[HN Gopher] Photoshop for Text
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Photoshop for Text
Author : kepano
Score : 54 points
Date : 2022-10-18 20:43 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stephanango.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stephanango.com)
| mlsu wrote:
| I cannot stand the idea of this. I know it's coming, I know I
| can't stop it, but it will be a catastrophic loss.
|
| Most people are bad at writing. This will make them "better" at
| writing, but only in a certain way. I love reading things people
| write, because it gives me a window into their mind, how they
| think, who they _are_ at a deep level. That is the joy of
| reading, and the structure of writing is a big part of that.
|
| Now, a lot of people's writing has become homogenized by the
| computerization of our world already, but only at a low level:
| spelling, basic grammar, and so on.
|
| When people have the ability to inpaint whole paragraphs, dreamed
| from the blob of internet text (which is mostly corporatized,
| computerized, email-ized, sterile in the way described above) we
| will lose something essential.
|
| And another problem arises. I send an email asking something, to
| a coworker or to a friend. They inpainted their response. Did
| they really understand what I was asking? Did we really
| communicate at all?
|
| Images, I guess, suffer from the same problem. But images are
| less interpersonal. They are communication, but not communication
| like writing is communication. In nearly all circumstances,
| images are less subtle than words are (the subtlety of visual
| communication happens irl, where such machines have yet to insert
| themselves).
| eimrine wrote:
| > Up until now, text editors have been focused on input. The next
| evolution of text editors will make it easy to alter
|
| Vim can do this, not in the sence you putting into the article
| but at least it does it without requiring using anything else
| except 3 rows of keyboard.
|
| > Text filters will allow you to paraphrase text, so that you can
| switch easily between styles of prose: literary, technical,
| journalistic, legal, and more.
|
| Pfff. Styles of prose are: trolling, documenting, cat-talking,
| legal and just making a list of something. Trolling cannot be
| augmented, documenting feature begs of some connections to
| reality, proper cat-talking requires throwing a lot of synonyms
| really fast, legal is kind of Java programming when you type one
| line and get 40, and augmenting lists might be done with either
| md-style but without requiring to draw every symbol of that ascii
| tables or excel-style but without gui.
| jakear wrote:
| What do you mean by "cat-talking" here? Bing doesn't yield
| much.
| Minor49er wrote:
| You don't want Bing. You want Bengal
| yreg wrote:
| > Vim can do this, not in the sence you putting into the
| article
|
| So in what sense? Some other irrelevant sense?
| oliverbennett wrote:
| Some people are better at writing than editing, some people are
| better at editing than writing.
|
| I find it necessary to heavily edit when writing - up to, and
| including, this comment. I don't mind it, and I don't mind doing
| it to other people's writing either, so this new way of doing
| things appeals to me.
|
| I'd be interested to hear what anyone who's able one-shot their
| writing thinks of this. I feel like that type of person may have
| less of a desire for this kind of stuff?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| There's an area where we've been way, way ahead of the curve for
| 70 years now.
|
| It's sound.
|
| Long before GPT, image synthesis, video deep-fakes and these
| imagined "Photoshop for words", we had sound synthesis.
|
| That's a very useful marker. Because we can read the things
| people were saying about the future of sound, their hopes, fears
| and predictions as far back as the 1960s when Robert Moog and
| Wendy Carlos were patching modular synths.
|
| Most of the fears and predictions turned out to be rubbish.
| Musicians, orchestras and live events didn't get replaced.
| Instead we invented synth-pop bands.
|
| And many of the things technologists imagined people would want
| to do, turned out to be way off the mark. To my knowledge Isao
| Tomita was the only talented artist to "replace an orchestra"
| with synthesisers. Most people who used the tools "as intended"
| were artless, and forgettable. Everyone else ran riot in the
| parameter space - messing and subverting the technology to get
| the weirdest punk-ass squelches and wobbles possible.
|
| So I always have to look on these "How synthetic X is going to
| make the real X obsolete" with a pinch of salt.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| > So I always have to look on these "How synthetic X is going
| to make the real X obsolete" with a pinch of salt.
|
| From your comment, it seems that the linked article is far more
| fear-mongering than it is; I gathered a mostly optimistic tone
| from it.
