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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8488 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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At this point the AI doubters should be eating a double serving of Crow. And the best thing about it all is how this is the worst AI will ever be.

In other news, OpenAI released GPT Image 2.5 today as well, representing yet another significant advance in AI generated images. I'd feel bad for the human artists etc., except the've been dead for over a year at this point and we might as well have their eventual replacement AI be as good as possible.

  • -15

We thought art would be the first to go, but that’s clearly wrong. AI is bad at producing useable images. I know this won’t always be the case, but by the time an ad exec can produces ads without an art team, other professions will be long gone as well.

AI is bad at producing useable images.

Art is meh, writing style is terrible. Part of this is the lack of RLVR; the alternative just trains the model to produce the lowest common denominator, which is what we get.

But, fundamentally, I don't think the labs care about art or prose style. Writing can be slop and it'll annoy people for a couple years, while math is a load-bearing component of RSI. Get RSI, and you can catch up on writing over a long weekend.

I think this is just a technical problem, frankly. You can prompt models to actually have decent writing style with enough effort which means it's possible that fine tuning or some even simpler operation on the output fixes the problem entirely. And that's a valuable product so i'm certain someone's going to come up with it eventually.

Slop writing and em dashes is the record skipping of our time, nothing more. People will miss it and try to ape it in 20 years.

You can prompt models to actually have decent writing style with enough effort

People keep saying this but never share the prompts. It's not possible.

What?

Maybe this is down to the fact that there's a high variance in what people consider to be "decent writing style", but you can just falsify that style isn't controllable by asking your favorite SotA model to write in the style of your favorite author. Never mind by using a fine tuned model.

Now if what you consider necessary for "decent" isn't quantifiable or is outside of the abilities of the current methods, fair enough, but I sure would like to know what it actually is.

That paper doesn't do it

It's a review of a whole area of research trying to do it with various levels of success. Fine tuning is still the best way of altering style AFAIK, but all this is insofar as we mean the same thing by "it". But it seems clearly we don't. So what is "it" (prose style) exactly if not text structure, sentiment, vocabulary, etc?

What's the quality you're looking for that's not described in this review?

The other commenter said:

People keep saying this but never share the prompts.

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