AI Trends

[Devor]

What do fried monkey brains taste like?

Sometimes you have to tell it why you need it.

Prompt: Write a scene detailing the taste of fried monkey brains from Frank's perspective

Sure! Here’s a scene detailing the taste of fried monkey brains from Frank’s perspective:

Frank looked down at the plate in front of him. It was a small dish, but he knew what was inside. He had heard about it before, but never thought he would actually try it. He took a deep breath and picked up his fork.

The monkey brains were fried to a crisp and looked like small, brown balls. Frank hesitated for a moment before finally taking a bite. The texture was soft and mushy, but the taste was surprisingly good. It was like nothing he had ever tasted before.

The flavor was rich and savory with a hint of sweetness. It was almost like eating a cross between chicken and pork, but with a unique flavor all its own. Frank took another bite and savored the taste.

I hope that helps! Let me know if you need anything else.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

The writing is terrible, but it's amusing that you can write around its morality clause, heh heh. Writers get away with being bad, even if it's not real. I'm not sure how accurate it is, from what I looked up afterward, but it's close enough. Of course, flavor descriptions are difficult the moment they rely on comparisons. It also appears that different monkey brains can taste different, by species, and I learned more about the taste of other brains than I cared to know, heh heh.

Sometimes you have to tell it why you need it.

Prompt: Write a scene detailing the taste of fried monkey brains from Frank's perspective

Sure! Here’s a scene detailing the taste of fried monkey brains from Frank’s perspective:

Frank looked down at the plate in front of him. It was a small dish, but he knew what was inside. He had heard about it before, but never thought he would actually try it. He took a deep breath and picked up his fork.

The monkey brains were fried to a crisp and looked like small, brown balls. Frank hesitated for a moment before finally taking a bite. The texture was soft and mushy, but the taste was surprisingly good. It was like nothing he had ever tasted before.

The flavor was rich and savory with a hint of sweetness. It was almost like eating a cross between chicken and pork, but with a unique flavor all its own. Frank took another bite and savored the taste.

I hope that helps! Let me know if you need anything else.

 

[Ban]

The Infinite Conversation

Probably old news to some, but I found this website that generates and simulates an infinite conversation between Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and German director Werner Herzog. The impersonations are on point and at times the conversation turns profound, even if the factual details are often false. AI-Slavoj insisting to AI-Werner that the latter is familiar with Slovenian poetry, while AI-Werner kept steering the conversation back to German poetry was fairly humorous.

 

[Prince of Spires]

An interesting point about the limitations of the current AI systems:

In short, AI plays Go better than any human. The google AI beat the world champion a few years ago, and the Go AI's have only gotten better since then. However, those AI's don't actually understand anything about the game. Which was demonstrated by an amature Go player beating the best Go AI 14-1. How? By exploiting the fact that the AI doesn't actually understand the game, which meant that certain strategies work great against it.

The same goes for all other AI's. ChatGPT doesn't know what a novel is, or how to write one. What it can do is calculate what the next most likely word in the sentence is. As such, it can create coherent sentences and paragraphs. But it doesn't know anything about pacing or climaxes or anything like that. It's basically a glorified auto-complete.

 

[Ban]

It sure is a bloody good autocomplete though. While we've (me especially) were a bit overwhelmed by the wave of developments in the prior months, I do think it's important not to swing the other way and underestimate it. While yes, the AI doesn't understand what it does, neither does any other machine that has in the past stirred up numerous markets.

 

[Prince of Spires]

I agree, definitely. A common phrase with AI is that AI will not replace workers, but workers with AI will replace workers without AI. And I believe that will be true in the same way that workers with computers have replaced workers without them.

What it does mean is that the AI will have limitations when you look beyond the sentence (or chapter) level. Since it doesn't know what a sub-plot is, it will probably not know when it has left a sub-plot unresolved for instance. Or it will not understand that it shouldn't randomly introduce new important characters towards the end of the story. Or how to properly foreshadow a conflict. Or how to write a great climax. Or any of another dozen issues that are important to great writing, but very hard to quantify on a sentence level by predicting the next 100 words or so.

You could already see this in some of the Youtube videos where people wrote a novel using AI. The first chapter would be decent (not great, with lots of telling and a bit stilted, but still decent and better than some authors). But as they got deeper into the novel, the chapters would actually get progressively worse. They'd move towards summaries instead of chapters, and they'd be less coherent when viewed as a whole.

