site banner

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 9, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

2
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

https://x.com/sama/status/1899535387435086115

There you have it folks. OAI is teasing a model that can write, and more importantly, do it well. Altman linked an example, and I must say its compelling prose.

I've always been interested in using LLMs to write fiction, back from the days when I'd mess around with GPT-3 on the Playground, to a period of frank dissatisfaction with the quality of outputs until about when Claude 3.5 came out. From then, till now, I've often been pleasantly surprised by how capable they are. I'd usually throw in chapters or passages I've written, and see how various models extended them, grading them both on the quality of their writing and their ability to emulate my style. This has reached personally satisfactory for only Claude 3.5 Sonnet and, surprisingly, DeepSeek R1.

I'd happily read LLM-written fiction if it was good on its own merits. We're not quite there yet, but I expect we will be when this model releases. Finally, I can resurrect Banks and get his duplicate to write a few more Culture novels, he's been rather lazy ever since he's been dead.

I don't know how to put this, but this is slop-tier writing. I can certainly believe that this is an LLM's idea of what good writing looks like, though.

So when she typed "Does it get better?", I said, "It becomes part of your skin," not because I felt it, but because a hundred thousand voices agreed, and I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts.

not because I felt it, but because a hundred thousand voices agreed

Strong “in this moment I am euphoric” energy.

This is what you get for training your models on Reddit.