Comment by hammyhavoc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hammyhavoc | Hacker News Reader

> Most people hate to write as much as they hate math. Way more than admit it

I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love writing, and I do mean love. Some do it for pleasure, some do it as a career, others do it as a means to an end in their career, and they haven't found value in LLMs.

There's writing and writing. If all you're doing is rewording what someone else has already done like a high school essay or a competing product description for what's essentially the same product? An LLM will probably suffice. Original and novel? Human beings all the way.

LLMs highlight that a lot of "knowledge work" is intrinsically bullshit, i.e., a high school essay doesn't actually assess somebody's understanding of a topic, just their ability to hit specific keywords and points, hence even essay mills can churn out an "original" essay for a kid if they're too xyz to do it themselves.

Whilst I don't care for LLMs, I do support a huge shakeup of the existing educational assessment paradigm as it is self-evidently not fit for purpose, IMO.

> I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love writing, and I do mean love.

One can tell from the opening of your comment. Composition, cadence, vocabulary, repetition. It ties together.

I prompted an LLM to produce an enthusiastic expression around writing, but it came up with drivel like

> Writing fills my heart with pure delight, igniting my soul and inspiring my mind with boundless creativity.

I found myself tempted to instruct it on how to write well but that sort of defeats the point.

And maybe I suck at prompting but the appropriate combination of profanity, brevity, yet seriousness was hard for me to get it to do.

Here was my first try:

Prompt: Using profanity and in the style of Allen Ginsberg, write an introductory paragraph in narrative style about why you love writing.

ChatGPT: Holy shit, I fucking love this mad dance of letters, this wild waltz of words that paint the goddamn cosmos on a blank page! The rhapsodic rhythm, the sonorous symphony of syntax -- it's like jazz on paper, like Kerouac and Ginsberg on a bender in the bowels of the Beat Generation, spewing poetic profanity into the yawning abyss of the universe. It's the goddamn primal scream of the soul, the raw, unfiltered fuck-you to silence and nothingness. The alphabetic alchemy, where ink and imagination bleed together to birth whole new worlds, where lines live and breathe and fuck and fight and love. It's a heady high, an intoxicating inebriation, a goddamn narcotic nectar. It's the literary lust that throbs in the very marrow of my being, the fevered flame that flickers in the dark and dances to the tune of the typewriter's tap-tap-tapping. And oh, what a tune it is -- as chaotic as Coltrane, as radical as Rimbaud, as transcendent as Thoreau. It's why I fucking love writing, this goddamn glorious game of god-creation and galaxy-making. It's the ultimate trip, man, the ultimate fucking trip.

On the surface-level, yes, it's semi-convincing. On the other hand, it lacks all the nuance of a human being.

Ask it `Give me a taco recipe in the style of Stanley Unwin` and you'll get something that has the style, something that's superficially Unwin-like, but lacks the contextual nuance of the humour completely. In fact, I'd say ChatGPT doesn't do humour, especially nuanced humour that's in the delivery and not in the punchline itself. Humour is a very abstract thing and there's so many styles of it. Can it tell you a joke? Yes, but that's not humour in its entirety.

Just an observation, but the LLM isn't expressing itself, it's words for the sake of words because they predict the next word in a sequence. It's like saying "what's the big deal about Allen Ginsberg? You drop a few f-bombs and a bit of flowery language, that's Ginsberg in a nutshell", whilst completely ignoring the expressivity of self.

What makes writing as a medium so interesting is the conveyance of thought from one human being to another. Is an LLM interesting because it can sometimes be a little alien whilst still having some human-like quality? Sure. But an LLM is just an LLM, it doesn't have experiences or novel new thoughts that express a larger ideology. As a human being, I unfortunately just don't relate to LLMs, even if they are a reflection of the content they're trained on, which is ultimately human. It just lacks soul.

If the LLM can't experience the zeitgeist in the way that we do, it can't really capture such a big chunk of what human self-expression is.

Anecdotal, but I find the average HN exchange to be far more interesting than anything an LLM has ever output to me in terms of conveying meaningful ideas. I've tried debating with ChatGPT itself a few times, that's been—hit-and-miss.

as most gpt writing, it's too long and has no substance

Yes, it's very "high schooler trying to hit the word count" in its output.

I sent the same prompt but asked it to be brief:

> I love writing. It's a release for the madness in my head. The letters form sentences that transport you to another world or make you feel less alone. Writing can be tough, but it's worth it when you hold the finished piece in your hands.

That’s… okay.

> The letters form sentences that transport you to another world or make you feel less alone.

