AI singer-songwriter ‘Anna Indiana’ debuted her first single ‘Betrayed by this Town’ on X, formerly Twitter—and listeners were not too impressed.
AI singer-songwriter ‘Anna Indiana’ debuted her first single ‘Betrayed by this Town’ on X, formerly Twitter—and listeners were not too impressed.
What is an example of something that is truly original and not derivative?
The style of an authors prose is not derivative. Read your favorite book and then tell an ai to write a short story in the style of that author.
Unless you have trully blind taste you are going to notice just how wooden the ai writing is.
An excellent example will be some sort of pulp novel where the author uses canned phrases. Dan Abbnet has a very repetitive style that lends itself well to ai, yet ai can not write a convincing Ciaphas Cain story. Convincing as in, if you showed it to me and i didnt know what ai was, i wouldnt think it was fanfiction.
Is this ability to create something original and non-derivative a basic human ability or is it something that very few are capable of only after many years of developing their ability?
Are you able to right now create something original and non-derivative as an example?
I dont feel like it but here is something I wrote with original prose, fitting the criteria of originality. As a favor for me arguing with you, please give me feedback on my prose
Not to talk down to you, but do you know what prose means? I actually used to not know what that word means so its not an embarassing thing to not know. That might be why I percieve you as “talking past me.” Prose is a writer’s style and choice of language. So purple prose is writing in an overly flowerly and annoying way. Every writer, regardless of talent and skill, has original prose. I think the only amount of practice required to be able to achieve this is to write enough to have a consistent style. So since you completed public school you also probably meet the criteria.
I have done the specific experiment I suggested using Dan Abbnet’s works with Chat GPT because I consider Dan to be my favorite author who makes repetitive pulpy fiction that I think AI idealy should be able to replicate, but it really can’t.
Thanks for sharing this. I wasn’t especially grabbed at the beginning, and honestly, since I had already checked the length, shortly in I didn’t think I would finish it. Maybe just because I was sort of disoriented at the start and not really relating so it was hard to find a foothold. Maybe a quarter of a way into it though it started to come together for me and began really enjoying it. The final scene was quite vivid and it nicely sort of quickly put me into the shoes of the hero and the pride they felt for their accomplishment. The anger toward everything just before succeeding did a good job of making them seem believable. I appreciate you taking the time to write that and share it.
I do not consider myself a writer, but I do find it therapeutic, and it is something that I have a habit of doing at least a little bit of every day, in fact, it is something that I keep track of my “streak” of. I think of prose as the writing version individual etchings that a carver does when forming a block of wood into a sculpture. Any individual one on its own is not often very impressive. But it is the way they come together as a whole that creates something beautiful. I don’t know how inline that is with the accepted definition of the term, and really it isn’t a word that I have much cause for using, or much interaction with in my life.
With the recent popularity of chatGPT there are a lot of people who have just now started paying attention to modern chatbots. Many people see them and assume that how they are now is just how they are, as if we are at some sort of wall, and the things they are still bad at is something intrinsic to the way a computer is able to “think”. These are the people who insist that a human is required to make beautiful or worthy artistic writing. They have made this judgement based on this assumption that what they see now is how it has to be.
There is another group of people, however, that see this very differently, these are the people who have been paying attention to the space a bit longer. They are watching a rapidly accelerating trajectory. They saw how awful, yet intriguing, early gpt2 was with things like AI dungeon, and the enormous leap it took upon the release of gpt3. They watched Replicas morph from being a tacky gimmick to something that had enough of an emotional hold on people to make them distraught enough to cause stickied suicide hotline reddit posts when the owners made the decision to pump the breaks on their capabilities. Something that was perceived as many as “my best friend has been lobotamized and there is nothing I can do about it”. I know, crazy, right?
The newcomers that got washed in with the latest chatGPT wave see this metaphoric car and say it’s no big deal, it’s only going 30km/hr, but what they fail to realize is that .25 seconds ago it was practically parked, and the gas pedal is still very much on the floor. To the people who have been paying attention longer, they don’t see this single snapshot of a slow moving car, they are watching a rapidly accelerating vehicle and wondering if it is gonna hit 60km/hr by the end of the first second or 200, and they are also wondering if the acceleration is going to continue after the second is up and how long it can keep this kind of rapid growth going. Who knows, maybe this new wave came in with no frame of reference, made thir initial gut response and they will end up being right and the more long term observers will be wrong, but that’s almost never how things seem to go. Only time will tell though.
I appreciate the feedback, especailly since I had the misconception that the begining was better than the end. That information is useful asuming you wrote it, but this really feels like ChatGPT wrote it. If it didn’t, then I think that you need to be less verbose and have more focus. Not trying to insult you, but using ChatGPT and then going “ha you didn’t notice so it really has replaced writers” is what I got last time I tried to be charitable.
I don’t really see the Replica thing being any evidence of how amazing ai is. There are a surprising amount of people who feel genuine love for an inanimate sex doll, so in my view the Replica-stans have been playing pretend so long that they have created a personal madness. Its something that I’ve thought about for a while. I even used Replica at one point just to see, and I was amazed at how fake it seemed. It was like the Spongebob scene where you answer the door and the chocolate salesman says “I love you.”
