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Comment by vagabund | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, what filters are you hitting that impede your effective use of ChatGPT? I've definitely seen some irritating outputs, e.g. progressive policy planks characterized as inherently good and correct positions, but only when I went looking for them. The guardrails haven't actually kept me from making use of it.

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It's almost useless for writing fiction. The AI clearly has some idea of how, but any time anything even slightly less than perfectly-G-rated happens in the story, it hits the filters.

Actually, it's even more restrictive than that implies. You can't so much as have two siblings quarrel without the AI insisting on turning it into a moral. Right then and there, immediately, never mind the concept of "Stories longer than a single page".

I don't know about your writer's block, but ChatGPT is amazing at going from a sentence or paragraph long description to getting to a single page long story, which is quite enough to get me unblocked. Yeah it won't write the whole book for you but where would the fun be in that?

Yea, I think this is where it really shines, in the sense that "motion is the lotion", and ChatGPT can produce a whole lot of motion. I find it can be useful in that way for coding as well. Even if it doesn't produce something fully sensical, I look at the things it's spit out and go ugh, close but not good enough, you need to change this, and this, and this, and next thing you know I've Ship-Of-Theseused my way to a prototype.

It just... it writes badly, because of all this biasing. I find NovelAI more useful for getting over blocks, regardless of its much lower intelligence.

At least at NAI I can edit its output.

Not discounting NovelAI, but you can also sign up for regular GPT3, which allows you to edit the output and generate new output based on that; as well as the option to have GPT insert text at a specified mark in the middle of a text, or have it edit text according to instructions (like "make it rhyme"). I think the regular GPT playground is a much better interface for prose than ChatGPT.

Absolutely. I built a super simple editor in rails 2 years ago on GPT3 [1] that simply pulls the most recent N words in your document as context and tries three times to complete the next paragraph for you, and just inserts whichever completion you choose directly into your doc. I've written probably 60k+ words over the years using it; doesn't write a whole story for you, but definitely keeps your momentum going any time writer's block rears its ugly head.

Definitely looking forward to the day where I can write stories at a high level and have an AI spit out the whole thing, though.

[1] https://github.com/indentlabs/gpt-3-writer

This is totally an aside, and I'm not calling you out, but I think it's an interesting topic:

> I've written probably 60k+ words over the years using it

Is this how you view it? You wrote the words?

I personally would kinda view your role as a creative director and curator of gpt completions.

I think it's going to be an interesting decade wrt content creation.

Definitely an interesting topic. I actually went and plugged a bunch of my stories/poetry into the new OpenAI human/ai classifier to see what it spit out and it all came back human-written, so at least there's that. :)

I see completions as just one more tool in the writer's arsenal, and not something that you can just let run wild on its own. I don't know my ratio of finger-written words vs completed words, but I think the line blurs even further when also doing (sometimes dozens of) revisions across both categories of words. (Just to clarify: "revisions" here being used in the traditional editing sense, not just regenerating/editing prompts, which I usually _also_ end up doing several times before finding something worth editing).

I also have a smaller WIP editor I'm working on that uses other AI models to flag words/phrases I could replace and suggests alternatives, among other smaller editing replacements. If I have an AI swap a single word out in a sentence for me, I'd personally still consider myself the author of that sentence. For me at least, writing is more about wholly encoding a story for a reader to experience -- word choice and structure are a few small tools to accomplish that, albeit incredibly important ones.

>I personally would kinda view your role as a creative director and curator of gpt completions.

I like this, but I'd probably change it for myself and all writers to creative director and curator of words. Not too different, IMO. :)

> curator of words

Yeah, fair. I like it.

I personally am not hung up on the distinction between AI and human work, including creative. I don't especially care who painted an awesome painting, or wrote an awesome book, unless I'm somehow connected to that human.

The product is the product.

Use the playground. Why would you use the chat interface for text generation? It is for questions and answers. Use the model directly on the playground for your purpose, and you won't hit such filters .

ChatGPT has a context of 4096 tokens (I believe), the playground last I checked maxes out at 2048. That's a huge difference, especially for stories.

I couldn't get it to write a realistic presidential debate between Trump and Caligula. It balked at including realistic muck-racking and name-calling and wouldn't change its mind.

It also refused to help me write a Python script to identify substations that would be attractive sabotage targets (low security, high utilization, likely to cause a cascade failure), or to answer my questions about the security of grid remote management.

It also didn't want to talk about the use of nuclear isomers as initiators for pure fusion weapons.

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