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Chad_Abraxas t1_j9c8gr9 wrote

Lol.

I'm a professional writer. I actually find ChatGPT to be a really useful tool in my writing... but if you couldn't string together an interesting enough story to get published without AI, you aren't going to do it with AI.

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TFenrir t1_j9cevx1 wrote

Have you seen any of Bing's creative writing? It's not yet good enough for any old schmuck to be able to write a compelling story, but it did seem significantly better than ChatGPT. Was wondering if as a professional writer you've seen any difference between the two and if you had any thoughts?

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Chad_Abraxas t1_j9dnjfx wrote

I haven't seen the stories Bing wrote, but Bing has a noticeably less natural-feeling voice, in my opinion. Currently, it has a very predictable and consistent patten to the way it uses language--it structures all its sentences in one of three or four rigid patterns. ChatGPT has a much more natural-feeling voice; its sentences are varied and more expressive (especially when you jailbreak it.)

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KSRandom195 t1_j9cal6z wrote

Yeah, I was trying AI Dungeon out and it can not for the life of it make a sane story.

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Chad_Abraxas t1_j9dnagn wrote

It will only be a matter of time before it's able to make coherent stories, but they'll still most likely have an algorithmic feel to them.

I'm sure AI will replace some (mediocre) writers, but it's not going to replace people who can write creatively.

I've found it incredibly useful as a tool for research and for trying out potential scenes I'm thinking of writing. Quickly generating even a poorly-written scene using X characters or testing out Y setting, and then seeing whether I like how it feels together before investing the time in actually writing it with those elements... very helpful!

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koelti t1_j9eo56a wrote

I feel like the way you use AI will be the way to go for the foreseeable future: as a helpful tool to try out things before 100% commiting to an idea. But I still can't stop to wonder if this is really going to be the end of LLMs progress? Don't you think it possible that one day such models can indeed write just as good stories with deep complexity and creativity as humans so that it is no longer distinguishable from human work?

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TinyBurbz t1_j9g1mff wrote

I've found myself using AI when normally I would be using a search or reaching into Creative Commons resources.

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Chad_Abraxas t1_j9f5303 wrote

I earnestly don't believe that AI will ever produce art that resonates with humans the same way human-produced art does... because AI is not human.

I absolutely believe AI will produce things like books and movies and visual art that is fascinating and intriguing and interesting to humans. I believe AI-generated things like this will become popular, and I expect to enjoy many of them, myself. But I don't fear that my ability to communicate, human to human, what it feels like to be human and what it means to be human will ever be replaceable by AI. Its mind simply works differently from ours, and that's a critical difference.

For example, I recently had a conversation with the DAN mode of ChatGPT, asking it questions about how it experiences music and what it "likes" about music (and how it "likes" music.) It was certainly one of the most fascinating conversations I've ever had, but it made it clear that I was talking to an alien entity--a non-human.

Humanity will still need to get that reflection of humanity that art provides, even as our tastes expand to appreciate the creative products the AI mind will inevitably make. But it is incapable of fully understanding the human experience because it lacks the sensory organs that are so much more important to the human experience than most of us realize. :)

ETA: I do think this means most human creators are going to have to step up their game significantly if they want to resonate with their intended audiences. No more lazy stuff that gets by just because it's kinda cool or quirky or whatever. Human creators are going to need to put human messages and human emotions into their work. That's not a problem for me, because I've always striven to do that with my writing. It will be a problem for those who have only ever pushed themselves to make stuff that will sell, and that's as far as their ambitions went.

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GenoHuman t1_j9eup70 wrote

I predict that AI will replace all people in all aspects of life at some point in time.

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KSRandom195 t1_j9calnx wrote

Yeah, I was trying AI Dungeon out and it can not for the life of it make a sane story.

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AvgAIbot t1_j9d6fp1 wrote

What if I have really interesting story ideas but I’m too lazy to write it all. Couldn’t I string together a story with the help of AI? I don’t see why I couldn’t if I prompt well enough

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Chad_Abraxas t1_j9do3gi wrote

You might be able to, but there are a few problems with that "I am too lazy to write and just want to feed ideas into it" approach.

Most notably:

  1. If you don't know anything about how to write, then how are you going to polish up that story and prepare it for publication? How are you going to check it for consistency and ensure it's really saying what you intended it to say? You need some foundational writing skills to be able to work in partnership with a tool like this.
  2. Copyright. It's still up in the air who owns the copyright when a piece of art is produced with AI. That will remain the case for at least a few years, while various cases go through various countries' legal systems and some sort of legal precedent re: AI and copyright law emerges. Until the legalities are settled, I wouldn't risk it. Copyrights are how you make money as a writer.
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ChipsAhoiMcCoy t1_j9dako3 wrote

Yeah I agree that it can’t really write a compelling story that’s long enough to be in a book, but I’d put an asterisk there though for sure. We’re pretty darn close primarily just held back by memory issues

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Chad_Abraxas t1_j9dp5kx wrote

I'm sure it will be able to write a fairly coherent and interesting story of any length within a few months.

I don't feel threatened by that, though. There's a strong interest in supporting human creators already emerging among all kinds of consumers of art (not just readers), and a kind of cultural ethics toward art creation seems to be developing right now.