I was very scared of AI for a long time because of how much effort I put into my writing. I felt like if I didn’t use chatGPT to write my commissions then I’d be left behind. I look back at my writing from that era and I feel kind of gross. I was able to write faster, but it was a crutch, and it read really, really bad. You could totally tell which parts I wrote and which part were edited by me. I was giving people an inferior product, and it made me feel bad. I stopped getting that many repeat customers during that era.
Now that I don’t do commissions anymore (unless you wanted me to write something), I put a lot of my focus on a novel I’m writing. I have written its words, and I will edit it into something that is uniquely mine. I really do not think that an individual writer’s prose is derivitave, precisley because I have tried and failed to use the paid version of AI tools to write some of my stories. I don’t think that it is a fair assumption that I am not a long term observer. While I wasnt there “from the begining”, I do still recognize the progression of AI. In a lot of ways I have seen negative progress, especially with ChatGPT. Over time it feels less like the ChatGPT I am familiar with and more like cleverbot.
I somewhat regularly use a different ai to write bash scripts, and it has been giving me more imaginary solutions. As a way to learn bash scripting it was a good tool, but after a while of reading its responses it is now quicker for me to just write my own. It feels more satisfying too, because I don’t find myself raging at how it gives me the same fake answer again and again.
LLMs make me unhappy because I don’t see any way that it is going to improve our lives. It just seems like a way to reward laziness and take away the joy of creating things. I can’t imagine how much worse it is going to make chat-based customer service, for example. The idea of a Comcast AI makes me shiver.
You said that you like keeping track of your writing streak. Have you tried giving yourself some sort of deadline and determining how many words per day you need to write in order to meet it? I think that I did not really improve much as a writer until I started to do commissions and had to obey deadlines.
I didn’t use any AI to critique your work or write my response to you. I am aware that people are really not able to distinguish between most humans writing and LLMs though, especially if the LLMs are given a good prompt. For instance, if you took the first half of your story, gave it to a good LLM with a good prompt and asked it to write a good ending, I don’t think random strangers would be able to tell which was which.
To be clear, about the beginning of your story, it may be that the beginning was good, and that the situation in which I read it was part of my unability to immediately immerse. I wasn’t expecting to all of a sudden be reading a fictional short story and so was possibly just going through the motions a bit more than someone who was excited to be enjoying a bit of art. Situation is very important I believe, you were not writing for this sort of situation I imagine.
I appreciate your feedback. I see writing strictly as a personal development tool. I have no ambition to use it to make money or impress people any more than cold showers, breathing exercises, meditation, lucid dreaming, or any other practice that I use for self improvement. Because of this I have no need to push myself to go to great lengths with it, it is more of a platonic thing for me. I have no desire to make things awkward by trying to get more from the relationship.
I do agree that ChatGPT specifically has been dumbed down a bit. I think that’s just a bit of corporate nature of it. The opensource local LLM community has really been thriving though, and that is where I expect lots of the most incredible progress to be made. After all, the world’s important computers all run on Linux, not Windows or iOS. It will take some more time, but I really think huge breakthroughs are not that far around the corner.
I saw it big time with the visual artists when disco diffusion(pre-dalle) and then eventually dalle came out, they went through a cycle of fear, anger, and then insulting the ability of programs. They were right, those early generations were awful. Now, just a short time later we have stable diffusion, midjourney, Dalle3 making some very impressive art, and nobody can really imagine where things will be in 5 years. I can’t imagine how upsetting it must be for people to watch as a force that they are powerless to stop consistently inches toward consuming the thing that they get most, if not all, of their personal worth from. To say it clouds their judgment and removes their ability to make realistic predictions of the future would be a gross understatement. I truly believe that we are headed towards a period of people being forced to look inwardly for their personal worth to an extent that many have never imagined. It worries me a bit that many people will refuse or be unable to look for it there, and I don’t really know what that will mean for a society with so many people who see themselves as so worthless. I think this is possibly the biggest immediate threat of AI on society. Even if we get basic income or whatever to cover all the jobloss, that doesn’t solve the problem of people hating themselves because their “special human ability” has been chewed up and spit out by an emotionless chunk of microscopic metal dots.
30 years ago laptops would make your lap go numb if you put it there, and only the wealthy had them. 20 years ago most people never used a personal touch screen. Now we fit many orders of magnitude more computing power than those original laptops into a device not much thicker than a touchscreen, and they are in the pockets of some of the poorest people on the planet. To think that 30 years from now authors will be seen any differently than the sweet old lady who makes her own hats simply is not realistic. Probably not even 10 years. The sooner people start looking at this situation objectively, the sooner they can start preparing for the future. The World changes in waves, learning to surf is way more useful than trying to convince yourself there’s no water.
That’s because the state of AI is “not good”. It’s nothing to do with being incapable of originality. Every word in that book has been written somewhere else. Write a book entirely comprised of brand new words and the reader won’t be able to understand it.
Originality is not binary, it exists on a scale. AI is just not very far up the scale just yet.