|
| The final paragraph -
|
| > While some of these capabilities sound a bit scary at first,
| they will eventually become as mundane as "desaturate",
| "Gaussian blur" or any regular image filter, and unlock new
| creative potential.
| [deleted]
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I think there's difference between synthesizers, which I would
| compare to something like different paints and brushes and
| papers, and then Photoshop and Corel draw and whatnot; and
| where image generators are heading which is more analogous to
| automatic music generation.
|
| I will also put it forward that for reasons I'm ignorant of,
| eye seems to be more readily fooled than ear. 20 years ago with
| crappy tools all I had to do was smudge and clone a hydrant in
| a photo and it would effectively be gone for 99% of observers.
| But similarly primitive ways of trying to change or later a
| sound file were immediatelly noticed by all listeners.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| Well, discrete images are an approximation/sampling of some kind
| of continuous process in nature. We therefore have a whole
| arsenal of tools to process this signal, ie photoshop.
|
| Text? I'm not sure what kind of model we have here. Only now that
| we have word embedding and other nlp models can we hope to do the
| same kind of thing we do with text as we do with images?
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Text style transfer or paraphrasing/rewriting without spending
| big bucks on fine-tuning a language model would be nice.
| dwrodri wrote:
| I think if you'd like a sample of what the author of the post is
| referring to, go checkout the Hemingway text editor[1]. It's very
| simple, and as far as I know makes no use of the advanced
| language models that have been in vogue for the past few years.
|
| Grammarly[2] also have a desktop app that appears to offer
| editing advice, although generally I think they're focused on
| grammatical correctness over anything else.
|
| The question I'm left asking myself at the end of the article is,
| to what end do we need to edit text like Photoshop? Part of me
| sees this "Photoshop for Text" as something that would be akin to
| "No Code" tech stacks. Good No-Code/Low-Code solutions usually
| allow to build specific classes of products (websites, 3D assets)
| in ways that are faster than the status quo. But anyone who
| spends enough time in a No Code stack eventually hits the wall
| where the people who designed the tool had to sacrifice the
| flexibility of text for the convenience of a GUI.
|
| I yearn for the day that we can set a language model loose on
| something like the NCBI database or arXiv and have it point out
| open problems in the field to new PhD students. Or have it figure
| out whether my ablation studies make sense. Or an AI that can
| generate math proofs for me. A lot of this linked to model
| interpretability and understanding, but I think the work that
| DeepMind is doing is showing that there might be a way to utilize
| this stuff in expert domains sooner than we think.
|
| 1: https://hemingwayapp.com/
|
| 2: https://www.grammarly.com/
|
| 3: https://andys.page/posts/how-to-draw/#
| CacheRules wrote:
| Do people really want to read machine generated fluff?
| luisegr wrote:
| iI have read stuff generated by LaMDA and it is really good at
| generating synthesis of any topic, I like more what it
| generates than what I read on wikipedia
| aziaziazi wrote:
| The essaie focuses on image and I can't help making the parallel
| with digital sound editing tools, which are [in my very
| uneducated opinion] more numerous and diverse.
| vanadium1st wrote:
| Autocomplete in Gmail has been getting more and more robust. At
| first it only suggested grammatical correction in words. Later it
| started giving advice on better sentence structure and then it
| just started suggesting whole sentences. Each of those steps I
| loved. More often then not it just says what I wanted to say,
| with less button pushes, and without all of the mistakes that I
| make as a non-native english speaker. I sound smarter in gmail
| and I like it.
|
| If I didn't have this experience, then giving the machine any
| input on what I write would seem crazy to me. I would think that
| language is too personal, too contextual, that I need control
| over every word and every letter.
|
| But now I love writing with the help of the machine. It still
| feels like me speaking, the machine doesn't add any extra context
| that I don't approve of. It really feels like the messages are
| still mine, and the autocomplete just helps me extract my
| thoughts from my head in a better and more effective way.
| bugfix-66 wrote:
| Imagine how your brain is atrophying. 1. (of
| body tissue or an organ) waste away, especially as a result of
| the degeneration of cells, or become vestigial during
| evolution. "without exercise, the muscles will
| atrophy"
| oscribinn wrote:
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