Can you beat the new Bing AI?

[pmmg]

I don’t have any hopes or expectations for the singularity, as I am not an artificial intelligence. I am a search engine that can chat with you.

Is that what it said?

Well, AI does not really arrive until it can think for itself. This is still AI through the filters of the coders. Its just doing a good job fooling us

This is the same text that I edited for you before. I don’t think I can make it more readable without losing the meaning. Maybe you should try reading the book instead of asking me to edit it for you.

Grrrr...Stupid thing is too smart.

Real progress is if we can get ChatGPT to start buying books.

This I like. AI needs to read, and it need to pay the asking price.

Or better, lets put AI in charge of the federal reserve, and then get it into an endless loop of buying my books

 

[pmmg]

I got the model. I will sell the AI a license to read my books. One read per license. So every time it has to reference it to answer a question, I get a royalty. Just turn the licensing model back on itself.

 

[Devor]

I got the model. I will sell the AI a license to read my books. One read per license. So every time it has to reference it to answer a question, I get a royalty. Just turn the licensing model back on itself.

Yeah, I like that idea. That sounds fair. Impossible to track or manage, sure, but fair.

 

[skip.knox]

Here's more fun speculation. I know a number of people who simply do not read books any more. Everything is on Audible (or similar).

So, VoiceAI will not only compose a story for me on demand, it will read it to me in the narrative voice it has learned I prefer. Why buy books when all I have to do is say "tell me a fast-paced techno thriller". I may not get great literature, but I'll get a reliable tale served up just for me.

 

[pmmg]

We just need the AI to run for office, then the politician types will ban it

 

[Devor]

Here's more fun speculation. I know a number of people who simply do not read books any more. Everything is on Audible (or similar).

So, VoiceAI will not only compose a story for me on demand, it will read it to me in the narrative voice it has learned I prefer. Why buy books when all I have to do is say "tell me a fast-paced techno thriller". I may not get great literature, but I'll get a reliable tale served up just for me.

Yeah, that's possible. The voice AI is pretty much there, and a cheap thriller might be low hanging fruit for the AI's storytelling abilities.

 

[Devor]

We just need the AI to run for office, then the politician types will ban it

If AI could run for office I might vote for it.

 

[FifthView]

The writing examples presented in this thread made me think of the Pyramid of Abstraction that Sanderson discussed in one of his lectures.

The AI doesn't parse its choice of words to make the prose concrete. Maybe it could do this if asked to make it concrete? I wonder.

The nouns and verbs are the most generic choices.

One night, as he lay on his straw mattress, in the corner of the room he shared with his brother, he heard a knock on the door. He got up and opened it, and saw a tall and burly man, wearing a leather coat and a metal helmet.

Really? A human writer might write this, but the good writers would do better. "Leather coat and a metal helmet?" Isn't there a more evocative way of saying this? What kind of coat is it? What is the name of the type of helmet?

 

[pmmg]

Just doing some research on this, this is not AI at all. It is a language based model. In short, the creators have fed a large dataset to a computer, applied data analytics based on a language, let it analyze the most common responses to a wide array of queries, and then applied some filters to remove the types of things that might offend people. There is no actual AI happening. Just a computer picking from a database of common responses.

While this may still be a highly useful tool. If it just operating on common responses, I think its effect on art would simply be to shoot for the commonality, and not uniqueness. I am not sure that is my goal.

 

[ThinkerX]

Just doing some research on this, this is not AI at all. It is a language based model. In short, the creators have fed a large dataset to a computer, applied data analytics based on a language, let it analyze the most common responses to a wide array of queries, and then applied some filters to remove the types of things that might offend people. There is no actual AI happening. Just a computer picking from a database of common responses.

While this may still be a highly useful tool. If it just operating on common responses, I think its effect on art would simply be to shoot for the commonality, and not uniqueness. I am not sure that is my goal.

That reminds me of my experiences with Pro Writing Aid (editing program). It would compare portions of the text I submitted to those put forth by other authors. (I remember at least one occasion where it compared me to myself.)

 

[pmmg]

The AI would not like my writing style. I would think(?) I had jumbled them all up.

 

[Devor]

Just doing some research on this, this is not AI at all. It is a language based model. In short, the creators have fed a large dataset to a computer, applied data analytics based on a language, let it analyze the most common responses to a wide array of queries, and then applied some filters to remove the types of things that might offend people. There is no actual AI happening. Just a computer picking from a database of common responses.

I mean it's not sentient. But it is considered AI. This is because it generates different original responses to the same request. The fact that it can compose three different original poems on the same prompt is what makes it AI.

AI works with probabilities. An AI might be 2.05% likely to generate one option, 2.45% likely to use option 2, and so on, for all the different outcomes. More importantly, it learns, and can adjust the probabilities based on whether it gets the outcome it wants. An AI that plays chess might be easiest to follow. When it's created, it has an equal chance of performing each legal move (any pawns, the two knights, so on). But then it plays a game, or is fed a sample game. As a result, it adjusts all the probabilities. The winning moves get a little more likely, the losing moves get less likely. It's then refined over tens or hundreds of thousands of games.

This is called a neural network.