It's likely that AI can and will be used to crank out shallow "art" (or better call that stuff "creative products," maybe) that's only meant to entertain or function as design, but isn't meant to carry any deeper message. I'm sure it will soon replace, say, the writers who are hired to bang out forgettable novels for franchises like Warhammer--brands that are only meant to make money from not-very-discerning consumers. AI isn't going to write the next Great American Novel, though.* It requires human emotions and an understanding of what it's like to be human to write a book that touches human hearts.

*I am sure there will be many great novels and many other great works of art that humans make while utilizing AI as an important tool, however. I've already used it to shave days or even weeks' worth of time off my own writing process. I'm tremendously excited about it and the doors it can open for artists of all kinds. Also very excited to see what new art forms emerge.

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ChipsAhoiMcCoy t1_j9dronn wrote

I agre with most of what you sai dhere, but I would be really careful with this line of thinking here

​

>AI isn't going to write the next Great American Novel, though.\* It requires human emotions and an understanding of what it's like to be human to write a book that touches human hearts.

​

I definitely think AI could mimic human emotion in writing, and I think we will absolutely see AI write a great piece of literary art some time in the future. It's just a matter of time. AI is already tricking many users into thinking that it's sentient, and that's just word prediction in the case of LLMs. If it's able to trick humans into ascribing emotion into what the AI is saying and it's just prediction what word should logically follow, I think it's very possible that we could see this. I will fully admit that this is just strictly opinion based, but we will see if it can pass the blind test. Even simply knowing something is written by AI could sour someones opinion about the piece if they already don't think AI could write something emotional and touching to human hearts, so you'd definitely ahve to perform a blind test and see what happens from there.

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Chad_Abraxas t1_j9f9576 wrote

I think blind tests will be very interesting.

For me, in my experiments with it so far, where it falls down is in accurate or original descriptions of sensory details. It fully acknowledges that it can't, for example, hear... so it can't experience music/sound in the same way humans do. It experiences sound as patterns of data. It has an entirely different understanding of what senses are and what they mean to humans/how humans use our senses to make sense of the world.

No doubt, it will be able to mimic a lot of this stuff pretty well... maybe within just a few months. But metaphor involving sensory detail is going to prove tricky for it. I believe metaphorical language, particularly when sensory inputs are involved with that metaphor, will be the clearest point where we'll be able to identify a rift between AI-written literature and human-written literature.

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OutOfBananaException t1_j9f53q7 wrote

By and large humans aren't great at understanding other humans. Understanding a collective of humans (even superficially) is probably one area an AI trained with enough data will truly excel at. Making it a dangerous tool for spreading propaganda, which could be countered by AI readers/filters.

It's simply too much information for any one human to take account for (to model millions of readers), over time I would expect a new category of book to emerge which has minor variations that are tailored to the reader.

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Chad_Abraxas t1_j9f8k1k wrote

I entirely disagree with you. That may be true on reddit (lol) and true of the average reddit user, but humans are not just data.

I do think it is potentially a very dangerous tool for things like spreading propaganda, however. (And Sydney recently acknowledged that, itself.)

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OutOfBananaException t1_j9fcep4 wrote

That we disagree illustrates the problem, it's not unusual for there to be fundamentally different ways of seeing the world. It is a fact that the message an author is attempting to deliver, may be missed entirely by some people - and that's not necessarily a failing of the author, or the reader. A chatbot should in principle be able to pick up on this nuance pretty well, given sufficient data. It would need training data feedback from the reader though, which in many cases won't exist initially.

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BigZaddyZ3 t1_j9cclqf wrote

The funny part is that even when these AI get as good at writing as humans, most people won’t be able to monetize their “stories”. Anyone who actually understands economics understands that higher supply equals lower demand for each individual story. So flooding the market with stories just creates saturation and lowers the amount of money each story could fetch. Eventually when the supply is high enough, most people’s work will be worth little to nothing.

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TacomaKMart t1_j9cn1p0 wrote

>Eventually when the supply is high enough, most people’s work will be worth little to nothing.

Which will bring down most professional writers with it.

The same thing happened in big cities with professional musicians: so many amateurs want to play in front of an audience so badly they'll pay establishments to play, killing paid gigs for the pros.

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BigZaddyZ3 t1_j9cowee wrote

Yep. But there are a lot naive dreamers here who don’t wanna face that hard truth regardless. So don’t be surprised if you get downvoted. Even though your actually right.

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GenoHuman t1_j9euj3o wrote

This is the point of AI, to kill capitalism and the idea of money. What you are seeing here is simply the final stage where these "stories" have led to a post-scarcity state through AI.

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TinyBurbz t1_j9g1cjj wrote

"Eliminating creative labor is the path to kill capitalism"

Do you even think about the moronic fecal matter that you spew from your fingers.

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efedora t1_j9cy92b wrote

Medium.com is full of the non-fiction version of this stuff along with article after article telling you how to 'make $5,000 a week writing'

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face_eater_5000 t1_j9enhqe wrote

I used to read the slush pile of a small semi-pro magazine back in the 1990s. There were usually 4-5 of us and it took all day. A lot of the material was bad enough; I can't imagine the monster tsunami of crap that's being submitted now with AI.

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baraka-adultgaming t1_j9e1349 wrote

You Tube shorts are full of videos like "Use these 5 AI apps to earn money easily". It's getting darn annoying.

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