Well I’m not speaking for everyone, but since I think I’m the only one who used the word “phony” here, I’ll speak for myself. I used that word not to disparage the tech (the tech I simply called worthless, as it’s not worth even discussing) but the person writing the article. If I were her family I do not believe I would ever speak to her agin until she retracted her product advertising in which she shamelessly used her sisters death to help sell. Her words are what I found disgusting.
I’m also 31 and obviously into tech to be here, so not an old man waving sticks at trains. What bizarre assumptions you have.
After a period of significant novelty, GPT-3 reveals itself to be something other than a magical fountain of ingenuity. However, ‘useless’ is going too far when talking about it as a writing tool. It can serve a similar purpose as generative games and techniques such as ‘exquisite cadaver’ or free writing.
One of the difficult things to do in art is to make something that makes some kind of sense but doesn’t simply follow an obvious logical path. Robert Frost put this as ‘no surprise for the writer, [then] no surprise for the reader.’ These leaps, or ‘illogical conclusions’ occupy a non-polynomial space of endless parameters. It’s like a traveling salesman problem where we aren’t sure where the salesman wants to be or how he traveled, until he has made it to his destination. Generative AI can help search the problem space.
you're really harping on the "product advertising" angle. If you dropped that angle completely, if you didn't think this was about that at all, would you still be mad? Why?
I’m not sure I know how to write about how sad and awful I find this article to be. I also can’t think of a worse way for someone to use my death than to write a tech review for a product, much less this completely worthless product. This whole thing reeks of phony.
Calling GPT-3 a product in this context is disingenuous. As it's a fairly new tool many people have been experimenting with it since it's come out. This article is a poignant exploration of using GPT-3 to tell stories. It feels very experimental artistic to me.
Well, each person is entitled to their reaction, no matter how uncharitable. But I'll say that my impression of the piece was nothing like an advertisement and I thought it was moving.
Apparently not being able to recognize ads is a popular trend. I believe South Park dedicated a whole season to this phenomenon. “Is it news? Or an ad?”
I find it really difficult to write a proper eulogy. So difficult in fact that for the several ones I've been involved with, I usually leave it to someone else with a seemingly higher degree of emotional intelligence than myself. I just can't seem to separate how their death makes me feel from the uplifting things that a eulogy is supposed to say. Here I am, still wondering what truly matters in life, and so don't believe I even have the right to summarize the value of someone else's. There's a conventional way these things get presented, but my belief in conventional ways is not strong enough. That's why I prefer to let someone else do it. Truth be told, I'd probably use a service like this the next time I needed to write one.
I highly recommend that if you don't have the ability, for whatever reason, to write a eulogy, find someone else who can do it authentically. An authentic and effective eulogy is about emotional connection. If you find yourself unable to write one, admit you cannot write one, and don't turn it over to an ai or even human service - find a human being with an authentic emotional connection to the deceased who can write it instead.
downvoters should at least have the fortitude to respond why they disagree.
yeah, this struck me as a cruel comment, if only out of carelessness. imho the comment author shouldn't feel good about striking at someone who's hurting, whether they approve of their coping mechanisms or not
Since I’m not the one who used my sisters death to sell a product - and I mean really read what she wrote, she is purposely insinuating that she is having a love affair with the product. “I’ve never read such an accurate Modern Love in my life”, “I felt acutely that there was something illicit about what I was doing” , “One night, when my husband was asleep” - I think I’m being quite nice about it. If I knew this person in real life I don’t believe I would be as nice.
There’s no product being sold; the Believer isn’t a particularly commercial magazine. Implying something feels thrilling and illicit like an affair doesnt mean it is an affair. The sister is dead, no one needs to worry about her. Loved ones who are coping with loss may do so in unconventional ways, and owe nothing to appease your cynicism.
AI writing believable and coherent words is both fascinating and terrifying, particularly to writers. Then arises the instinct to use it as a creative tool, followed by the impulse to edit and workshop the output.
