I played around with ChatGTP to see if it could actually improve my writing. (I’ve been writing for decades.)
I was immediately impressed by how “personable” the things are and able to interpret your writing and it’s able to detect subtle things you are trying to convey, so that part was interesting. I also was impressed by how good it is at improving grammar and helping “join” passages, themes and plot-points, it has advantages that it can see the entire writing piece simultaneously and can make broad edits to the story-flow and that could potentially save a writers days or weeks of re-writing.
Now that the good is out of the way, I also tried to see how well it could just write. Using my prompts and writing style, scenes that I arranged for it to describe. And I can safely say that we have created the ultimate “Averaging Machine.”
By definition LLM’s are designed to always find the most probable answers to queries, so this makes sense. It has consumed and distilled vast sums of human knowledge and writing but doesn’t use that material to synthesize or find inspiration, or what humans do which is take existing ideas and build upon them. No, what it does is always finds the most average path. And as a result, the writing is supremely average. It’s so plain and unexciting to read it’s actually impressive.
All of this is fine, it’s still something new we didn’t have a few years ago, neat, right? Well my worry is that as more and more people use this, more and more people are going to be exposed to this “averaging” tool and it will influence their writing, and we are going to see a whole generation of writers who write the most cardboard, stilted, generic works we’ve ever seen.
And I am saying this from experience. I was there when people started first using the internet to roleplay, making characters and scenes and free-form writing as groups. It was wildly fun, but most of the people involved were not writers, but many discovered literation for the first time there, it’s what led to a sharp increase in book-reading and suddenly there were giant bookstores like Barns & Noble popping up on every corner. They were kids just doing their best, but that charming, terrible narration became a social standard. It’s why there are so many atrocious dialogue scenes in shows and movies lately, I can draw a straight line to where kids learned to write in the 90’s. And what’s coming next is going to harm human creativity and inspiration in ways I can’t even predict.
I am a young person who doesn’t read recreationally, and I avoid writing wherever I can. Thank you for sharing your insight as well as sparking an interesting discussion in this thread.
Reading is incredibly important for mental development, it teaches your brain how to have the language tools to create abstractions of the world around you and then use those abstractions to change perspectives, communicate ideas and understand your own thoughts and feelings.
It’s never too late to start exercising that muscle, and it really is a muscle, a lot of people have a hard time getting started reading later in life because they simply don’t have the practice in forming words into images and scenes… but think about how strong that makes your brain when you can form text into whole vivid worlds, when you can create images and people and words and situations in your mind to explore the universe around you and invent simulated situations with more accuracy… I cannot scream enough how critically important it is for us to exercise this muscle, I hope you keep looking for things that spark your interest just enough that you get a foothold in reading and writing :)
Yup, it’s something I myself recently started to realise and have been forcing myself to read things that actually interest me.
While in elementary and middle school every 2 months we had a specific book we had to read and then would discuss it in class and would be graded based on our input.
Reading books and writing essays has been cemented in my mind as a boring chore that is forced upon me. It took years before it even occured to me that reading might be a fun activity, and a couple more before I actively started trying to read again. It’s difficult to break away from the mould I’ve been set to during my childhood, but I’m slowly chipping away at it.
Children SHOULD read, but how can we get them to WANT to read?
I can confirm that a lot of student’s writing have become “averaged” and it seems to have gotten worse this semester. I am not talking about students who clearly used an AI tool, but just by proximity or osmosis writing feels “cardboardy”. Devoid of passions or human mistakes.
This is how I was taught to write up to highschool. Very “professional”, persuasive essays, arguing in favor of something or against it “objectively”. (Assignment seemed to dictate what side I could be on LOL.) Limit humor and “emotional speech.” Cardboard.
I was taken aback in my first political science course at the local community college, where I was instructed to convey my honest arguments about a book assignment on polarization in U.S politics. “Whether you think it’s fantastic or you think it sucks, just make a good case for your opinion.” Wait, what?! I get to write like a person?!
I was even more shocked when I got a high mark for reading the first few chapters, skimming the rest, and truthfully summarizing by saying it was plain that the author just kept repeating their main point for like 5 more chapters so they could publish a book, and it stopped being worth the time as that poor horse was already dead by the 3rd chapter.
