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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3069 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for April 19, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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No really, 99% of literary output is utter dross barely worth proofreading. Look at the amateurish garbage regularly posted on Reddit writing subs like Writing Prompts as an example.

What strikes you as good writing is the cherry-picked output of tens of thousands of would-be writers

I completely agree with you here. Sorry if I didn't make that clear enough. My point was that if all GPT is doing is beating the average or even the above-average writers then that's not really relevant to me, because I wasn't reading that type of writing in the first place. It needs to beat the superior writers to really have an impact.

I imagine that we would have some disagreements over how big the elite actually-worth-reading club is, and who gets to be admitted to it, but I agree with the basic point you're making here.

As of today, it can't write a proper novel since even a 32k token context window isn't sufficient

Actually it can, with recursive prompting. Predictably, the result is not very interesting. But in fairness, there would probably be an immediate improvement if you got rid of all of OpenAI's safety guardrails.

but I have gotten very decent prose out of it in my tinkering

Oh sure, it can write some good sentences. But writing a good sentence is like drawing a good (representational) picture - it's a purely local problem that doesn't have to deal with global conceptual structure. What makes a strong essay or a strong novel is the global structure, and the intricate relationships between local pieces and the overall structure. If there is an inherent limit to the "predict the next token" methodology, it will be found here.

Fair enough! I don't think we have any real disagreement at all then.

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