ChatGPT your way past writer's block

[Bramblethorn]

GPT is stirring up shit in the world of education. A good thing too, I say. Something similar happened in math education a while back, when electronic calculators appeared. They'll first ban it, then allow it again, after they've redefined what "education" means.

I HIGHLY recommend anyone who's interested in the philosophical ramifications of ChatGPT to read Alan Turing's short, totally non-technical paper from 1950, (wherein he describes "The Imitation Game" a.k.a "The Turing Test"):

A link for the hard of googling:

https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/sources/t_article.pdf

It's a good read, but GPT is not close to being able to pass the Turing Test against a skeptical interviewer who knows how to probe for understanding.

So the odds may be against it producing an exact copy of a photo, but producing something almost identical happens more frequently.

What I'm getting at is the possibility that a narrative AI might produce plagiaristically similar prose without the user of the program detecting it.

Just remembered I had an example of GPT doing this:

Me: Write a story about somebody who creates a very funny joke, analysing the precise wording of the joke to explain why it's so funny.

GPT: Once upon a time, there was a comedian named Bob. Bob had been doing stand-up comedy for years, but had never quite hit the big time. He was always searching for the perfect joke that would make him a household name.

One day, while walking through the park, Bob had an epiphany. He realized that the key to crafting a truly great joke was not in the punchline, but in the setup. With this newfound understanding, Bob set out to write a joke that would truly make people laugh.

He spent weeks pouring [sic] over dictionaries and thesauruses, looking for just the right words to use in his joke. He experimented with different sentence structures and word combinations until he finally found the perfect phrasing.
The joke went something like this:

"I told my wife she was drawing her eyebrows too high. She looked surprised."

The key to this joke's success was the use of the word "surprised." By using this word, Bob was able to create a play on words that made the punchline even more humorous. The setup of the joke - "I told my wife she was drawing her eyebrows too high" - leads the listener to expect a punchline about the wife's appearance, but the punchline - "She looked surprised" - subverts that expectation by instead making a pun on the word "surprised" which is the key to the humor of the joke.

Bob's joke was a hit, and he immediately became a household name. He went on to write many more funny jokes, but none were quite as successful as his first, perfect joke.

Bob's joke became so popular that it was used in multiple shows and even translated to different languages. The use of precise words and sentence structure can make a big difference in the humor of a joke, and this was proven by Bob's success.

That joke isn't original to GPT; googling it will find plenty of examples on the web. It's just pulled out something it saw on a r/dadjokes.

Note also that its explanation contradicts itself - the key to a great joke is "not in the punchline but in the setup", but then the very last word of the joke is "the key".

 

[XerXesXu]

; anybody wanting to use it to write a good story will still need to put in a lot of their own work.

. Your prompt suggests second person, and games of that kind account for a lot of the second-person material that would likely be in a training corpus.

That example also hints at the limitations of GPT. (NovelAI also runs on GPT.) Why is the ocean is above the sky? How can a single blanket be

There's also the location of the oak tree as "on the southeast side" of something which is apparently on the west of the protagonist - not the most helpful way to locate it relative to that protagonist!

Exactly. You must shape the story with prompts, it won't just spit out screeds.

After plugging away for a couple of hours a story emerges. Now, I didn't conceive of a story to begin writing, I tidied up Red Chamber's prompt and entered it. I was surprised at the first iteration, yes I'd need to alter 'above' to 'beneath', all the usual things you do when you edit, but that first iteration prompted me. I continued, prompt and counter-prompt with the app and my prompts shaped it's story and it's prompts shaped mine. The result is something I never pre-conceived of, and my working practice is to start with a beginning and an end then navigate between the two. I still don't know how it'll end, but I'm enjoying the game, and as you note, it's very like playing a game, a rather entertaining game.

 

[lovecraft68]

There's a train coming down the track very fast. You'll either be on board shouting 'Full steam ahead,' or on the tracks tut-tuting. Do you speak from experience of using AI, or are you offering an uninformed opinion? Readers will want to take that into account.

Justify a little more.

If you took a test but needed an app to give you the answers, did you pass the test?
If you use the parking features that come with the big penis compensation trucks to park, did you park it?
If you need a GPS to get you somewhere did you get yourself there?

If you need AI to write for you, are you a writer?

Answer to all four is no, and that no is as cut and dried as it gets. This is not far from having a ghost writer, but saying you wrote the story.

If you need a binky to help you, that's on you, don't disparage people who can come up with their own ideas like every writer from the dawn of time has until the "I need my tech to do everything for me' dodos came along.

What's next? People going to get the AI to write your posts for them?

 

[AwkwardlySet]

AI Tilan! A new frontier in trolling

 

[XerXesXu]

Justify a little more.

