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cafffaro t1_j1eh1sf wrote

Reply to comment by Representative_Pop_8 in Video: Artificial Intelligence can write as well as humans. See how it works by LanceOhio

Everything I’ve seen so far has two issues. First of all, sterility. Writers tend to have a mixed voice depending on the specific sentence or content in question. The AI stuff just seems to glazed over and plastic. It’s hard to put into words exactly what the give away is, but there is just something uncanny about AI writing that I think is pretty glaring is you’re used to reading/assessing prose.

Second, the emptiness and vagueness. Pretty much every prompt I’ve fed into an AI is decent for calling up rote information (although sometimes throws you a few oddball factoids), but terrible at being critical. Humans like to make a point which comes out in writing either explicitly or subtly. Not so with AI which is, from what I can tell, always “some people say X, other people say Y, so the important thing to know is that there is more than one way of looking at this.” If a human student wrote something like this, I’d tell them “ok, you got about 10% of the way there….where is the other 90% telling me what YOU think?”

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Representative_Pop_8 t1_j1ei3t8 wrote

>Humans like to make a point which comes out in writing either explicitly or subtly. Not so with AI which is, from what I can tell, always “some people say X, other people say Y, so the important thing to know is that there is more than one way of looking at this.”

i am not sure if this is specific to AI or to current implementation of gptchat. it is obvious they have tried to make it sterile on purpose to avoid uncomfortable responses, and there are clearly some hardwired protections against some type of responses. they seem to want it to avoid showing creativity, anything that could make people think it is conscious or has ideas of its own or inventing new stuff( when pressed I have seen it does have some of that though still not at human level) , and then legal precautions on anything that would cause trouble if you base your actions on the AI's response.

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cafffaro t1_j1emfb0 wrote

That could be the case! Good points.

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spellbanisher t1_j1fznz2 wrote

You can direct the AI to respond in a different style. While that will change its syntax and word choice to some extent, you still feel like you're reading something genric. I think the reason for that is chatgpt can only relate words to words. It basically pastiches together a bunch of phrases that statistically correlate. But this means it is not really capable of original or fresh turns of phrase. A human writer first thinks of ideas, experiences, or images and then tries to find the words to express it. The AI can only pastiche phrases and change the wording like a student who plagiarizes but uses a thesaurus to change some words or rearranges some sentences to make the copying less obvious.

I had chatgpt write me a scene where a man with robotic tentacles fought a man with enhanced reflexes and strength in a gladiatorial arena. I had it do it again and again in various styles: of Chuck Palahniuk, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Dr. Seuss. And yes, asking for different styles changed some of the wording and syntax. But no matter the style, every sentence, every sentence, EVERY SENTENCE, comprised common or unoriginal phrases. They fought with "fierce intensity." The tentacles "twisted and turned." The sweat gleamed on their tired bodies. Just unoriginal phrase after unoriginal phrase.

To be fair, a good deal of human writing is stock phrases. But if I had to guess, about 50% of a great writers' phrasing is original, 10-20% for an average writer, and 0% for a word sequencing algorithm.

My professors always told me to avoid cliches and common phrases. To produce original writing, you must strive for the precise words or metaphors to describe your ideas. A common phrase or cliche will merely approximate it, or it indicates that your ideas are either fuzzy or trite.

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