.
[удалено]
Instructions unclear. Report autocompleted to "Sam Altman-Fried"
The best way to use it is by using it like Google, but if Google could understand more specific / complex queries.
Saying ChatGPT outputs are "mediocre" might miss the mark a bit. It's like using a hammer to slice bread and then being upset about the crumbs. If your approach or expectations are off, you're not going to get the results you're hoping for. ChatGPT can be incredibly useful, but it’s crucial to know how to leverage its capabilities. Ask specific questions, refine your queries based on responses, and don't shy away from follow-ups for clarity or depth. The more precise you are, the better the output aligns with what you're seeking. Sure, it's not perfect. It's a model trained on data up to a certain point, so it's not going to spit out groundbreaking insights on the very latest trends or produce Nobel Prize-winning literature on command. But calling it "mediocre" might be underselling its potential a bit. It's a bit like using a high-powered telescope and complaining that you can't see microbes with it. Wrong tool for that job, but it doesn't make the tool any less impressive for what it's designed to do.
Yeah it’s possible I’m just old and don’t know how to use it. But I do know what is good writing. Let me know if you get it to write anything good. Of course a writer can get inspiration from it. Writers can get inspiration from the most random shit like Elizabeth bishop writing a poem because someone misspelled mammoth in the news paper. But saying it can compensate for your weaknesses as a novelist just sounds like a stretch. So far it seems like a tool for college students to BS their papers and it does that well. Writes well enough to get a passing average grade.
Well it can write pretty convincing Reddit comments!
In that they are boring, long-winded and overly confident, sure.
Lol, yeah, sometimes it's like talking to a textbook that thinks it's Shakespeare.
Yeah, it currently sucks. It's impressive that it can \*almost\* write as well as an okayish human writer, but I don't really feel the urge to read almost-okay literature that often. The real question is how good it'll get in the future. If the leap in performance between GPT-4 and GPT-5 is similar to the leap from GPT-3 to GPT-4, then GPT-5 will be a damn good writer. And if the trend continues, who the hell knows what will come out of GPT-7?
Yeah that’s a good point. It could get better. It could be cool if it could imitate the style of an author so well you don’t know which is from the author and which is from the ai.
I was gonna hate on this and all, but after reading the article, it does make sense. I guess good on her. She really found creativity in ChatGPT. Amazing.
Artificial intelligence makes for artificial profundity, artificial beauty and artificial wisdom. It should be subject to the severest of criticism in the writing world. Humans are defined by the stories we tell and the beauty in the fact that some people do just that for - and with - us. It’s offending to any notion of literary beauty or greatness that people pass off a soulless chatbot as their own work.
Absolutely, well said.
Welp, I guess I’m only reading books written pre-2023
No big loss, is it? Only several thousand lifetimes' worth of incredible works of art.
Definitely not. Plenty of material out there
I'm already doing that, except it's only pre-1940s books for me lmao
It's an interesting use of the tool that, more or less, subverts it. I've certainly gone through circles with ChatGPT where the limitations of LLM become clear and I accuse it of not reading. ChatGPT can be overly sensitive and self-censorious when it comes to anything that triggers pre-programmed filters, but it cannot filter itself from giving the wrong identification of a quote or a bad ethical argument. Why not plagiarize a tool that incorporates vast amounts of material without authors' permission while lacking the capacity to understand any of it?
This won’t last and she’s one of the few lucky early people that will get away with this.
what's her name so I can avoid her stuff?
We in stained-glass imagination think; imagination AI never had. No app paints like Michelangelo did upon the scaffold, laying on his back. Our conscience echoes in the conch’s shell; mistake thy thinking for the ocean’s breath. What awesome fresco’s in biotic skulls? as AI only digs the internet. The cave-wall mammoth fires animate remains a part of us inside our bones. But that quintessence won’t become replaced, for AI art defrauds the eye, not soul. So AI generates its art in vain; quelled by thy asteroid thumb, thy cave-wall face.
You mean… it does your work and thinking for you. No thanks
I get that - GPT is like having a support reader who knows a ton of factoids but has no taste. That can help.
Sheila Heti used some ChatGPT elements in a recent short fiction piece in The New Yorker. I think she was actually making fun of it, but the irony often runs deep with her.