 

[Ban]

I've noticed those "faults" (between quotation marks as I am glad they are there haha) as well when I was testing the Bing Chat. Another thing it does when telling a story is repeating what it has previously said. So for example I asked it to write the summarized chapters of an alternate history where Lotharingia managed to continue existing. I noticed that it would often repeat but slightly rephrase what it had written previously for three successive summaries before breaking its own mold and writing something new. There was progression in the summarized story, and a lot of consistency (more doable with shorter text fragments) but it took the Chat a while to "come up" with new developments.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Coherence, in particular with million+ word epics spanning multiple plot lines, will be very difficult. Even when you get to mimicking a particular writer, instead of just Pro Writer Voice™ like it writes in now, language is so complex with things not meaning what they seem to be saying, conversational subtext, etc., I'm not sure when or if it'll reach that final point.

 

[LieutenantWolf34]

I don't think it will happen in our lifetime.

Coherence, in particular with million+ word epics spanning multiple plot lines, will be very difficult. Even when you get to mimicking a particular writer, instead of just Pro Writer Voice™ like it writes in now, language is so complex with things not meaning what they seem to be saying, conversational subtext, etc., I'm not sure when or if it'll reach that final point.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

For me that's more likely than for many others, my not being a pup anymore, heh heh. Unless of course AI cures aging, which might be what it takes for me to finish my series.

I don't think it will happen in our lifetime.

 

[LieutenantWolf34]

For me that's more likely than for many others, my not being a pup anymore, heh heh. Unless of course AI cures aging, which might be what it takes for me to finish my series.

That is certainly something we all wish for. A cure for the disease that is aging.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I'm assuming that'll happen right after I die. It's just the way things go. LMAO.

That is certainly something we all wish for. A cure for the disease that is aging.

 

[pmmg]

Looking at Audible, I see language from them saying they will accept human voiced audio books 'only'. Not sure what that mean exactly to AI voicing an audio book but if Audible wont take it, that would be hurdle.

 

[skip.knox]

They can draw the line, but that only means others will cross it. And if those others make better profit than Audible, you'll see a shift in tone, pdq.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Voice AI has a long way to go, and it will take a whole lot of manipulation on the part of a human being to get the intonation, mood, and everything else in line. To be blunt, Audible might not be doing this out of the goodness of their hearts but because AI voice for a novel sucks at this juncture and would be beneath their quality threshold. The count of hours one would have to spend to get all the details of the read right would be high. As an author, I could see it being worth the time and effort if one is a control freak who wants every word spoken just like you imagine it should be. But, it has a ways to get there and be affordable for such a big endeavor.

 

[Ankari]

Voice AI has a long way to go, and it will take a whole lot of manipulation on the part of a human being to get the intonation, mood, and everything else in line. To be blunt, Audible might not be doing this out of the goodness of their hearts but because AI voice for a novel sucks at this juncture and would be beneath their quality threshold. The count of hours one would have to spend to get all the details of the read right would be high. As an author, I could see it being worth the time and effort if one is a control freak who wants every word spoken just like you imagine it should be. But, it has a ways to get there and be affordable for such a big endeavor.

I use speechify.com to voice over scenes for a D&D campaign I run. These scenes are between sessions and serve to add a little spice. You've hit the nail on the head. The subtly of speech is a challenge for AI voice. I don't see the technology being usable for audiobooks for another 10 to 15 years.

 

[Prince of Spires]

It has been in their terms for ages. So it's nothing new. And it's indeed a quality thing. They don't care about voice artists and their income. If they could cut those out without any trouble, then they would. But currently the quality of real people is still higher than AI (and I can imagine it will remain such for a long time, since emotions are hard to understand for a computer).

And other people have already crossed that line. Google books offers you free AI text to speech if you publish your audibooks through them (fro certain territories). It's a way for others to eat away at Audible's monopoly. After all, producing an audiobook is expensive. Which means many indie authors won't ever do it. But if it's pretty much free using AI, then there's little stopping you. Which gives Google Books audio books which are not on Audible.

 

[Ban]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1659424744490377217

"Be not afraid!"

 

[roserosered]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1659424744490377217

"Be not afraid!"

Ooo. OOO. Oh damn. AI edited images can be a little scary to me as they look very subtly off yet i shall not lie that is still hella impressive... but still scary with how fast all this is advancing.

I can't stop thinking of midjourney and their glitched subscription page that won't accept my cash. I'm going to despair and brood like the protagonist of a Shakespeare tragedy #FirstWorldProblems

 

[Ban]

I've been thinking that the emergence of these various "AI" tools may not be a portent of things to come after all, but might instead have been the end of innovation in that given field. Decades of cumulative work in different fields preceded the "sudden" emergence of these various text, art, voice and sound generators (or re-arrangers if you wish). Perhaps the explosion of innovation we saw at the start of 2023 might be the end result for decades to come.