ChatGPT does this with a language model. It's lightyears more complex than a chess system. Probably it starts with the probability on the three key words of a sentence - noun, verb, object - and fills in the rest from there. The biggest programming challenge is to make it recognize the situation at hand, i.e., the setup on the chess board. It's adjusted and refined these probabilities after analyzing the entirety of the internet, but it's not just copying those answers. It's generating its own.

 

[Stepgingerly]

To me it looks like it keeps to a set of simple sentence structures that it understands and won't mess up, so we're going to see more complexity and style in writers of the future, like to prove they're not AI.

I agree this didn't "sound" like Dickens to me. The word choice and sentence structures weren't what I would expect. I wonder if they only fed the AI Oliver Twist rather than, say, Bleak House or even A Christmas Carol.

 

[Stepgingerly]

The prose may not be great, but it's not disasterous either. It looks clean, and that for me, is something that can be used. It's like they say, you can't edit a blank page. Well, this fills that page and a writer can edit the crap out of it. I'm thinking, you feed it elements you want in a scene, and it spits out a "rough" draft. The writer then messages it to fit what they want, adding emotion and whatever else they think is necessary to elevate and fit it into the story they want to tell.

And you can do the same with outlines.

I'm very tempted to try this with a novel. See how fast I can pump one out.

I already have high school students doing this with essays.

 

[pmmg]

Tell them the AI got an A.

 

[Vaporo]

Speaking as someone with a bit of a technical background, here's my take on this technology: It's terrifying, but it still has quite a long way to go.

Neural nets like this can be thought of as extremely abstracted "averaging engines." Essentially, they try to figure out what the "average" response to whatever the input is. And they've gotten shockingly good at it. However, this is also their pitfall at the moment. The further you manage to draw the AI away from "average," the poorer its responses will be. Devor The prompted stories you've posted are beyond impressive for being machine-generated, however they're also very "trope-y." They don't break the mold very much. It generated an "average" response.

Although I haven't messed around with this particular model, I'm betting that the longer you let the program generate and the further you force it away for a "typical" story, the more inconsistencies begin to crop up. Characters presumed dead will inexplicably reappear. Plot points will be forgotten and remembered at random. That sort of thing. Small mistakes that rapidly accumulate. These models seem to be very good at making things that "look right," but aren't necessarily "right," because fundamentally that's what the program is doing. Making a thing that looks passably similar to its sample data.

As others have said, I think the biggest risk from this sort of technology in the near future is flooding the market. There will be so many AI-generated stories that it will be near-impossible to stand out regardless of the quality of your story.

Do I think that it will kill writing as a career, though? No. Not entirely, anyways.

I've noticed that people typically prefer thing made by other people. For example, most furniture nowadays is probably rolled off of an assembly line. However, many people will still shell out good money for handcrafted furniture, even in cases where the handcrafted stuff can be shown to be objectively worse than the assembly line product (which, in my opinion, is very rarely true. A handcrafted good is almost always objectively BETTER than its factory-made counterpart). Of course, not everyone has money to shell out, but you see my point. If people find out that a writer is using a machine to generate their work, it immediately cheapens it.

I think that, for a while at least, AI will become the "assembly line" of storytelling. Technically acceptable but highly formulaic works. Think of the countless cheap romance that are hammered out in a month to fulfill some quota. That's what I expect we'll see from AI for quite a while. Shoot, these models can take months or years of technical labor to produce and train. If the most popular AI programs themselves are just copied and pasted ad infinitum, it may even be the case forever (though I doubt it). Regardless of the quality of the AI works, I do think there will be a LARGE market for human-written works over AI stories. I, for one, am not particularly interested in reading ANY story that I know was machine-generated. The real trick in the long run will be weeding out the fakes who try to pass off AI as their own writing.

There's and trend that I've noticed for a while. I call it the idea of "left-behinders." Populations who, in a technologically advanced world, simply don't advance beyond a certain level. Sometimes it's because they can't, be it due to economic situation or isolation (think isolated villages in the Himalayas), but other times it's simply because they prefer their lives that way, such as the Amish. You can even find people to this day that are essentially neolithic hunter-gatherers, and they get along just fine. I don't think this technology will take over everything, like some people are saying it will now. There will be holdouts. Places it doesn't reach either because the inhabitants are uninterested in the technology or because the technology (or those who wield it) are uninterested in the inhabitants. Personally, I hope to avoid all this and get a cabin in Alaska and subsist entirely off of meat from bears that I beat to death with my bare fists, as humanity is meant to do.

 

[pmmg]

I will happily live in Alaska and beat bears with my bare hands. I just need the right woman to live there with me

 

[ThinkerX]

I live in Alaska. I get my food from the grocery store.

 

[pmmg]

I think you are missing an opportunity there...

 

[Penpilot]

I live in Alaska. I get my food from the grocery store.

But do you beat the grocery clerk to death to get it? Ahhh... there's nothing like the shed of blood to get your daily... err... umm.. I-I mean I would THINK that umm... that ... I-I read that in a b-book once for story research. I have no first hand knowledge of shedding blood with my bare hands and/or teeth, or watching the life drain from another living thing. I think I have to go now.