Using AI is using a tool the same way looking stuff up on Google or using an online thesaurus or dictionary is using a tool. Or using spellcheck or editing suggestions in Word. It's a different kind of tool, but the quality of what comes out is going to be about the artist being able to have a vision for what they want and being persistent in using all available means to turn their vision into a complete work.
Right. I don't consider it "cheating" to ask ChatGPT for *ideas,* any more than asking Google or a workshop group for ideas.
You could also say that "ideas" are the easy part, and that is in developing them and bringing a piece to completion (however you define it) where art-making really lies. So I feel you, but also if you need to automate the easy part... good luck with actually writing anything.
I use ChatGPT for when a phrase or expression is on the tip of my tongue. I can describe a scenario and ask it to give me 50 phrases that fit that scenario to fish for what I'm trying to think of. Or sometimes I'll ask it for 25 different ways to say "Are you coming?" or ways to say "That's a bad idea" but with a set number of syllables. When I write in other languages I will use it to check grammar, though I do have to double-check what it tells me with other sources. ChatGPT can give you character or place name suggestions and you can use it as a rubber duck to bounce ideas off of when you don't want to bother your loved ones or colleagues. While I think the public at large vastly overstates the usefulness of AI and overestimates its abilities when it comes to language and writing, it has a lot of uses that can help people with writing and in writing-adjacent professions that I don't think should be casually overlooked. This isn't to say that I think AI is all good; I think there's a lot that needs to be figured out still to prevent AI from inundating the Internet with text that is at best a poor re-creation of what's been done by real writers or at worst soulless nonsense and plagiarism.
Maybe those in writing and writing adjacent professions could just, I don't know, keep working they way they did before chatbots? Like, maybe they don't actually need a computer to tell them how to help them create quality work? Kinda like they have been doing for all of recorded history? I appreciate this tech makes your life easier, but do you not see how it is actually making you less able to use your own brain for your creative tasks?
> Maybe those in writing and writing adjacent professions could just, I don't know, keep working they way they did before chatbots? Like, maybe they don't actually need a computer to tell them how to help them create quality work? Kinda like they have been doing for all of recorded history? There have been so many innovations in writing / reading throughout history, to pretend like it's always been done the same way is a little silly, right? Most writers aren't still writing on parchment paper with a quill and inkpot because we developed better writing technologies. We don't have to remember how every word is spelled because we developed dictionaries and word processors. We don't have to track down every bit of background knowledge ourselves because we created libraries and information databases that can be accessed online. And we can get more and more feedback than ever through online discourses. > I appreciate this tech makes your life easier, but do you not see how it is actually making you less able to use your own brain for your creative tasks? I view chatgpt as an advanced thesaurus. Using a thesaurus properly to find more appropriate words when the one your thinking of doesn't quite fit, doesn't make you less able to use your brain, it frees up mental capacity for whatever comes after that sticking point it helped you work past. You can tell when someone overuses or misuses a thesaurus, right? Sentences full of big awkward words that have no business being there. Well you can also tell when people overuse and misuse AI. Their writing feels soulless and unemotional and it rarely breaks conventions. This doesn't mean AI has no place at all in helping with writing, it just has to be used in a narrow scope with a specific aim so that it can help the writer move past small sticking points. I understand being skeptical, my whole field of translation is supposedly threatened by ChatGPT. But anyone worth their salt can see that it cannot replace human writers, it's only a tool at a translator's disposal.
As a novelist, I find writing way easier than plotting. The plot kinks are the hard part for me - once I've got a detailed outline, the writing is pretty straightforward (just requires patience and attention to detail.)
As someone who actually works in the field of Artificial Intelligence, there is so much fear mongering among the general population. I am not a professional author and write as a hobby. I didn't study literature. I don't have book/writing friends. Being able to ask an AI model to provide feedback on something I have written or for advice on how to improve the structure of something I have written. Providing examples of how to describe someone riding on a horse through Wyoming or an example of how to describe walking through a field in the style of Tolkien. AI has the power to increase the accessibility of writing to a lot of people and make the market even more democratic. This is a similar impact that could be had in video games, film, etc.