
Writing for Snobs - headalgorithm
https://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2020/09/writing-for-snobs.html
======
krick
Any of these thoughts are valid only under the assumption that one is
concerned if something is written by GPT-3 or a human. But nobody cares. I
would gladly read Wikipedia written by GPT-3, if it can rewrite math articles
in a less fucked-up unnecessary jargon-filled way than they already are. And
if not, I will hate it more, but only to a degree it will do it's job worse
than a human did (presumably it's humans who write all this atrocity, I don't
know for sure).

And nobody reads marketing brochures anyway. I hope they don't, and I pity
them otherwise.

Who I don't pity though are lawyers, and if GPT-3 can make lawyers as
miserable, as normal people are when forced to deal with lawyers: good. I
mean, I don't _really believe_ anything can eliminate this pesky profession
(which depends on laws & litigation process being incomprehensible to ordinary
citizens), but I can at least entertain myself with this thought for a while.

~~~
Proziam
I can imagine GTP-3 being used to make legal documents that are even more
difficult for a human being to parse. That's probably a net-negative for
society as a whole if it is used that way.

Of course, it's fun to chuckle at the thought of a lawyer having to read
through the most insane document of all time and muttering profanities to
himself the entire time.

~~~
krick
"The most insane document of all time" is not the point. It is good to make
documents unreadable, sure, but they still must be valid, and you have to be
sure they are valid, before you use them in the battle. However close to the
realms of sci-fi we may be, I believe we are still very far from any machine
being able to compete with a professional lawyer in that kind of stuff. Jokes
aside, they kinda specialise on it.

What GPT-3 can be good at though is making a huge amounts of text cheaply and
quickly. Making up a tons of bullshit to present in court (or putting the
other side in a position when they have to) is a way to make litigation last
forever, i.e. until the side with less money is forced to give up on a case
they could have otherwise won. You can win by virtue of having more lawyers to
read and type stuff.

And that way to use GPT-3 based stuff I imagine to be much closer shot. A
company with 2 competent lawyers will be able to generate virtually same
amount of semi-coherent bullshit as a company with a 100 of lawyers. You can
produce an amount of stuff in a single night that is humanly impossible to
read, but still if kinda meaningful stuff with some content kinda "relevant"
to the matter at hand. At some point it will stop making any sense, the judge
won't read this shit, nobody will. You will have to somehow forbid to make
stuff more complicated than it must be. What is currently normal will fall
apart.

As I said, I don't actually believe it will do any good: people will still
find a way to make it way too complicated for normal humans, but acceptable
for lawyers. But until they agree on a new norm, it will be painful for
everybody involved.

~~~
Proziam
If you have 'known valid' legalese broken into segments and clauses (this
already exists in platforms in use by legal professionals to speed up this
process, but for legit purpose) and you can convert certain elements into
variables (names, dates, addresses, and so forth), you can trivially make a
'valid' legal document that is nearly impossible to parse due to length, by
referencing everything under the sun and stars, by introducing lots of
situational logic that rests on references, or by simply relying on hyper-
specific language and structure.

For example, I've had to read quite a few 1,000+ page legal documents
(Companies Act 2006 being one example) and that document gets referenced _all
the time_. I can imagine tools like GPT-3 being used to crank things up to 11
to ensure that no user ever really reads or understands the TOS/EULA/whatever
they're reading. Not that most people do anyway.

> too complicated for normal humans, but acceptable for lawyers.

I can totally imagine someone building a tool to parse generated garbage
legalese into plain language bullet points and adding the proper visual
references/links and document structure so that a human can read it. Perhaps
it already exists and I'm just not aware of it.

------
masswerk
> _" the tell-tale signature artifact of simulation is not the spiky glitch,
> it's the smooth, shallow, facile surface"_

Notably, this has been true for visual content from the beginning, compare the
original "TRON" movie. It had been especially true in times, when smooth
gradients and perfect lines had been a luxury, which were hard to achieve in
analog media technology, and became the tell-tale signature of computer
generated visual content. After an intermezzo in the uncanny valley and with
embraceable pixels, we seem to be right back where we started. – It's somewhat
logical that what is true for visual content should also be true for textual
content.

[Edit] We may add a definition: "Interesting" is the artful deviation from the
smooth and perfect.

~~~
082349872349872
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom#Production](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom#Production)

hard to achieve as a practical effect, but still cheaper than digital.

~~~
masswerk
Max Headroom is somewhat special, since it's a crossover of digital and video.
The later has always been signaled by glitches and artifacts (as in color,
unstable vertical and/or horizontal hold, overly expressed scanlines, lately
also by exaggerated cushion distortion, etc).

~~~
082349872349872
Supporting the signalling,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23833111](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23833111)
was definitely a product of the VCR era.

See also the expressed scanlines in the "faked" 80's of the first video in
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24398456](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24398456)
.

