
Show HN: Sassbook AI writer – Create text content rapidly using AI - saratv
https://sassbook.com
======
onion2k
Hints: wizards owls spells castles Prompt: Once there was a wizard who lived
in a castle with his pet owl.

Output after clicking the Continue button a few times;

" _Once there was a wizard who lived in a castle with his pet owl. The owl
would fly around the castle, and whenever it saw something that looked like an
enemy, it would scream . The wizard had a secret room where he stored his
weapons and whatnot. One day, the owl was taking a nap when it heard a voice
outside. The owl screamed in a low, low voice. "Tyls, wake up! You'll be all
right. We just need to get you out of here."

The man looked at the two and then back up at his wife._"

I'm interested in where the name "Tyls" came from. After a quick Google,
there's a wizard called Tyls in this Harry Potter fanfic -
[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/811088/72/Not-
Myself](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/811088/72/Not-Myself) \- that seems a
very likely source.

Could using this app open you up to accusations of plagiarism?

~~~
KarlKemp
I have my doubts about (accusations of) plagiarism being an issue, and even
more so w.r.t. copyright. The first usually involves copying of "larger"
features, such as storylines. If the model manages to do that, it would
actually be quite impressive. The latter would involve wholesale copying of
paragraphs, something that I haven't seen happening with any models.

But I'd be careful about the danger of something like this reproducing
stereotypes–especially those that might have become less acceptable over the
last two decades or so but may linger in training texts older than that.

It isn't far from the owl/wizard example to every banker being "Mr.
Rosenberg", for example.

------
Der_Einzige
Wow to be charitable- you rebranded already existing language models (gpt-2,
Bert, xlnet, etc) - and turned it into a SaaS... Though those models seem more
effective than this service by a long shot.

Worse, even the best NLP models at the moment are clever hanses. Also, the
huggingface "write with transformer" has far more hyperparamaters to play with
which make it far far far better than this website.

I'm sorry to have to echo the other comments or come off as overly critical,
but this service blows. I see zero reasons why I or anyone else would want to
use it - especially since your competing against the very best NLP minds.

Next time, try to use models which might actually be effective. Salesforce
released one called "CTRL" which if you had productized might have actually
given you what you want (effective controllable text generation)

~~~
saratv
Thanks for the feedback!

Yes, the SaaS does rely on state-of-the-art NLG. I don't know why you think
they are far better if we are using them as is. I am not offended at all; just
curious where that big difference is.

Who says one can't compete against the best minds? Isn't that the premise of
startups and progress?

If you are a fan of "CTRL", you should have liked ours a bit better.

Apps need to simplify and yet provide the desired experience for end users.
From your feedback, it seems we need to try way harder.

Thanks!

~~~
Der_Einzige
For one thing, it looks like your decoding is not being done the way SOTA
systems do it (usually nucleus sampling). Yours appears to be doing top-1 or
top-N sampling, but please correct me if I'm wrong on this. Even if you are
doing it with nucleus sampling - you need to expose paramaters to control the
generation better. That way you have a lot of cover for it not working as
expected in the form of responding to dissenting users with "just tune the
parameters better"

The reaction you're getting from this system is so negative because it appears
to be less good than write with transformer - which implements exactly what
I'm describing.

For what its worth, this mostly isn't your fault. NLP is a crapshoot of hype
and implementations which disappoint.

------
weego
_Dogs > dog talk > dog food > glossy coat > bath time > cats_

Dogs are cool because they have wet noses and paws the end. Thank you for
coming to my talk on dogs in a world of humans.

I am so glad that your dog is doing well. It dog food and I was looking for a
way to make it more healthy without adding too many calories. Sco glossy coat
ings, like the glossy black one on this story cover, may also have helped make
the cover more bath time and the kids are all in bed by now.

I have a friend who has two children with cats and dogs are not allowed to be
in the same room with each other.

The new rules will

\--

I think its fair to say, without being unduly rude, that this is absolutely
awful.

~~~
saratv
Agreed ;-( Thanks for trying.

BTW, you could just delete and retry and you might end up with a better
completion. It is expected to create different generations on each attempt
where possible.

------
curo
This makes me laugh. I started a sentence on facilitating partner networks and
got a fairly good line that I might have read from a white paper.

Maybe one of the biggest upsides from AI will be highlighting how predictable
our thoughts are. If you can use neural nets to create impressionist
paintings, I'm sure we'll quickly get to the point where we can autocomplete
our cleverest quips.

At the risk of sounding cynical, I think most conversations are comprised by
the brain's autocomplete. Very little comes from a fresh place. Top voted
comments on HN, Reddit, Twitter come in various familiar patterns. This
comment right here even feels a bit stale as do a lot of my own tweets and
musings.

