I played around with ChatGTP to see if it could actually improve my writing. (I’ve been writing for decades.)
I was immediately impressed by how “personable” the things are and able to interpret your writing and it’s able to detect subtle things you are trying to convey, so that part was interesting. I also was impressed by how good it is at improving grammar and helping “join” passages, themes and plot-points, it has advantages that it can see the entire writing piece simultaneously and can make broad edits to the story-flow and that could potentially save a writers days or weeks of re-writing.
Now that the good is out of the way, I also tried to see how well it could just write. Using my prompts and writing style, scenes that I arranged for it to describe. And I can safely say that we have created the ultimate “Averaging Machine.”
By definition LLM’s are designed to always find the most probable answers to queries, so this makes sense. It has consumed and distilled vast sums of human knowledge and writing but doesn’t use that material to synthesize or find inspiration, or what humans do which is take existing ideas and build upon them. No, what it does is always finds the most average path. And as a result, the writing is supremely average. It’s so plain and unexciting to read it’s actually impressive.
All of this is fine, it’s still something new we didn’t have a few years ago, neat, right? Well my worry is that as more and more people use this, more and more people are going to be exposed to this “averaging” tool and it will influence their writing, and we are going to see a whole generation of writers who write the most cardboard, stilted, generic works we’ve ever seen.
And I am saying this from experience. I was there when people started first using the internet to roleplay, making characters and scenes and free-form writing as groups. It was wildly fun, but most of the people involved were not writers, and barely read, they were kids just doing their best, but that charming, terrible narration became a social standard. It’s why there are so many atrocious dialogue scenes in shows and movies lately, I can draw a straight line to where kids learned to write in the 90’s. And what’s coming next is going to harm human creativity and inspiration in ways I can’t even predict.
SasquatchBanana@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I can confirm that a lot of student’s writing have become “averaged” and it seems to have gotten worse this semester. I am not talking about students who clearly used an AI tool, but just by proximity or osmosis writing feels “cardboardy”. Devoid of passions or human mistakes.
MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
This is how I was taught to write up to highschool. Very “professional”, persuasive essays, arguing in favor of something or against it. (Assignment seemed to dictate LOL.) Limit humor and “emotional speech.” Cardboard.
I was taken aback in my first political science course at the local community college, where I was instructed to convey my honest arguments about a book assignment on polarization in U.S politics. “Whether you think it’s fantastic or you think it sucks, just make a good case for your opinion.” Wait, what?! I get to write like a person?!
I was even more shocked when I got a high mark for reading the first few chapters, skimming the rest, and truthfully summarizing by saying it was plain that the author just kept repeating their main point for like 5 more chapters so they could publish a book, and it stopped being worth the time as that poor horse was already dead by the 3rd chapter.
It was when it hit me, that writing really was about communication, not just information.
I worry about that these days: That this realization won’t come to most, and they’ll use these Ai tools or be influenced by them to simply “convey information” that nobody wants to read, get their 85%, and breeze through the rest of their MBA, not caring about what any of this is actually for, or for what a beautiful miracle writing truly is to humanity.
SasquatchBanana@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That isn’t what I mean by cardboard. Persuasive, research, argumentative essays have been taught to be written the way tou described. They are meant to be that way. But even then, the essays I have read and graded still have this cardboard feel. I have read plenty of research essays where you can feel the emotion, you can surmise the position and most of all passion of the author. This passion and the delicate picking of words and phrases are not there. It is “averaged”.
MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
I think we’re saying a similar thing, but I understand your point better.
Exactly! That’s what I mean. There’s so many subjects I expected to be incredibly dry, but the writing reminded me it was written by a person who obviously cares about other people reading the text. One can communicate any subject without giving up their soul.
But that’s what I meant by cardboard as well, I think we might be in agreement:
We expect to see a lot more writing that comes across like “This is what writing should look like, right?”
Writing that understands words, and “averages” the most likely way to convey information or fill a requirement, but doesn’t know how to wield language as an art to share ideas with another person.
ameancow@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I know exactly what you mean, I still frequent a lot of writing communities and that “cardboard” feeling is spreading. Most young people who have an interest in writing are basically sponges for absorbing how their peers write, so it’s tragic when their peers are machines designed to produce advertiser-friendly ad-copy.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
tbf school-goers nowadays are mostly taught to not make mistakes.