As for exaggerated curvature, surely we've all run across
[https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-
term](https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term) by now?

------
war1025
> Japanese and British cultures are so hierarchical and stratified, in such
> long-lasting and subtle ways, that they've become incredibly good at
> discerning status from tiny signals.

The topic of the article wasn't all that interesting to me, but I thought this
quip was interesting.

Does anyone have any references that expand on the merit of it?

Or thoughts on the idea in general?

~~~
bserge
I've worked in Britain and what I noticed was that working class Brits
consider themselves apart from the "posh" middle class and of course, the
upper class.

They seem to think they will be working class for the rest of their lives and
there's noticeable hate/resent for the rich.

Being an immigrant, I didn't notice any of this stuff. I didn't notice the
dismissive polite attitude, I thought it was just politeness. You know, when
someone wealthier talks to you, they're polite but there's subtle signals that
they consider you "inferior".

I only saw the opportunities, of which there are plenty. I didn't see classes,
I just saw that it is possible to go from working class to upper class, much
easier than in most other EU countries.

I did start noticing these "subtle signals" after a year and a half or so, but
honestly I just decided to ignore them. Since I would always be a foreigner,
people would just cut me some slack for not understanding stuff (this also
happens in Japan afaik).

Clothes play an important role, surprisingly (OK, maybe not that surprising).
If you're in dirty workwear and a hi-vis vest, you're pretty much considered
bottom of the barrel. With the right clothes, you can turn into anything from
a "chav" or a middle class manager to a millionaire (though you also need the
attitude - no slouching, make eye contact, etc).

Just some of my thoughts.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Foreigners are in a special class in the UK, so you were already pigeon-holed.

The subtle signals are about who your parents are, which of the different
educational streams you went through, and - more than anything - who you know.
Clothes will display all of that indirectly, but the core is always about
families and networks.

The idea that opportunities exist is very much a middle class mindset, and
anyone who pursues it will inevitably run into the class ceiling. You can make
a huge pile of money but it won't buy you entry into the upper classes. At
best you'll be a nouveau "someone we can do business with" \- or the technical
help.

Under the considerable surface polish and politeness the defining
characteristics of the upper classes are effortless social - not just
professional - confidence, personal entitlement, and exceptionalism. Members
are strongly encouraged to believe in all of the above from birth, and it's
very hard for outsiders to understand this. There's also a curious affinity
with more successful - let's say almost managerial - working class criminals.

I used to live in an upper class enclave, and it was quite astonishing how
much time these people spent trying to screw each other over with disputes
over family inheritances, property and land rights, various investment scams,
and so on.

~~~
p1necone
Okay so you've made a pile of money, but the people that think they've got a
god given right to wealth from birth still thumb their noses at you and don't
want to be friends. My question is, why should anyone care if clearly shitty
people don't want to know them?

~~~
quotemstr
For the same reason people in the US care about what a bunch of high-follower
Twitter accounts think of them. We're hard-wired to seek status even when that
status is counterproductive and contrary to our instrumental goals.

------
echelon
It just occurred to me that GPT-3 could become an existential threat to
Google.

If the SERPs are filled with garbage, their search algorithm loses competitive
edge. We may need to go back to a reputation graph-based system. That sort of
thing doesn't scale, and Google isn't doing this at all.

In fact, all of the platforms may suffer. How will Facebook keep out GPT-3
spam?

~~~
ForHackernews
Why would they want to keep out GPT-3 spam? They're probably already looking
at how they can drive engagement by having human users argue with bots they
run.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
_Because their users don 't want to read GPT-3 spam._ If that's the dominant
form of content on those platforms, people are going to use those platforms
less.

I mean, for a while Facebook may get paid for presenting ads to GPT-3 spam
bots, but eventually advertisers will catch on that the _people_ are gone.

~~~
echelon
I can't wait for us to train models on user browser behavior.

Maybe we can unleash bots that appear exactly as humans, ruining the
advertiser gravy train forever.

~~~
Zippogriff
Mark my words: if that even looks like that _might_ happen, the advertising
behemoths (chiefly Google and Facebook) will spend every last dollar trying to
get some kind of human Internet ID program passed into law.

If our weapons (programs, scripts, "AI") become half as effective as theirs
(the advertising giants'), they'll drop nine-plus figures paying to have ours
outlawed, guaranteed. The only thing that might save us from that in the US is
that national ID of any sort is pretty unpopular across party lines, and
that's effectively what it'd be.

I wouldn't be surprised if they're already quietly laying the groundwork for
such an effort.

~~~
chrisweekly
"national ID of any sort"

In the US it's not possible to catch a flight across the country or obtain a
loan without providing your SSN. And the SSN was originally, extra-explicitly,
not allowed to be used for anything but administering social security
benefits.