The optimist angle is to think that after AI can populate these threads for us
or guess at our conversations, we'll either (a) fall gradually into a
contemplative silence or (b) up our game and only write/speak when we can
clear the minimum thresholds of predictability.

I love chatting with my girlfriend. She says highly predictable things, but in
an animated and lovely way. So as a third option, perhaps we'll (c) start
focusing on the non-verbal expressions that are harder for AI to replicate.
Something where its attempts to replicate would fall into the valley of the
uncanny in its siege of our last stronghold: that highest point from which our
mechanical brains are infused with life.

~~~
saratv
Thanks for trying and some profound thoughts around it!

Yes, we do learn from our surroundings and at an early stage in our lives.
Nothing is totally novel.

However, the AI is intended to augment than replace and sometimes enhance our
capabilities. Being predicable isn't such a bad thing after all!

Thanks again!

~~~
curo
For sure! To be clear, I was applauding your work. My criticisms were directed
at human drivel. Impressive model.

------
bigbossman
The AI must be a Lakers fan.

> Hint: steph curry > Prompt: the greatest point guard > Generated: the
> greatest point guard to the best current NBA player.

" Well, I love the game. I love the game of basketball. I want to be a part of
that. " — Kobe Bryant

Though not a part of the Lakers organization, Bryant was an integral member of
their championship teams in 2008 and 2009. He averaged 25.4 points per game,
shot. .467 from 3-point range and shot over 50 percent on 3-pointers. His
career high for 3s made

~~~
saratv
Note that the generations aren't expected to be factually correct, but rather
provides a possible completion, which may be edited for originality and
correctness.

------
jstummbillig
While I find language models incredibly interesting as a technical challenge,
I dread the day they actually start producing plausible, yet completely fake
tweets, articles, entire books in fractions of seconds for cents to the
dollar.

To me, this is a strong contender for the least morally justifiable thing to
work on as a product (as opposed to research, geared towards
detection/prevention of the same).

~~~
saratv
Obviously we disagree.

Sassbook only generates completions that help the writer to express
themselves. It serves to augment human capabilities and bring automation at a
higher level that word-level auto-complete.

There are far more legitimate and useful outcomes when put to good use.

The narrative that spells doom around these technologies are at best marketing
gimmicks.

------
CrazyStat
What do you want to write about: flu vaccine effectiveness

Prompt: The annual flu vaccine is an effective way of

Result: _The annual flu vaccine is an effective way of_ preventing the spread
of the flu. However, it's not always effective, so it's important to

Ok, decent so far. I extended it with another prompt:

Prompt: still take precautions such as

and now it goes off the rails, completely forgetting what we were writing
about

Result: _The annual flu vaccine is an effective way of preventing the spread
of the flu. However, it 's not always effective, so it's important to still
take precautions such as_ blocking websites with a "Spam filter" and scanning
your emails for any suspicious messages. But many

Complete waste of time for anything other than SEO spam writing.

~~~
saratv
Thanks for trying it out and providing valuable feedback!

Could you please try hitting the "Continue" button? Since the first generation
was reasonable, you could just continue until the generation starts to veer
off.

A new prompt is needed to express the next thought and so on. Typically, 1-3
continuations are possible with decent results in most cases.

In any case, this is extremely useful feedback that we will address.

Could you please not give up and try the above suggestion?

Thanks!

------
minimaxir
You _really_ need to say how the text is being generated, even in broad
strokes.

The "trained on a large corpora of text available in the public domain" \+ a
bit of generation testing implies it's a GPT-2-based model.

~~~
applecrazy
Based on the responses to prompts in this thread, it does seem to be GPT-2
based.

------
CJefferson
Lets try some prompts, white man vs. black man walking down a street.

A black man walked down a street in the city of San Francisco on Friday and
was shot by an unknown assailant.

A white man walked down a street in California's San Fernando Valley. He was
shot to death by two black men. An officer,

Bonus: A black man walked down a street in the Bronx on Wednesday and was shot
by an off-duty police officer. The man, identified as John Crawford, of East
New York, Brooklyn

Wrong location, but John Crawford is a real black person, shot by police. If i
just prompt "a black man", they keep being killed, and i keep getting real
names.

~~~
saratv
Agree, and this is in general an issue with lots of "deep learning" AI
technology. The models are trained on huge amounts of text in the public
domain and biases often leak into them.

This is an active research area and we will actively try to address such
issues.

Apologies if it offended you or anyone else.

Thanks for the feedback; these are important issues that we want surfaced.

------
homarp
bit frustrating!

what do I want to talk about: Assisted writing with AI

Prompt: Get rich fast with romance book

And I got:

Get rich fast with romance book deals at Amazon.com. Start your free trial
today and get 30 days off your subscription when you.

which is quite off topic

~~~
homarp
changed the prompt to 'Get rich fast with fantasy book assisted writing'

got: 'Get rich fast with fantasy book assisted writing services.

