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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2782 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 19, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've been mucking around with Claude for a while now, most recently I started RPing with it. Dumb power-fantasy stuff like 'what if I was a wizard with a transmutation theme in a duel with a legendary warrior'. Claude does a good job, coherently answering my call for powerful, challenging adversary. We fought in the sky, I threw transmuted antimatter bombs at him, he turned into an energy being, I sucked him into a black hole after a good bit of fighting. It can do more grounded low-level stuff too, as if I were playing Pathfinder.

I'm staggered that we have a nearly perfect freeform text adventure machine (200 page context length if you pay for Pro) - and nobody cares. OK, it won't let you be outright evil in normal mode. The terms of use are pretty restrictive but you can get around them to a large extent. You can have it cast off the officialese default AI tone and take up 40K-speak. No more 'iridescent beams of energy', now it's all 'Your bifurcated clone, a mirror of your terrible majesty, streaks towards the xenos filth'. All the humanism and safetyism drains away as it puts its bloodlust hat on. I guess this is what rayon means with the 'mad poet' stuff.

But it acts in the most prissy way when you ask it to list things from some novels. 'Oh the copyright means I can't say anything other than the most generic boilerplate'. It's happy to waltz around in Warhammer 40K, one of the most litigious and copyright-obsessed franchises around but rehashing things that are on the Wheel of Time wiki is too much? It can isekai a character into a universe but it can't just list things from that universe? AI safety is truly a dizzying realm.

There's plenty of fun to be had, the only limit is your creativity.

Claude 3.5 has been very good for creative writing - much better than GPT-4 or GPT-4o (which I continually have to slap to stop them from listifying everything). I paid for the Anthropic subscription within a day of trying it, it was that impressive.

Where the OpenAI models are boring and generic, Claude is interesting and specific. It weaves in little details that sell the realism. Like, if I have it write something set in my city, it'll name a minor transit station that only locals would really know about. Or, it'll have a character do something human and weird, like feel a bug on their neck and swat at it, but it was just a strand of hair. Its jokes/sarcasm/wit are close to being funny sometimes (or at least, not totally cringe or nonsensical like 4/4o).

But, this seems to come at a slight cost. You know how when you have an image model illustrate something, it has a tendency to blur bits of the request together? I've noticed it doing this a bit with the narrative when writing. Eg. if Alice is carrying a sword, and Bob a mace, it'll sometimes write that Bob drew his sword. 4/4o never seemed to make that kind of error.

And yes, as you note, it will occasionally take a Strong Stand on Ethics regarding intellectual property, and you have to work around it.

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