If you took a test but needed an app to give you the answers, did you pass the test?
If you use the parking features that come with the big penis compensation trucks to park, did you park it?
If you need a GPS to get you somewhere did you get yourself there?

If you need AI to write for you, are you a writer?

Answer to all four is no, and that no is as cut and dried as it gets. This is not far from having a ghost writer, but saying you wrote the story.

If you need a binky to help you, that's on you, don't disparage people who can come up with their own ideas like every writer from the dawn of time has until the "I need my tech to do everything for me' dodos came along.

What's next? People going to get the AI to write your posts for them?

You're too prolix. Your short amswer is, "My opinion is utterly uninformed.' Good writing is succinct and clear.

 

[Bareskinny]

I've been using NovelAI myself for the same reason, and bonus it doesn't shy away from pornography in any way.

Sounds like this brand of AI will become the savior of incels everywhere.

 

[XerXesXu]

AI Tilan! A new frontier in trolling

You'll recall that Tilan introduced himself by claiming intellectual property in mere words and concepts. Most dismissed it as the common imprinting of ideas that affects all readers and the regurgitation of them that afflicts all writers. Poor 8Letters used the odd couple of sentences he'd taken from another writer, and gave a rational reason why. Outrage. Those who promiscuously borrow lyrics and poems, and classical literature to decorate and explain their work were appalled. Their plagiarism is an homage, high art. Then, some new lad mentioned that he was experimenting with AI. He was scorned and laughed at by the 'seriously' literate. Well, I'm not seriously literate and I view their homages as I view 8Letters plagiarism. Fair enough. Other people's words and phrases can express and evoke emotions one cannot articulate, and that's all he did. He didn't copy a work.

I would never discourage anyone from creatively exploring new tools, which the lad wanted to do. By all means, stick to quills and parchment yourself, but they're not the future of literature and its mischievous to try and inhibit others' creative exploration.

 

[Djmac1031]

So I've never heard of NovelAI before and decided to play with it a bit.

My initial thoughts after only a few minutes:

I suppose if you entered enough prompts into the thing, it might generate a half decent story, or at the very least the germ of something you could then edit and rework to make your own.

But nothing it's generated on it's own has been the least bit compelling. And it often loses the thread of it's own narrative.

If I were struggling with how to flesh out an idea for a story, could this AI help?

Maybe. But only with a lot of hit or miss in trying to prompt the damn thing.

I'd much rather just work it out myself.

Lastly: if someone were to actually "write" a complete story using AI and post it here, without editing or adding something on their own, I'd probably be closing out of it after a paragraph or three.

 

[ElectricBlue]

In my view, that's an experiment worth pursuing. It's not just a tool, it's a toy, it has a lot of play value, and will only get better.

I never said I expected AI to make sense, I was just observing that your extract made very little sense at all, no more than a child with a collection of phrases on pieces of paper. "Look mummy, I can write, see!"

"No darling, you're just putting things next to each other."

But hey, treat it as a toy, because right now, it's barely even that. I don't think style EB is threatened just yet.

 

[XerXesXu]

Part of the current debate around AI has to do with the fact that nothing "belongs to the AI." This is where copyright issues and concerns come into play.

There's a GAN site called thispersondoesnotexist.com that people might be familiar with. So, it generates photorealistic portraits using datasets of real photographs. It seemed pretty amazing at first, but lately attention has been focused on how closely its generated images sometimes are to the dataset images.

Litigation is already afoot.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23558516/ai-art-copyright-stable-diffusion-getty-images-lawsuit

We should know more in a year or two.

The success of AI has moved its benefactors to move from open source to monetise it. 'thisperson', I believe, is still open source, and it uses images gifted to open source, but scraped by their AI program. I use it in some of my WIPs to put a face to a character. I'm happy to declare that I have the copyright, by clicking I generate the image, it's the equivalent of borrowing someone's camera to take a photo. The photographer has copyright, not the owner of the camera. But, one can never foretell the future. I can't see the courts leaning heavily against AI, but they may redistribute the contemplated gazillions in profits to recognise all levels of contribution to the profits.

If 'thisperson' generates an image that could be used as a biometric ID eg passport or driving licence image of a complainant, they may have a claim, but short of that it's just a striking resemblance and no more actionable than one human looking like another would be actionable of itself. They would both have an equal and opposite right of action.

This is all speculation, commercial actions are settled commercially. They expect that they'll be plenty of money to go around.

