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by Applejinx 1070 days ago
No, not really. The body of text GPT is trained on gets its own interpretation of 'but' and 'therefore'. If you feed it 'therefore' maybe it'll start writing legal documents. If you feed it 'but' maybe it'll just contradict itself, or express some triviality.

What you'd need for Matt and Trey style 'but' and 'therefore' is entire prompts being introduced in the background and switched out. Imagine thousands of words of prompt. 'but' means, fundamentally obstruct something about where your whole prompt is heading, like a screenwriter introducing a twist that must be resolved before the story can continue. 'therefore' means describe something that unfolds obviously as a result of all that's been introduced in the prompt.

These are not sentence-level issues, not output-level stuff. These are prompt level. More than that, they're prompt level with intentionality: you have to understand how a 'but' will fundamentally obstruct your prompt, how a 'therefore' will integrate both your original prompt and the obstruction.

Assume you have to coherently switch around your prompt introducing new fundamentals, and still have that make sense. It might get you rather formulaic results (but, Luke loses his mentor! therefore he must study and meditate and get to the final goal through his own transcendence!) but that just shows you it's working. That's how you get from a pile of arbitrary time-wasting, to a capital S Story.

From there on out, it's about which stories to tell, how far you can depart from the norms while still providing the intentionality and purpose, and what the purpose is :)
1 comments
fnordpiglet 1070 days ago
I think that’s sort of unfair and untrue, have you used GPT? Yes if you naively use “therefore” you might. But it explicitly semantically matches the context. If the context is a south park story and with prompting in the context of how to respond to trailing therefores it will almost certainly follow the semantic context prompted with. Now - is it as good as Matt and Trey? Of course not! It’ll produce a relatively bland imitation.
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