[klabb3]

> As impressive as GPT-3/4 has been at writing, what's more shocking is just how bullshity-y human writing is..

Yeah. Most people have focused on what LLMs can do, but I think it’s equally if not more interesting what can they not do, and why?

When we say LLMs can generate text we’re painting brush strokes as broad as a 10-lane highway. Apparently we have quite limited vocabulary about what writing actually is, and specifically what categories and levels exist.

For instance, it’s fun (and in my view completely expected) to see that courteous emails, LinkedIn inspirational spam, corp-speech etc, GPT outperforms humans with flying colors, on the first attempt too! Whereas if you’re asking for the next book of Game of Thrones or any well-written literature it falls flat – incredibly boring, generic, full of platitudes and empty arcs and characters.

We have to start mapping the field of writing to a better conceptual space. Currently it seems like we can’t even differentiate between the equivalent of arithmetic and abstract algebra.

[lambdaba]

To me it looks very analogous to AI-generated "art", it's very easy to generate some generally esthetically pleasing visuals, but the depth of the art stays in proportion with the input effort... Which is often not much. All of this shouldn't be very surprising really, and there's still a lot of usefulness to it, if only for depreciating the low-quality copy-paste productions and making the really unique and novel ones even more valuable.

[p1esk]

What is “depth of the art”?

[airstrike]

Hah. Good question. You could write a whole grad level thesis on it.

[lambdaba]

Yeah, I couldn't say, it's just "vibes" I guess, just like the filler text produced by business consultants it's just not something that I feel would be missed if lost. It all looks the same at some level even when it's superficially different. Midjourney especially is very uniform in this regard, everything looks great, but it's kind of flat at the same time.

[amccloud]

storytelling and perceived value