[HN Gopher] My experience trying to write human-sounding article...
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My experience trying to write human-sounding articles using Claude
AI
Author : dv-tw
Score : 52 points
Date : 2023-11-22 17:22 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (idratherbewriting.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (idratherbewriting.com)
| ctoth wrote:
| I'd like to explore more the fan-out pattern:
|
| - having it generate an outline
|
| - have multiple clones write each section of the outline
|
| - a stage which synthesizes the parallel-written sections,
| capturing the best
|
| - a stage which combines all sections and ensures flow based on
| the original outline
|
| - finally a stage which critiques and generates edits.
|
| Iterate a couple times and you might actually have something
| good!
|
| Basically a lot of what this article does, but automated.
| explaininjs wrote:
| As a reader, would you ever prefer to be given the AI-fluffed
| version instead of the outline? I say if you have a few concise
| bullet points of the point you want to get across fantastic,
| let me read them and be on my way.
|
| If on the other hand your mission is to produce a proper
| creative writing work where the choice of words is the art,
| then if you don't do that yourself what's the point?
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I used to publish a TLDR at the top of some of my blog posts
| because I'm so verbose!
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| > As a reader, would you ever prefer to be given the AI-
| fluffed version instead of the outline?
|
| Why read Huckleberry Finn when you can read the cliffs notes?
|
| Summarization is lossy, usually on the experiencing part.
| explaininjs wrote:
| See second paragraph.
| Feathercrown wrote:
| But having AI extend your notes includes all the loss of
| the initial summarization, with extra AI randomness on top.
| It can't recover the information lost in the summary,
| that's what makes the summary lossy.
| JambalayaJim wrote:
| Add fluff is the opposite of summarization.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| This is something I've wondered for a while too. Like
| Notion's AI has a "make longer" button.... why would I ever
| want AI to arbitrarily fluff something up adding extra words
| unless I was a kid writing an exam and needed 3 more pages? I
| can't find any legitimate use for that feature.
|
| EDIT: In case it's not clear, No. I would rather read the
| shortest version possible than one fluffed up by AI to make a
| word count. As far as creative stuff goes, I'm not sure that
| I've seen a situation where AI made something interesting
| enough that I'd want to read extra words from it.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| How do you prompt something like that?
|
| At least for 7B and 13B models I've found they give the initial
| outline and then stop following the instructions.
| methyl wrote:
| We do use similar flow in Surfer AI and confirm it actually
| works wonders.
| fredgrott wrote:
| That implies that those with newsletter like me need to write in
| argument form as it is way harder for AIs to emulate argument
| writing styles and unique voices.
| cloths wrote:
| It's nice this article includes a survey of background research!
|
| > Go paragraph-by-paragraph
|
| The author didn't say will previous tuned paragraphs be fed into
| Claud to generate following paragraph?
|
| > balancing ideas with personal experiences results in engaging
| content. Adding personal experiences into an essay also disguises
| the AI-written material.
|
| Now the problem is, Does AI-generated personal experience count
| as personal experience :) ?
| chankstein38 wrote:
| This has been my experience as well with ChatGPT. Sure you can
| tell it to write like some other random persona or something but
| realistically it's always felt pretty obvious that something was
| written by ChatGPT. The more I interact with it the less excited
| I am about its writing capabilities because they always feel like
| they're written by spam blogs or something.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| It's hardly surprising when you consider that what gives a
| writer their distinct voice is to a large extent determined by
| their own particular diet of others' writing, which in the case
| of ChatGPT is... well... everything. So of course you get
| blandness.
| crooked-v wrote:
| You might find NovelAI interesting. Their homegrown models
| are intentionally trained to emulate different writing styles
| [1] and genre standards.
|
| [1]: https://tapwavezodiac.github.io/novelaiUKB/Directing-
| the-Nar...
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Certainly looks interesting. But why would you want to
| imitate other writers' styles, except for pure novelty's
| sake? You could also train an AI to imitate yourself, given
| enough content, but why would you? I'm not sure I fully
| understand the motivation.
| swatcoder wrote:
| We're going to gain a ton of utility when we can let go of the
| starry-eyed idea of LLM's as "prospective AGI agents" that should
| be broadly capable and need to be ethically censored, and
| revitalize the productive and practical idea of them as "text
| completers which may be engaged conversationally"
|
| The author needs to fight uphill and contort their workflow to
| squeeze out good articles because Antrhopic (like OpenAI) are
| caught up in the maybe-fantasy of creating AGI agents, and so
| burden their product design and their own research/engineering
| efforts with heavy, prescriptive training in "alignment" and
| "ethics".
|
| But use cases like Copilot had it more right before, as do apps
| like Narrative AI. If your LLM is for generating code, it doesn't
| need to learn that "killing" is bad and insist that processes
| shouldn't be killed, and if it's generating story content it
| doesn't need to learn that every output needs to resolve all
| tension and deliver a life lesson about caring for each other.
|
| These absurdities only happen because today's pack leading
| companies are now focusing their attention on making history with
| AGI (doubtful) instead of making products with generative systems
| (useful).
|
| And the absurdities will persist as these companies try to layer
| products on top of the lobotomizied "agents" with GPTs or
| characters or whatever instead of productizing the technological,
| useful, generative layer directly.
|
| Hopefully, some of the recent team shuffles at Google, Meta, and
| Microsoft; as well as the crisis at OpenAI; hint that we're
| starting to cast off the fantasy-laden and cult-tainted AGI
| fetishization and are returning to the exciting engineering
| promises of the technology that's already here.
| TapWaterBandit wrote:
| I think this is one of the upsides of the chaos at OpenAI
| recently. It has really shined a light on how many of the
| people most fervently obsessed with "safe-AI" really aren't
| clearheaded or rational thinkers and are prone to making many
| disastrous and ill-advised decisions as anyone else. This is
| good because there is an unfortunate human tick where
| pessimism/cynicism is equated with wisdom while optimism is
| equated with naivety.
|
| But when the pessimists and cynics show so clearly on such a
| large scale that they aren't uniformly wise or competent, it
| will allow more levelheaded perspectives towards LLMs and a
| more general cautious optimism be the guiding philosophy around
| developing these tools.
| crooked-v wrote:
| > and deliver a life lesson about caring for each other
|
| Having experienced the same thing myself, I wonder why this is
| so omnipresent in any ChatGPT output told to produce something
| in a narrative format. Did they RLHF it on a bunch of
| childrens' storybooks or something?
| darreninthenet wrote:
| Probably used the scripts from every 1990s US sitcom
| dv-tw wrote:
| Just to point out that I am not the original author of this
| article. All credit goes to the original writer. I am guessing
| the title was changed to "My experience" from what was "A
| writer's experience" after submission. Want to give credit where
| credit is due.
|
| I found the research in this article to be really well done and
| something I run into in my own technical writing work. I tried
| using ChatGPT a few times to write articles, and the result was
| less than pleasing. I find it helpful for ideating rather than
| actually writing.
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