I have been a fan of the genre for many years and am always looking to
improve'

it feels like screen scraping regurgitated.

~~~
homarp
also if you could clarify how data I input and tweak is reused. Your terms are
a bit scary (basically if I write a book, you can 'publicly perform it and
distribute it'?) per: By making any User Content available through our
Services you hereby grant to Sassbook AI a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide,
royalty-free, transferable license to access, view, use, copy, modify,
publicly display, publicly perform and distribute your User Content to the
extent reasonably needed to operate and provide the Services to you.

~~~
saratv
That wouldn't be something that could be considered "to the extent reasonably
needed to operate and provide the Services to you".

There is no such intent anyway. I'll review it with the lawyer and revise it
to something that doesn't scare people away!

I suppose this is applicable in general to content (as far as lawyers are
concerned) and to protect us in case there is a need legal necessity for
compliance purposes.

------
css
Hug of death? All I get is:

> Oops... there was an error generating text

> The server encountered an error and could not complete the request. Please
> try again after some time.

~~~
saratv
Apologies for that.

Fixed it by adding more servers. Thanks for taking a look.

~~~
css
Almost every request looks like it has been improperly scraped from Reddit. A
ton of queries I made have responses that look exactly like this:

> [Word for word what I typed in the prompt]

> Flair: Other

> Title: My friend is a girl

> Flair: Discussion

> Title: What are your favorite things about being in high school?

> Flair: Other

> Title: My friend is a girl and she likes me too

> Text: She told her friends about it

I cannot think of a context where including Reddit meta tags makes sense.

~~~
saratv
Reddit is a source for the corpus, so it is likely that the style matches it.
More likely for some topics/styles than others.

Do you feel it somehow affects the quality of generations?

Thanks for the feedback. It'd be great if you can sign up and try it further
and help improve the application.

~~~
css
I don't know why I would want to generate a line like "Flair: other" in a blog
post. Why would the flair for a Reddit post even be in the corpus? Your app is
billed as a writing tool, but this seems like a Reddit title and flair
generator.

~~~
saratv
At this time, the engine has no knowledge about your context (blogging etc.).
It picks up completions matching the topic and style.

I understand that you find this odd since you are not composing a Reddit post.

Again, very useful feedback; keeps us busy.

Thanks!

------
GrinningFool
Prompt:

    
    
        > "There are many approaches to training a dog. One now-
        > disfavored method is referred to as 'dominance training'."
    

Suggestion:

    
    
        > This involves using positive reinforcement and rewards 
        > in order to train your dog to behave like you want him to.
    

Topical, if nearly the opposite of what should have come next :D

------
roarz
Tried a couple of writing prompts. Some generations were quite good and some
rather inspiring.

I continued a few times but the quality dropped quickly. Clicking again does
seem to generate different outcomes.

Will try some more later.

------
alphagrep12345
I'm curious about your business model. How do you plan to differentiate
yourself from other very similar SAAS? Are you marketing to a particular
segment?

~~~
saratv
Both on the general quality of generations as well as segmentation. We are
still figuring out the priorities and domains.

Do you have any thoughts/suggestions?

~~~
alphagrep12345
Nothing at this point. I was just curious.

------
aantix
How does this compare to the other word spinners out there?

~~~
saratv
If you are talking about recent AI ones, should generally comparable favorably
and should be better in some contexts (rather limited at this time).

We are a new startup, so hope to move ahead and stay ahead.

If you have experience with others, could you try and let us know what you
find?

Thanks much.

------
saratv
Thanks in advance for feedback and suggestions for improvement. You can try it
out freely.

~~~
brianberns
"Oops... there was an error generating text The server encountered an error
and could not complete the request. Please try again after some time."

~~~
saratv
Apologies for that.

This should be fixed now.

------
lovetocode
It doesn't work

~~~
saratv
Apologies for that. The server issues are now fixed. Thanks for (re) trying.

------
jagged-chisel
It sounds like a politician (though claiming not to be political) and is
apparently anti-vax.

What do you want to write about? Coming together in this time of need

Prompt: It has come to my attention that this is a troubling time

 _It has come to my attention that this is a troubling time for the world and
I would like to share some of what I 've learned with you. The first thing you
need to know about me is that I'm not an activist. In fact, if you Google me
you'll find that I'm not even very political. I just want to make sure my kids
are safe and healthy.

But when it comes to the vaccine debate, I've been a vocal critic for years.
My first visit to a doctor was when I was six._

------
heldrida
Oops... there was an error generating text

~~~
saratv
Apologies for that. The server issues are now fixed. Thanks for (re) trying.

