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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31877 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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In my opinion - as a writer myself - is that right now, AI is approximately at the level of your average competently-written fanfiction, which is a big problem for Hollywood because they write below that level.

Man, as a reader, I have to disagree. AI can write individual paragraphs much better than most writers, but when it comes to themes, character growth, plot, and simple internal consistency between chapters, I find AI sorely lacking. Maybe I'm overestimating your average competently-written fanfic though.

I think that's mostly the short context window. AI can't keep the details straight because it has anterograde amnesia and forgets what it was talking about after a few thousand words.

Right now we are in the centaur stage where a competent fanfic writer stitching together ChatGPT-4 paragraphs and correcting the AI when necessary could produce a better product, or at least be much more prolific at creating an equivalent product.

When ChatGPT-5 is available and it has a context window large enough to fit entire novels, which will surely happen in the next ten years, that won't be true anymore.

For sure. I'd be interested in seeing what the costs for larger context windows will look like. Claude already has a 100k context window, but it's pretty expensive. GPT-4 also has a 32K context window that's even more so. It seems that as the models get stronger they get significantly more expensive to build and operate too.

I think we will soon run into two fundamental constraints:

  1. We will run out of external data to feed the AI, meaning further training will yield diminishing returns
  2. AI-produced text will mingle with human-produced text in somewhat undetectable ways, lowering the quality of any affected data.

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