1. You nailed it no one cares about the dead sister… not even the author of this piece.
2. No it’s not a real affair because you can’t have an affair with inanimate objects.
3. I am a writer (so your No True Scotsman implication doesn’t work here) and it’s neither fascinating nor terrifying. The only people who feel threatened by it are bullshit artists worried they will get out bullshited.
It wasn’t a no true Scotsman, but simply stating an area where generative content has a particular implication. You clearly read it closer than many would, and I almost commented on that. I also think that perhaps some background on the publication and author might relieve some of your specific cynicism.
As for fascination and terror, it is not about GPT-3 itself, but the larger question of our utility in the face of an imagined AI’s eventual capability. Heck, some degree of novelty can be generated by Markov chains, chatbots or Mad Libs.
Further, the fact you are implying the dead are more important than the living dealing with loss would make me a the values by which you determine what is sacred.
If you write for the web you are in denial. In the next 5 years either you'll be using an AI tool that you gradually feed input to and edit the output or you'll be replaced by somebody that is doing just that.
I'm curious how informed your opinion is by the way. You say you're a writer but that doesn't mean much in this context since this technology is very new and most people aren't catching on yet. Have you tried out the recent tools like conversation.ai? Do you use tools like MarketMuse?
They already use AI and more straightforward techniques to write many articles for the Web, such as market reports. But for creative writing I'm less persuaded, especially when it's not like you have to pay through the nose for writers.
I think I should have been more specific, I was talking more about SEO copywriting than creative writing.
Writers aren't too expensive you're right - I pay $.04-.06 per word for the 10 that I employ. But depending on the scale, level of competition, and return potential bringing in more AI gets attractive and could be necessary at some point.
My point in my comment was just that if you're a writer and aren't paying attention to these new AI tools you could end up getting blindsided at some point or you might see your pay decrease and be left wondering why
Yes the problem is that I just don’t understand a how to use this fresh new innovative product that will sweep the world by storm with its ability to take the burden and hard work out of the whole writing process. If only I see the light through these amazing stupefying mind-befuddling product demos…
And no I do not write ad content for the web nor will I ever get a computer to write my feelings for me. Not in 5 years, not in 10 years, not whatever you tell your up-incoming investors. The fact that writing about personal grief and marketmuse are being equated as like things is rather disturbing, in a sociopathic/psychopathic sort of way.
Judging by all of these comments I believe I
may just be in the wrong place and that hacker-news is no longer for people like myself.
I don't see how you could have possibly read the piece and come to that conclusion. The point of the article is not at all that the AI does a great job and makes it easy to write with no effort.
I wasn't asking if you watched a product demo I was asking if you'd actually used them. My company does, and they are greatly helpful to our writers.
I was talking about copywriting more than whatever it is you do so I should have been more clear. Good job rage quitting HN btw, hopefully you feel better today lol.
"The fact that writing about personal grief and marketmuse are being equated as like things is rather disturbing, in a sociopathic/psychopathic sort of way" MarketMuse doesn't write content so this just shows you don't know what you're talking about
I guess there's no accounting for taste. I found the piece a haunting and poetic meditation on grief and recovery.
I will tell you how it felt for me. I felt I had lost half of myself. I felt I had lost my right arm. I felt I had lost my left leg. I felt I had lost my tongue. I felt I had lost my heart. I felt I had lost my mind. I felt I had lost my eyes. I felt I had lost my ears. I felt I had lost my breath. I felt I had lost my voice. I felt I had lost my smile. I felt I had lost my laugh. I felt I had lost my tears. I felt I had lost my future. I felt I had lost my past. I felt I had lost my parents, as well. I felt I had lost everything. I felt I had lost everything.
And yet, I did not lose everything. I did not stop being me. I did not stop existing. There were things I could do: I could make my bed, I could wash the dishes, I could walk the dog, I could feed myself, I could live in the world.
I guess there really isn't. To me this reads like a kindergartener proudly listing all the body parts they know. Or some program repeating words it was given (which is what this actually is). It's not deep or touching at all because it's so comically bad.
It's amazing and raw. Not like a kindergartener. Like a person who is experiencing feelings without a clear sense of place or reason. I thought the prose was an achievement for a computer, and the sequential format allowing the AI to finish each story was a novel medium. The AI was a kind of mirror, extrapolating the mood and content of what was written before.
