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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   3501 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 28, 2023

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 totally mesmerized by ChatGPT4's writing capabilities lately, having used it to generate hours upon hours of entertainment somewhere in the gray area between a TTRPG and collaborative fanfic. I give it the outline of a scene, tell it what the characters do. If there's combat or uncertainty, I have it evaluate using the game rules and their character sheets. Mostly though, it reads like a choose-your-own-adventure novel with all possibilities open.

Consider this tavern-meet scene from the Cyberpunk universe: I think this is pretty fucking good. GPT's prose is not high art, but it's a damn sight better than what I could manage. If I played a live game with friends, we would not narrate this well. If we played a PbP or written game, I'd still forget to colour the similes with elements of each character's backstory like GPT did without my even asking.

It's empowering to be able to orchestrate tropey pulp so quickly. Normally I'm a slow writer (seconding @PatellaFarmer 's comment a while ago ), and not a good one - both for fiction and nonfiction. I'll agonize over word choice, phrasing, go back, edit too much, and it'll still come out awful (e.g. this post).

With GPT though, I'm like Mickey in Fantasia's Sorcerer's Apprentice and god, it's fun! "Have two characters enage in a fierce argument reflecting their core moral differences". "Write a climactic battle scene, every action heightened to the stuff of legend", "Do a silly montage anime music video (AMV) set to an angsty alt-rock song (Paramore, MCR or something) Cut the lyrics with descriptions of each clip as you write the next few days of story." Call me easily amused, I guess.

Maybe I'll get bored eventually, but for now, I'm astonished at how addicting it is. A quick ctrl+F of my inputs says I made 422 requests on one session alone: great value for the monthly subscription. I found myself staying up late several nights to wait for the next quota rollover. It's like that just one more episode feeling of a good TV show, but the next episode never disappoints, because you can tell the writers to go back and fix it straight away. Then they do!

Of course, it's not without flaws. Given the limited context window, ChatGPT behaves kinda like "Skeleton Jelly", forgetting details you haven't mentioned recently. You have to act as its script supervisor and fix continuity when it inevitably screws up. I mitigate this by keeping a running "save file" prompt of character stats, appearance, the story so far. So long as I keep that up to date and re-prompt it, it does all right, at the cost of re-using the same descriptive words more than it should.

There are also quirks I wish I didn't have to burn requests correcting. Like, for whatever reason - my prompting? its training data? - dialogue tends to drift into therapy-speak. Characters validate each others' feelings and everyone is super happy and supportive. I have to keep pulling on the reins to maintain tension and conflict.

Anyway, I highly recommend trying some stories with it if you like narrative crafting or TTRPGs but otherwise can't write.

I'm not impressed. I mean, I'm impressed insofar as a Chatbot can write anything, but the particular example you posted was of the quality I'd expect from a community college student taking a creative writing elective.

You might want to update your priors. Have you taken a creative writing class? I took one sophomore year at a prestigious U.S. university. The writing quality was nowhere near GPT4 level. I can only imagine how bad a community college class would be. I expect that most students would struggle to produce a coherent narrative at all.

The vast majority of people are terrible at writing.

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