
An AI Breaks the Writing Barrier - jkuria
https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-ai-breaks-the-writing-barrier-11598068862
======
Animats
This technology will make a big dent in blithering as an industry. Too much of
journalism, and far too much of the web, consists of taking in press releases
and speeches and rewriting them. That now looks automatable.

I wonder if GPT-4 will be able to take over the romance novel industry.

~~~
rcfox
I plugged my company's "About Us" page text into a prompt for AI Dungeon's
GPT-3-based engine, and it started off with my character using the site, then
quickly changed into my character following an Arduino tutorial, and
eventually devolved into a college romance drama.

~~~
dgellow
Do you have it somewhere? That sounds hilarious!

~~~
rcfox
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vR99DO1AKJrh_GGg...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vR99DO1AKJrh_GGg-
DoxGICob32jUct_r79VJjb2Qg1biq0t8z39gKqH-QT1Dz1adS5qAShz7thYQMR/pub)

I gave up on the story when it started to get romantic because I wasn't really
in that kind of a mood at the time.

~~~
whiddershins
Wait, explain more please, the prompts are you. ‘browse Reddit’ etc.

~~~
rcfox
Yes, the lines starting with > are my input, except I would write something
like "browse Reddit" and it transformed it into a second-person description:
"You browse Reddit"

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6gvONxR4sf7o
I hate it when models are described as "an AI." It's too much of a
personification for my taste. "An intelligence" carries a lot of baggage
compared to "a model." We can argue til we're blue in the face about whether
GPT-3 is intelligent, so writing a headline like this is already too much hype
for me. I've gotten the chance to play with GPT-3 quite a bit, and while
_amazingly impressive_ , it's not _remotely_ close to what the hype train says
it is.

~~~
devindotcom
You're right in a way but the term AI has come to encompass all software of
the machine learning type, systems that imitate the process of intelligent
thought. It's shorthand at this point, unfortunately inaccurate but ML isn't
as well known and every character counts in headlines so longer descriptions
are saved for the body.

I don't like the way some words are used, and I complain about it too:
[https://coldewey.cc/2020/06/common-bugbears-of-modern-
online...](https://coldewey.cc/2020/06/common-bugbears-of-modern-online-
writing/)

That's our right as fellow users of the language. But unfortunately (such as
with "begging the question" or "flammable") we're much too late to make a
difference. AI is, I think one of those cases.

~~~
6gvONxR4sf7o
That's not the complaint. This is orthogonal to the AI vs ML vs stats debate.

It's "an AI/ML/stats _model_ " vs "an AI." "An artificial intelligence" has
baggage that's hard to pin down, like it suggests it has a notion of self or
sentience or something.

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potiuper
Q: Which is heavier, a toaster or a pencil? A: A pencil is heavier than a
toaster.

Seems legit: [https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-
records/102759-la...](https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-
records/102759-largest-pencil)

~~~
Rapzid
There's that word again,heavy. Why are things so heavy in the future is there
a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?

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king_magic
Ugh, WSJ - no, it's not "shocking experts". It's shocking people who have
absolutely no conception of how GPT-3 works. Those of us who do are mildly
impressed, but recognize that GPT-3 is only an incremental improvement, and
much of what comes out of it is nothing more than moderately coherent
nonsense.

~~~
evolve2k
The “shock” is not about the difference between GPT-3 against developments on
its predecessors.

It’s that itself it’s starting to cross the “Writing Barrier”.

The incremental gain is of little public interest, the social impacts of
having an AI that can reliably produce content that is often indistinguishable
from human content, now we’re potentially facing a profound change in how we
write and in who’s writing we consume.

~~~
EarthLaunch
> who’s writing we consume

Maybe it’ll be an improvement

~~~
evolve2k
Smart writing tools +

With regards to myself having a Smart Grammarly tool where I can write a page
of dot pints and provide a few web links and then run a browser extension that
turns it all into a coherent logical article. That would be brilliant.

Even more fake content -

The more SEO optimised, computer generate, algorithm ready content that is
produced the faster we head into control-based dystopian context.

You spend a month and write up your best distilled, researched, coherent _new_
thoughts on where we need to shift as a society.

Other parties jam together 1000 response articles drawing on established
thought with the intent to deceive and your message is lost in the noise.
“It’s all fake anyways”

An acceleration of our information downfall.

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netsectoday
Nowadays when reading articles I usually have a "did a bot write this" meter
running in my head. When the author has no point and is just spewing related
words that form sentences I usually click away.

I wonder at what point it'll switch to "did a human write this" and I will
click away when I realize it's inefficient monkey words.

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
Is this a specific suggestion that you believe a significant fraction of news
articles are written by bots? Is it a jokey way to repackage that tired
everything-used-to-be-better cynicism? I really can't tell!

And, by the way, journalism never was as matter-of-fact-only as everyone
somehow assumes. Even you parents probably grew up in a Hunter S. Thompson-
world. Your Grandparents had Hemingway who, despite the short sentences,
didn't exactly crack the Shannon Limit in his war dispatches.

There have always been different styles. Just read the headlines only and
you're almost back to the 19th century, when news-tickers actually ticked, and
every tick cost a dollar, and a dollar is an hourly wage.

But I'd suggest actually understanding the purpose of narrative journalism and
occasionally indulging in it. I've seen that complaint so often, and from a
certain type of person almost exclusively, and I'm starting to wonder if it
isn't some sort of psychological phenomenon, with guys (it's always men)
fearing that anything less dry than a phone book rubs up on them, and their
masculinity and rationality might suffer irreparable harm from exposure to
yucky "feelings".

~~~
perl4ever
>Is this a specific suggestion that you believe a significant fraction of news
articles are written by bots?

Financial news on lesser known public companies seems to be.

It's easy to generate a story based on some numbers about the stock to
parameterize it.

Example (showing absolutely no understanding):

"Sorrento Therapeutics, Inc., belongs to Healthcare sector and Biotechnology
industry. The company’s Market capitalization is $1.68B with the total
Outstanding Shares of 32. On 03-09-2020 (Thursday), SRNE stock construct a
change of -2.89 in a total of its share price and finished its trading at
7.06.

Profitability Ratios (ROE, ROA, ROI):

Looking into the profitability ratios of SRNE stock, an investor will find its
ROE, ROA, ROI standing at -297.9%, -49.4% and -91.3%, respectively."