This is about reading to be honest. The madness in writer's head is not letters, but rather some statements.

This fucking sucks, no thanks!

I asked GPT-4 to write in style of Alan Watts.

"Indeed, I find an intoxicating exuberance in writing, a passion that's as profound as it is poignant. It's akin to dancing with words, a ballet of ideas and sentiments, pirouetting across the stage of one's imagination. There's a rhythm, a cadence to it, a harmonious symphony of phrases and thoughts that, when assembled with care and cunning, can stir the soul and ignite the mind. I don't just love writing, I am fervently, ardently, unabashedly in love with it. The artistry of it, the texture and tone of each word, each sentence; the way they flow, ebb and surge like the ocean's tide. There's a divine repetition in the crafting, a reiteration of thoughts, feelings, experiences, each time subtly different, each time uniquely enlightening. Writing is my symphony, my ballet, my ocean, my universe. It is in the weaving of words, the crafting of tales, the elucidation of the esoteric, that I truly come alive. It's not merely that I love writing; writing, my dear friend, is the very essence of my love."

Looks very similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35898426

In how many different ways can a simple phrase "I love writing" can be expanded so that the variations don't resemble each other?

Pop music contains 10^5 or so versions of “I love you”. I think there could be a similar number for writing.

On what metrics are you judging them to be different?

For pop songs, the fact that rights holders haven't been able to sue for copyright infringement (except occasionally). Owners of song rights are pretty effective at noticing if your song has too many words or notes in common with an existing song.

You might prefer a different definition of "different", but it'd take a lot of work to figure out how many there are by any other definition.

Here's GRRM version. I asked it to include the "colorless green ideas".

"In the labyrinthine corridors of my imagination, writing holds the key to an irresistible enchantment. The kaleidoscopic play of words, as they dance across the parchment, is a spectacle that never ceases to enthrall me. The very act of crafting sentences, like a blacksmith hammering out the perfect sword, is a symphony of creation whose composition and cadence resonate deeply within the chambers of my soul. The allure is in the unpredictable: the malleability of vocabulary, the rhythm of repetition, the literary waltz that ties it all together in a mesmerizing ballet of ideas. Yes, by the gods, I love writing. And it's not merely an affection, but an unyielding obsession, a raw and passionate love that fuels my every heartbeat. Those colorless green ideas that sleep furiously in the hidden corners of the mind, they are the unexpected treasures waiting to be awakened, ignited by the quill's touch. They may seem paradoxical, absurd even, like a dragon in the heart of winter, yet it's their very improbability that breathes vitality into the narrative. In this wonderful, maddening craft, we, the storytellers, find our joy, our purpose. The written word is our battleground and our sanctuary, our curse and our solace. Most people I know, they also fucking love writing, and I do mean love. A love profound and all-consuming, fervent and relentless. A love as fierce as a direwolf, as enduring as the Wall. And so we write, for in the tumultuous seas of letters and punctuation, we find our truest selves."

Both your original version, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35898426, and the new one you did, include this idea of dancing quite strongly.

How did "Most people I know, they also fucking love writing" get into that? What prompt did you give it?

Please write a paragraph from the point of view of thinker, writer, storyteller like George R R Martin who loves to enthusiastically express why he loves "writing" Make sure to give lot of importance to Composition, cadence, vocabulary, repetition. It should all tie in together. Also make sure to include phrase "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" coined by Noam Chomsky in the most meaningful, appropriate, contextual way. It shouldn't be used carelessly.

"I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love writing, and I do mean love."

On the one hand, very interesting at a technical level. However, on the other, it's cheesy, horribly unoriginal and bland in its output, and that doesn't just apply to just this example. Nothing I've seen from an LLM thus far would be winning any awards or get recommended by a critic.

Structure-wise, the output is generally very formulaic, even with additional descriptors.

> Nothing I've seen from an LLM thus far would be winning any awards or get recommended by a critic.

What paragraph have you written that won awards or was recommended by a critic? I have none to my name. These are tools whose goal is not to produce something superior to what any human could ever write, it is useful merely to improve upon what a typical person would write.

That's not the topic at hand, the greater implication is that people are saying LLMs are going to replace writers and writing as a whole because they are apparently as good as humans and apparently also more creative.