This may worry you. The FBI is after us. In less than 4 years they think they'll be able to unmask our real identities and where we live.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...-tech-to-unmask-anonymous-writers/ar-AA12lRmZ​

 

[AwkwardlySet]

You'll recall that Tilan introduced himself by claiming intellectual property in mere words and concepts. Most dismissed it as the common imprinting of ideas that affects all readers and the regurgitation of them that afflicts all writers. Poor 8Letters used the odd couple of sentences he'd taken from another writer, and gave a rational reason why. Outrage. Those who promiscuously borrow lyrics and poems, and classical literature to decorate and explain their work were appalled. Their plagiarism is an homage, high art. Then, some new lad mentioned that he was experimenting with AI. He was scorned and laughed at by the 'seriously' literate. Well, I'm not seriously literate and I view their homages as I view 8Letters plagiarism. Fair enough. Other people's words and phrases can express and evoke emotions one cannot articulate, and that's all he did. He didn't copy a work.

I would never discourage anyone from creatively exploring new tools, which the lad wanted to do. By all means, stick to quills and parchment yourself, but they're not the future of literature and its mischievous to try and inhibit others' creative exploration.

As I said, the idea of a program, we mistakenly call AI, writing stories is somewhat disturbing to me. I refrained from making any judgements about whose intellectual property the story would be, if parts of it were written by the so called AI. I won't be going there, as yes, there is plenty of help one can receive from other programs that help with grammar and style. I suppose a limit should still be set somewhere. My problem was of a different nature - it was a fear of the idea that programs could one day produce art. That is far more intimidating to me.
It is true that we are all inspired by those who had written long before us, as the echoes of the stuff we read are always somewhere inside of us. Once again you have to set a limit somewhere. What 8letters did was plagiarism in my opinion, yet nobody was really pulling out pitchforks, he just handled the whole situation badly. Some limits need to exist in everything.

 

[XerXesXu]

What 8letters did was plagiarism in my opinion,

You don't give your opinion on copying poems and lyrics and classical passages. I'd be interested to have it.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

You don't give your opinion on copying poems and lyrics and classical passages. I'd be interested to have it.

Honestly, I have no idea who, if anyone is doing such a thing. Are we talking about Lit authors?

 

[XerXesXu]

Honestly, I have no idea who, if anyone is doing such a thing. Are we talking about Lit authors?

'How much can I copy?' is a popular topic on Lit.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

'How much can I copy?' is a popular topic on Lit.

I would probably need some context to have an actual opinion. As far as I am concerned you can use as much as you want, as long as you put it in quotes and name the source. You can also paraphrase, but again you need to reference the author. If you are saying someone is taking passages from books and classical pieces without any reference, or even claiming it is their work, by changing only a small part of it, then I see that as blatant stealing. Once again, I would need to see an example, as this is all hypothetical.

 

[Sammael Bard]

I see AI used in writing similar to what steroids is to bodybuilding - Enhanced performance but, in the end, it’s wasn’t your effort. People who admit to using it beforehand don’t get as much backlash as people who get caught lying about it later.

Speaking for Lit, I doubt any readers would even know the difference after you’ve smoothed out the chinks with a round of beta-reading and editing. And I seriously doubt anyone would care as long as it was ‘good enough’ to squeeze a wank out.

Climb a league higher, and you’d get ripped by traditional publishers for trying to pass an AI authored book as yours. ChatGPT is just as easy to trace as it uses presets from a vast online library. It isn’t ’creating’ anything, per se, just mixing and matching.

I think free-to-publish sites like Lit will be burdened by a lot of AI-generated garbage in the coming days. Higher leagues of publishing will be relatively unaffected. Hobby writers will have to make a choice whether they’ll use the AI or not.

 

[ElectricBlue]

'How much can I copy?' is a popular topic on Lit.

You've missed the point that when folk cite a song lyric or a poem, they're giving credit to the songwriter or poet. It's not plagiarism, when the original source is given.

To answer @AwkwardlySet, Lit will allow up to 50% of a lyric or poem (based on my experience). A line or two, with a tag to the songwriter, is quite common.

 

[XerXesXu]

I would probably need some context to have an actual opinion. As far as I am concerned you can use as much as you want, as long as you put it in quotes and name the source. You can also paraphrase, but again you need to reference the author. If you are saying someone is taking passages from books and classical pieces without any reference, or even claiming it is their work, by changing only a small part of it, then I see that as blatant stealing. Once again, I would need to see an example, as this is all hypothetical.

https://forum.literotica.com/threads/using-song-lyrics-and-copyright-infringement-question.1579425/

That'll give you a flavour.

 

[XerXesXu]

It's not plagiarism, when the original source is given.

To answer @AwkwardlySet, Lit will allow up to 50% of a lyric or poem (based on my experience). A line or two, with a tag to the songwriter, is quite common.

As 8Letters did.