~~~
Zippogriff
Exactly. It's a terrible tool for that job and wasn't designed for it, but
there's such a great need for something like that, that businesses and
governments have grabbed onto it anyway, for lack of something better.

Despite what might be described as an absolutely huge _market signal_ that
there's desire and need for this, resistance to actual national ID is so high
among elected officials that propositions for it have, so far, always been
DOA. Maybe national IDs really are terrible and it's worth the shared-over-
the-population pain and expense not having one causes in a modern society and
economy, IDK.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Then maybe a privately-issued national ID is the answer, for those that want
it. That's the proper response to a _market_ signal, no?

~~~
Zippogriff
Indeed, there must be some reason no such thing has materialized from the
market, despite ongoing problems caused by its absence.

I'd guess it's one of those things where network effects make it hard to get
off the ground, and given the nature of it, especially hard to get off the
ground without government buy-in from the beginning, as so many of the ways
it'd be useful for saving time and money and reducing risk are tied to
interaction with the government. If a market-based solution for it were
desirable, for whatever reason, defining some clear and interoperable standard
at the government level would probably be necessary to make the market viable,
no matter how much latent demand there may be.

Further, imagining the user experience of a non-heavily-regulated/standardized
ID market, it seems like it'd necessarily be so hellishly bad it'd never gain
adoption. Having 5 different IDs and sometimes having to get new ones or drop
an old one seems no better than using credit cards and our social security
numbers as IDs, like we do now. It seems to me the epitome of something that
can't possibly be any good as a market solution, unless it's so monopolized or
regulated that it's indistinguishable from a government solution, except
somewhat less straightforward.

------
pmoriarty
_" One lesson that GPT-3 might be teaching us: the tell-tale signature
artifact of simulation is not the spiky glitch, it's the smooth, shallow,
facile surface. It's not the errors, it's a certain kind of boring
flawlessness, that's what we should be on the lookout for."_

These models could be trained on any arbitrary corpus of writing, from any one
author or combinations of authors.

Let's see the the critics complain about "boring flawlessness" when the model
is trained on the works of Shakespeare, Voltaire, Buckowski, Lewis Carroll,
Mark Twain, or Hunter S Thompson... or some combination of the above.

~~~
lalaithion
GPT-3 was trained on all of those authors.

~~~
pmoriarty
But many millions of others besides these.

So these authors were drowned out in the noise.

I'm talking about training on just a relatively small number of authors, so
the model can acquire some of their distinctive traits.

~~~
caconym_
I don't know much about GPT-3, but if you drastically reduce the size of the
corpus won't you also drastically reduce the output domain to the point that
it's no longer useful? Or is there some way to get it to take whatever
"semantic understanding" makes it somewhat convincing, that it's gathered from
the full corpus, and ape a particular author's style over it?

It's very possible for human authors to imitate style. In fact, if you write a
lot of the same kind of thing that you read, you'll find your own style
gravitating toward that of whoever you're reading at the time. I just (re)read
_Franny and Zooey_ , for instance, and for days I've been fighting Salinger
outbreaks in my own prose. Presumably a machine could do the same thing, but
I'd guess it's a very hard problem _on top of_ creating something like GPT-3.

edit: and this is not even getting into the thematic and semantic richness of
the content, which is something good authors pack a lot more of into each word
than the blogspam wordsmiths GPT-3 is about to put out of work.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" if you drastically reduce the size of the corpus won't you also drastically
reduce the output domain to the point that it's no longer useful?"_

Usefulness is in the eye of the beholder.

A model trained on, say, all the works of Shakespeare might not create
something that can pass for Shakespeare's lost work, but might be inspiring,
interesting, or have a Shakespearean quality about it in small doses... which
could still be very useful for a writer seeking inspiration.

Incidentally, all of Shakespeare's works make up a not insignificant amount of
data, though obviously it's a lot less than what GPT-3 was trained on.

Other prolific authors might also provide enough data to train a model.

It's not clear to me at what point the amount of data one uses becomes too
little for useful results, and it would surprise me if there was any consensus
on this matter, considering the enormous variety in AI techniques, combination
of techniques, and parameters that can be used for training and testing, along
with all the different uses one might put the models to after they're trained.

~~~
caconym_
> Usefulness is in the eye of the beholder.

I think the context here is the question of what "kinds" of writing GPT-3 and
similar technologies can and can't do as well as humans, so when I talk about
"usefulness" I'm really talking about whether GPT-3 can do its thing of
generating passable text in response to widely varied prompts. If it can't do
that in some domain, then it's not going to replace writers working in that
domain.

That doesn't mean the output won't be interesting, but it will be far less
relevant in the ways that make GPT-3 notable in the first place.

------
lmm
> There's a kind of writing that is actively aspiring to a smooth, shallow,
> facile surface, a certain kind of boring flawlessness. The writing that most
> corporations do. That's who GPT-3 will get to first. Not the novelists and
> the poets but the corporate copy-writers. They came for the writers of car
> brochures, but I wasn't a writer of car brochures, so I said nothing.

I'm not at all convinced. A car brochure at least has to tell you what's good
about the car. Poetry seems to actively aspire to saying nothing substantive,
and so does a lot of "literary" fiction and a certain kind of magazine
article.