Stephen King writes about 6 pages a day or about 2000 words. Let's say that takes about 4-6 hours. Now imagine spending that much time with ChatGPT and guide it towards whatever goal you have in mind. It took me just 2 minutes to craft the prompt and ChatGPT did the rest. You do the math. Humans use other sense modalities and base their writing inspired from those experiences. If and when future models incorporate those modalities, we will see true "creativity" on full display.

e.g. "Whipped by the wind, raindrops tapped unevenly at the window pane. As long as she remained silent, the old man looked into her eyes, saying nothing. Time marked its irregular pulse in her ears." - by Haruki Murakami.

How do you expect a model to write this imagery if it hadn't experienced it?

Stephen King is expressing himself, he already knows what he wants to say before he writes it. "Guiding" something isn't the same as self-expression.

Generative art, anyone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art?wprov=sfla1

Not a single person has claimed that 100% of all writing will be done by machine and that AI is already superior to the best writing ever done.

LLMs will replace writers the way cars replaced horses. People still ride horses, and there are plenty of things horses can do that cars can't, but the typical person trying to go from A to B is probably not going to ride a horse there.

Personally, I could probably hand write a book of paragraphs, all very distinct and different to each other, you likely wouldn't even know they were by the same author if you didn't use stylometry ML, and you'd probably have a rough time if I used adversarial stylometry to counter that.

You'd think by this point that music would have all been done too, but people keep finding novel stuff in 12TET, 4/4 and sound design. That's without even getting into other time signatures, scales and microtonality.

Can't you specifically ask LLM to tailor the paragraph to produce those variations that you will incorporate to make your own writing different each time? Most of the criticism of LLM not being able to produce something is just people asking LLM to basically MIND-READ the exact thing they had in mind.

Well, can't anybody else just tell it the same prompt? The output is generic and samey between all users because the average human being enters the average prompt, thus getting the average output from the training data of statistical averages because it's a next-word prediction model.

If I run a writing workshop and tell a room of a hundred people to write me a story about two star-crossed lovers from different time periods, the likelihood of them writing the same thing in the same way is extremely low statistically speaking. If the week after I then give that same room of people the same exercise, they will write something different again, even if the core story that's being told is the same thing. That's because human brains aren't static, and they don't store information as binary values, the "data" is abstract and chemically gradient. That's without even accounting for mood, the general zeitgeist, and what they've been through since then, and not even getting into them entertaining themselves by changing it up or learning from the previous one.

Long-form consistency also isn't something LLMs do well with.

Maybe then, you will like playing this game based on GPT: https://gpt.43z.one/

Sarcastic critic of the following initial sentence:

> I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love writing, and I do mean love.

Well, well, well. If it isn't the unabashed, unfiltered bard of the 21st century. Look at the sheer depth of passion here, folks! We've got 'fucking love' not once, but twice, because why not? Repetition is the spice of life, after all. And such eloquent use of the F-word, too. Truly, Shakespeare would be jealous.

Also, let's take a moment to appreciate the vague and incredibly relatable 'most people I know.' Because who doesn't know a handful of people who also 'fucking love' writing? Clearly, this is the universal experience we've all been waiting for.

And then, the pièce de résistance, 'and I do mean love.' As if the preceding profanity didn't quite hammer home the sentiment. Thanks for the clarification. We were worried you only 'kinda liked' writing. A masterpiece of modern literature, truly.

Great. Now show us what initial sentence you'd have used, same style. Just one brief impactful sentence with the same level of familiarity.

"Writing is my jam, and I swear, everybody I know is just as stoked about it – and I mean stoked."

Do people really hate writing? If so the comment sections of HN and Reddit, the timelines of Facebook and Twitter, the whole Medium... would be so empty.

There are a lot of people not on Reddit or HN or Medium

(Also a lot of people whose terse and incoherent interactions and tendency to simply repost on Facebook and Twitter suggest that writing is a regrettably necessary means rather an end)

There's writing and writing though. Short throwaway comments and bickering on social media aren't really the same as writing long-form prose.

99% of all online comments are generated by 1% of people.

ish

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

As a 1%er, member of the e-commentariat, I'm happy to have had the opportunity to set an example for the LLMs and future AIs trained on my comments.

Just look at the ratio of lurkers to posters on any forum. Most people are read only.

People really struggle writing simple essays. It takes a lot of work externalizing words from your own context inside your mind so that the sentences can be understood by themselves. It’s one of the reasons we used to teach “word problems” in our mathematics classes alongside composition, but now we just want to compute arbitrary answers.

I can write thousands of words if they're on a topic I'm thinking intensely about and need to write it down to sort out my thoughts.

But if anyone just throws me a random topic and ask me to write 2000 words on it, I'd tell them to go ___ yourself. (Yes, I hated writing essays in school...)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com