 

[Bramblethorn]

This may worry you. The FBI is after us. In less than 4 years they think they'll be able to unmask our real identities and where we live.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...-tech-to-unmask-anonymous-writers/ar-AA12lRmZ​

Ugh. The danger with that kind of thing is less that it might work and more that it'll be used by people who don't care whether it works or not, so long as it helps get convictions.

cf. the recent "911 call analysis junk science" business.

I think free-to-publish sites like Lit will be burdened by a lot of AI-generated garbage in the coming days. Higher leagues of publishing will be relatively unaffected. Hobby writers will have to make a choice whether they’ll use the AI or not.

Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see where Lit moderation goes on this from the current "watching and considering" position.

I'd guess that the lower commercial tiers, things like Amazon self-publishing, are going to feel the biggest impacts in the short run. People might post AI-generated stories here for attention but they don't have a profit motive.

 

[Rustyoznail]

At the end of the day, does it really matter if someone uses an AI to put together a story here? Is it any worse than a writer who produces dozens of poorly written derivative stories in a popular category? Or chapter 162 in a never ending tale? (And no, I'm not pointing at anyone. You know they're out there).

I write for fun. I'll look at AI for fun. Computers are just tools to get to a result, good or bad. Computers have been threatening to take over my job of civil design for 40 years, but it's not going to happen anytime soon. They help on simple tasks, but cannot be trusted on complex tasks. The result needs a person with a critical eye to examine the answers.

 

[ElectricBlue]

As 8Letters did.

No, he didn't. He stole a significant chunk of another writer's content without permission or credit, got busted, didn't acknowledge much wrong doing, and tried to justify it by saying, "Well, I wanted those words, so that makes it okay."

You're attempting to rewrite history.

 

[Bramblethorn]

As 8Letters did.

I don't want to reopen recent wounds, but this is not what happened.

There was nothing within the original story to tell readers that it was using passages taken from other works, let alone identifying or attributing them. It did mention an "author's notes" discussion thread on the forums, where he did acknowledge using material from two other authors, but very few readers would have looked up those notes - no more than a few percent.

(At the time I looked, the discussion thread had a total of 824 views, and presumably many of those would've been authors coming back repeatedly to discuss the plagiarism issue. I can't tell exactly how many views the story itself got, but another of his stories in the same category had around 40k views within a few months of posting so I'd expect it was something similar.)

The author's notes as originally published didn't mention which authors/works he'd used. When people asked, he named one story by JCMcNeilly, but couldn't remember the other one.

He did not identify which specific passages he'd taken from McNeilly. He did give a rough location, which was enough for me to compare the two stories and spot some of those passages, but I don't know whether I got everything. It shouldn't have been on me to provide this info.

The other author has never been identified or credited. He did say he hadn't taken much from them, but it's hard to know how much stock to put in that, because his description of what he'd taken from McNeilly wasn't entirely accurate ("no dialogue").

This is a long way from quoting a line or two from a song, styled in a way that clearly identifies it as a quote, and attributing the artist by name at the point where the quote appears.

 

[XerXesXu]

No, he didn't. He copied a sample so small it would be caught by the de minimis rule, it comprised no coherent fragment of the sampled work and required no acknowledgment. He innocently revealed what he had done and why.

Could you confirm for the readers of your post that you are a serial copier of substantial samples of others' work, lyrics and poems, that you acknowledge that these samples are not fair use, and you boast of your shameful practices across many threads on Lit.
This is so that the readers can weigh you and 8Letters in the balance and, if either of you offend, form a fair opinion about who is the greater offender. I know you are a decent chap and would not want to do otherwise.

 

[XerXesXu]

I don't want to reopen recent wounds, but this is not what happened.

There was nothing within the original story to tell readers that it was using passages taken from other works, let alone identifying or attributing them. It did mention an "author's notes" discussion thread on the forums, where he did acknowledge using material from two other authors, but very few readers would have looked up those notes - no more than a few percent.

(At the time I looked, the discussion thread had a total of 824 views, and presumably many of those would've been authors coming back repeatedly to discuss the plagiarism issue. I can't tell exactly how many views the story itself got, but another of his stories in the same category had around 40k views within a few months of posting so I'd expect it was something similar.)

The author's notes as originally published didn't mention which authors/works he'd used. When people asked, he named one story by JCMcNeilly, but couldn't remember the other one.

He did not identify which specific passages he'd taken from McNeilly. He did give a rough location, which was enough for me to compare the two stories and spot some of those passages, but I don't know whether I got everything. It shouldn't have been on me to provide this info.

The other author has never been identified or credited. He did say he hadn't taken much from them, but it's hard to know how much stock to put in that, because his description of what he'd taken from McNeilly wasn't entirely accurate ("no dialogue").

This is a long way from quoting a line or two from a song, styled in a way that clearly identifies it as a quote, and attributing the artist by name at the point where the quote appears.

See #49.