~~~
Thorrez
Computers are good at giving you facts, that's why computers will be able to
write a car brochure. Poetry is more about making you feel something. That's
harder for a computer to do.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Marketing of cars has very little to do with facts, it's all about emotion.
There are no pictures of the typical congestion, its all open roads with no
other pesky road users. The models are all slim whereas most of their
customers struggle to drag their fat backsides into the car. The kids are
happy to sit in the back whilst the reality is they will be screaming "are we
there yet" after five minutes of a long drive.

Modern marketing is all about emotion.

------
bencollier49
Hmm. Have these guys seen Ryan North's "Star Trek GPT-NG"?

`S1, E20: The Big Goodbye: The crew of the Enterprise-D sets aside all of its
other duties to try and solve a murder mystery. Filmed on location in Miami. A
woman dressed in a Starfleet uniform from the ship is murdered, and Riker's
going to need a tan to solve this case.`

------
keenmaster
The premise is that GPT-3 has a certain style, but it doesn't. It is almost
defined by its ability to readily adopt linguistic idiosyncracies. That
includes the OP's example of using colloquialisms like "dang."

GPT-3 will reduce the premium on style compared to substance.

~~~
Zippogriff
The value of much writing, especially on the Web, is being what the reader
happens to have found rather than whatever better thing they might instead be
reading on the same topic. That is, if your cheap knock-off article is what
people end up reading, for whatever reason, instead of the better one(s) you
cribbed from, you win. Because the barriers to entry on reading are so low
(click link, start reading) and most of the writing's low-value to begin with,
people don't exactly shop around for their idle Web reading.

These articles may have substance, but simply be far from the best
presentation of that substance. I think GPT-3 and similar projects will do a
fine job at subpar regurgitation of existing info that's better covered
elsewhere but still manages to capture eyeballs, which describes, I expect,
something like 99% of all writing on the Web, including, and perhaps
especially, message board posts like this, as people often remark when yet
another 300-post thread hits the front page on [some tired topic the
discussion of which plays out the same every time]. Long-form print isn't
perfect but is somewhat better, since there are some barriers both to
publishing and to reading and you're not giving the writing away for free so
simply holding a passing reader's interest for two minutes means nothing. The
web, though, and maybe even magazines? I wouldn't bet against machines doing
much or even most of that writing within a decade. Consider: how much of an
issue of, say, Cosmo consists of light re-workings of earlier, recurring
articles? People already joke about that kind of thing. Machines can probably
do that work, very soon.

~~~
keenmaster
We're playing a sequential game. No one is going to happily lap up GPT-3/4/5
generated articles in the long run as their _primary reading_ unless they only
read articles that take the form of "X happened, then Y, and A said B" (which
actually is a lot of people, but they're not really readers anyway).

GPT will serve as intellectual humiliation. Some people will be embarrassed to
find out that most of their reading materials can be generated by robots. On
the margins, that can lead to people deliberately seeking out more
intellectual content. That includes long format materials such as books. On
the labor side, writing talent will be allocated away from shallow topics.
That's a plus to me.

~~~
NortySpock
If GPT could produce something intellectually interesting, wouldn't that pass
the Turing test?

Seems like all GPT can produce is an infinite supply of shaggy dog stories. I
don't know if I'd call that intellectual humiliation, just a lack of a point
or punchline.

([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_dog_story](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_dog_story))

~~~
keenmaster
To rephrase: it will humiliate people who consume non-intellectually
interesting material but don't really think about what they're doing. E.g.
Someone whose daily reading consists of the top articles on Yahoo News. I
don't think they'll continue to do so if Yahoo and its partners switch to
GPT-X. So either Yahoo will source better material, or its readership will
decline.

~~~
NortySpock
In GPT's current iteration, I agree.

If GPT produces better output and is carefully mixed in with existing stories,
I don't think anyone will notice.

What percentage of stock price stories are generated by a bot? Off the cuff
and totally guessing, I'd say 50%. Do you know the exact number? Could you
tell? Would the headline service tell you? (probably not)

~~~
keenmaster
Ethos matters, especially when there's money involved and you're taking advice
from someone. You'd be disturbed if that someone is a bot. Maybe you shouldn't
be, because sometimes financial advisors are worse than bots, but people don't
know that.

As for the stories that merely describe stock movements without any real
analysis, I myself would read those. I'm completely fine with that as long as
there's reliable QA on the output.