It was when it hit me, that writing really was about communication, not just information.
I worry about that these days: That this realization won’t come to most, and they’ll use these Ai tools or be influenced by them to simply “convey information” that nobody wants to read, get their 85%, and breeze through the rest of their MBA, not caring about what any of this is actually for, or for what a beautiful miracle writing truly is to humanity.
That isn’t what I mean by cardboard. Persuasive, research, argumentative essays have been taught to be written the way tou described. They are meant to be that way. But even then, the essays I have read and graded still have this cardboard feel. I have read plenty of research essays where you can feel the emotion, you can surmise the position and most of all passion of the author. This passion and the delicate picking of words and phrases are not there. It is “averaged”.
I think we’re saying a similar thing, but I understand your point better.
I have read plenty of research essays where you can feel the emotion, you can surmise the position and most of all passion of the author.
Exactly! That’s what I mean. There’s so many subjects I expected to be incredibly dry, but the writing reminded me it was written by a person who obviously cares about other people reading the text. One can communicate any subject without giving up their soul.
(I am always surprised, but I find this in programming books often, haha.)
But that’s what I meant by cardboard as well, I think we might be in agreement:
We expect to see a lot more writing that comes across like “This is what writing should look like, right?”
Writing that understands words, and “averages” the most likely way to convey information or fill a requirement,
but doesn’t know how to wield language as an art to share ideas with another person.
the writing reminded me it was written by a person who obviously cares about other people reading the text.
This is what’s missing being discussed in nearly every online argument about AI art that I read online, there are rarely people who make the actual argument that the whole purpose of art and writing is to share an experience, to give someone else the experience that the author or artist is feeling.
Even if I look at a really bad poem or a terrible drawing, if the artist was really doing their best to share the image in their head or the feeling they were having when they wrote it, it will be 1000X more significant and poignant than a machine that crushes the efforts of thousands of people together and averages them out.
Sure there are billions of people who are content with looking at a cool image and think no deeper of it and are even annoyed at criticism of AI work, but on some level I think everyone prefers content made by another human trying to share something.
I know exactly what you mean, I still frequent a lot of writing communities and that “cardboard” feeling is spreading. Most young people who have an interest in writing are basically sponges for absorbing how their peers write, so it’s tragic when their peers are machines designed to produce advertiser-friendly ad-copy.
I do agree with your “averaging machine” argument. It makes a lot of sense given how LLMs are trained as essentially massive statistical models.
Your conjecture that bad writing is due to roleplaying on the early internet is a bit more… speculative. Lacking any numbers comparing writing trends over time I don’t think one can draw such a conclusion.
Large discord groups and forums are still the proving ground for new, young writers who try to get started crafting their prose to this day, and I have watched it for over 30 years. It has changed, dramatically, and I would be remiss to say I have no idea where the change came from if I didn’t also see the patterns.
Yes it’s entirely anecdotal, I have no intention of making a scientific argument, but I’m also not the only one worried about the influence of LLM’s on creators. It’s already butchering the traditional artistic world, just for the very basic reason that 14-year-old Mindy McCallister who has a crush on werewolves at one time would have taught herself to draw terrible, atrocious furry art on lined notebook paper with hearts and a self-inserted picture of herself in a wedding dress. This is where we all get started (not specifically werewolf romance but you get the idea) with art and drawing and digital art before learning to refine our craft and get better and better at self-expression, but we now have a shortcut where you can skip ALL of that process and just have your snarling lupine BF generated for you within seconds. Setting aside the controversy over if it’s real art or not, what it’s doing is taking away the formative process from millions of potential artists.
I do agree with your “averaging machine” argument. It makes a lot of sense given how LLMs are trained as essentially massive statistical models.
For image generation models I think a good analogy is to say it’s not drawing, but rather sculpting - it starts with a big block of white noise and then takes away all the parts that don’t look like the prompt. Iterate a few times until the result is mostly stable (that is it can’t make the input look much more like the prompt than it already does). It’s why you can get radically different images from the same prompt - the starting block of white noise is different, so which parts of that noise look most prompt-like and so get emphasized are going to be different.
I played around with ChatGTP to see if it could actually improve my writing. (I’ve been writing for decades.)
I was immediately impressed by how “personable” the things are and able to interpret your writing and it’s able to detect subtle things you are trying to convey, so that part was interesting. I also was impressed by how good it is at improving grammar and helping “join” passages, themes and plot-points, it has advantages that it can see the entire writing piece simultaneously and can make broad edits to the story-flow and that could potentially save a writers days or weeks of re-writing.
Now that the good is out of the way, I also tried to see how well it could just write. Using my prompts and writing style, scenes that I arranged for it to describe. And I can safely say that we have created the ultimate “Averaging Machine.”
By definition LLM’s are designed to always find the most probable answers to queries, so this makes sense. It has consumed and distilled vast sums of human knowledge and writing but doesn’t use that material to synthesize or find inspiration, or what humans do which is take existing ideas and build upon them. No, what it does is always finds the most average path. And as a result, the writing is supremely average. It’s so plain and unexciting to read it’s actually impressive.
All of this is fine, it’s still something new we didn’t have a few years ago, neat, right? Well my worry is that as more and more people use this, more and more people are going to be exposed to this “averaging” tool and it will influence their writing, and we are going to see a whole generation of writers who write the most cardboard, stilted, generic works we’ve ever seen.
And I am saying this from experience. I was there when people started first using the internet to roleplay, making characters and scenes and free-form writing as groups. It was wildly fun, but most of the people involved were not writers, but many discovered literation for the first time there, it’s what led to a sharp increase in book-reading and suddenly there were giant bookstores like Barns & Noble popping up on every corner. They were kids just doing their best, but that charming, terrible narration became a social standard. It’s why there are so many atrocious dialogue scenes in shows and movies lately, I can draw a straight line to where kids learned to write in the 90’s. And what’s coming next is going to harm human creativity and inspiration in ways I can’t even predict.
I am a young person who doesn’t read recreationally, and I avoid writing wherever I can. Thank you for sharing your insight as well as sparking an interesting discussion in this thread.
Reading is incredibly important for mental development, it teaches your brain how to have the language tools to create abstractions of the world around you and then use those abstractions to change perspectives, communicate ideas and understand your own thoughts and feelings.
It’s never too late to start exercising that muscle, and it really is a muscle, a lot of people have a hard time getting started reading later in life because they simply don’t have the practice in forming words into images and scenes… but think about how strong that makes your brain when you can form text into whole vivid worlds, when you can create images and people and words and situations in your mind to explore the universe around you and invent simulated situations with more accuracy… I cannot scream enough how critically important it is for us to exercise this muscle, I hope you keep looking for things that spark your interest just enough that you get a foothold in reading and writing :)
Yup, it’s something I myself recently started to realise and have been forcing myself to read things that actually interest me.
While in elementary and middle school every 2 months we had a specific book we had to read and then would discuss it in class and would be graded based on our input.
Reading books and writing essays has been cemented in my mind as a boring chore that is forced upon me. It took years before it even occured to me that reading might be a fun activity, and a couple more before I actively started trying to read again. It’s difficult to break away from the mould I’ve been set to during my childhood, but I’m slowly chipping away at it.
Children SHOULD read, but how can we get them to WANT to read?
I can confirm that a lot of student’s writing have become “averaged” and it seems to have gotten worse this semester. I am not talking about students who clearly used an AI tool, but just by proximity or osmosis writing feels “cardboardy”. Devoid of passions or human mistakes.
This is how I was taught to write up to highschool. Very “professional”, persuasive essays, arguing in favor of something or against it “objectively”. (Assignment seemed to dictate what side I could be on LOL.) Limit humor and “emotional speech.” Cardboard.
I was taken aback in my first political science course at the local community college, where I was instructed to convey my honest arguments about a book assignment on polarization in U.S politics. “Whether you think it’s fantastic or you think it sucks, just make a good case for your opinion.” Wait, what?! I get to write like a person?!
I was even more shocked when I got a high mark for reading the first few chapters, skimming the rest, and truthfully summarizing by saying it was plain that the author just kept repeating their main point for like 5 more chapters so they could publish a book, and it stopped being worth the time as that poor horse was already dead by the 3rd chapter.
It was when it hit me, that writing really was about communication, not just information.
I worry about that these days: That this realization won’t come to most, and they’ll use these Ai tools or be influenced by them to simply “convey information” that nobody wants to read, get their 85%, and breeze through the rest of their MBA, not caring about what any of this is actually for, or for what a beautiful miracle writing truly is to humanity.
That isn’t what I mean by cardboard. Persuasive, research, argumentative essays have been taught to be written the way tou described. They are meant to be that way. But even then, the essays I have read and graded still have this cardboard feel. I have read plenty of research essays where you can feel the emotion, you can surmise the position and most of all passion of the author. This passion and the delicate picking of words and phrases are not there. It is “averaged”.
I think we’re saying a similar thing, but I understand your point better.
Exactly! That’s what I mean. There’s so many subjects I expected to be incredibly dry, but the writing reminded me it was written by a person who obviously cares about other people reading the text. One can communicate any subject without giving up their soul.
(I am always surprised, but I find this in programming books often, haha.)
But that’s what I meant by cardboard as well, I think we might be in agreement:
We expect to see a lot more writing that comes across like “This is what writing should look like, right?”
Writing that understands words, and “averages” the most likely way to convey information or fill a requirement, but doesn’t know how to wield language as an art to share ideas with another person.
This is what’s missing being discussed in nearly every online argument about AI art that I read online, there are rarely people who make the actual argument that the whole purpose of art and writing is to share an experience, to give someone else the experience that the author or artist is feeling.
Even if I look at a really bad poem or a terrible drawing, if the artist was really doing their best to share the image in their head or the feeling they were having when they wrote it, it will be 1000X more significant and poignant than a machine that crushes the efforts of thousands of people together and averages them out.
Sure there are billions of people who are content with looking at a cool image and think no deeper of it and are even annoyed at criticism of AI work, but on some level I think everyone prefers content made by another human trying to share something.
I know exactly what you mean, I still frequent a lot of writing communities and that “cardboard” feeling is spreading. Most young people who have an interest in writing are basically sponges for absorbing how their peers write, so it’s tragic when their peers are machines designed to produce advertiser-friendly ad-copy.
tbf school-goers nowadays are mostly taught to not make mistakes.
I do agree with your “averaging machine” argument. It makes a lot of sense given how LLMs are trained as essentially massive statistical models.
Your conjecture that bad writing is due to roleplaying on the early internet is a bit more… speculative. Lacking any numbers comparing writing trends over time I don’t think one can draw such a conclusion.
Large discord groups and forums are still the proving ground for new, young writers who try to get started crafting their prose to this day, and I have watched it for over 30 years. It has changed, dramatically, and I would be remiss to say I have no idea where the change came from if I didn’t also see the patterns.
Yes it’s entirely anecdotal, I have no intention of making a scientific argument, but I’m also not the only one worried about the influence of LLM’s on creators. It’s already butchering the traditional artistic world, just for the very basic reason that 14-year-old Mindy McCallister who has a crush on werewolves at one time would have taught herself to draw terrible, atrocious furry art on lined notebook paper with hearts and a self-inserted picture of herself in a wedding dress. This is where we all get started (not specifically werewolf romance but you get the idea) with art and drawing and digital art before learning to refine our craft and get better and better at self-expression, but we now have a shortcut where you can skip ALL of that process and just have your snarling lupine BF generated for you within seconds. Setting aside the controversy over if it’s real art or not, what it’s doing is taking away the formative process from millions of potential artists.
For image generation models I think a good analogy is to say it’s not drawing, but rather sculpting - it starts with a big block of white noise and then takes away all the parts that don’t look like the prompt. Iterate a few times until the result is mostly stable (that is it can’t make the input look much more like the prompt than it already does). It’s why you can get radically different images from the same prompt - the starting block of white noise is different, so which parts of that noise look most prompt-like and so get emphasized are going to be different.