The AI portions as the chorus of a song carrying the mood of the more specific bits written by the human.
I also thought the bit I quoted was evocative of my own process of grief. At first you are shattered. You've lost half yourself. You've lost everything. Then, in the slightest most mundane ways, you heal. I can make the bed. I can live in the world.
It seems pretty clear that something in all this is really bothering you. That's reasonable, but do you suppose there might be more effective ways, than shotgunning insults across a comment thread, to try to work out why it gets to you so?
Insulting others as having mental problems because you aren’t able to relate seems to belie a pretty large lack of tact, much less an ability to empathize.
To protest against pretentious people caring about how their death is used I am going to claim that anyone can do with my body, ashes, or anything, whatever they want since I won't be alive any way to care.
Hey, please don't post personal attacks to HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Maybe you don't feel they deserve better, but you definitely owe this community better when posting to it.
In regards to your second link, I found this quote coming to mind while reading about your linkages to chromaticity:
“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.” - Ulysses
This too if you dig a little deeper is an allusion to Aristotle’s work. So I would say that many others have also found abstract analogous meaning in the way in which we decipher color and the way in which we decipher the world.
Not only would this be marginal it also wouldn’t necessarily be catching the real “monsters”. I don’t think if you find someone with old already known about images that it would necessarily equate to someone that actually abuses children. I think about this in a similar way (not exactly) as I do with drugs, just because a person gets busted with drugs doesn’t mean they are a drug dealer or a maker of drugs.
This is not to say that perhaps there are some more active real-time stuff in these databases that maybe with enough searching could make its way back to the perpetrator and indeed maybe even find a victim. It’s just seems that that would be far more marginal and is generally what I’m concerned about when it comes to these issues. For me it’s more important to protect children than it is to bust some weirdos for looking at the wrong porn (these can both be related as well and I do understand that I just think it’s not as cut and dry as we believe it is), further if it keeps said weirdo from actually harming a child then let them have it. We allow these databases to exist for, presumably, the same reason, with the idea that we can stop future victims from happening.
I just finished playing this and I wasn’t particularly impressed. It seemed to be saying that your anxiety is controlling you when you choose not to use, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tinder. I don’t believe that using social media apps is a necessary or meaningful thing to do with your life. Nor do I think it’s fair to imply that people who choose not to engage on those platforms are suffering from anxiety disorders. In fact it often seems more the opposite way around.
However, I’m not entirely sure that this was the intended insinuation. Yet it’s hard to read anything else into it since its about a girl trying to engage with her friends on her phone across these various platforms and being stopped by the ‘anxiety wolf’. She even gets her health dinged for sharing a news story, which to some extent could be viewed as engaging with reality.
Engaging with reality can most assuredly cause anxiety, however I don’t really view this as improper. I don’t believe that mental health should be thought of as a framing or mindset one has to the extent that it frames reality away. I.E. I may feel better if I pretend covid is not real though I am not making a healthy choice if I do.
> It seemed to be saying that your anxiety is controlling you when you choose not to use, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tinder.
This is a really odd reading to me. Especially if you play through the scenario multiple times, you see that the Anxiety Wolf controls Human regardless of what you do: even if you turn down the party invitations or if you never interact with the news story on Twitter at all.
It's not that engaging with social networks is bad, it's that Anxiety Wolf views every interaction and outcome as dangerous. If you eat bread, you're eating junk food. If you don't eat bread, you might have an eating disorder. If you don't share a story, you're disengaged. If you do share a story, you didn't fact check it enough. If you eat lunch alone, you're going to die alone because you can't make friends. If you try to get a date, your date's a serial killer. You can't win; there isn't a move that Anxiety Wolf will be happy with other than being in a constant state of panic all the time or curling up in a ball and crying, because Anxiety Wolf is scared of everything.
The point of the first section of the game is that Anxiety Wolf has an unhealthy relationship with risk analysis, which ultimately leads into the point of the second act of the game -- that the absence of Anxiety Wolf also causes Human to have an unhealthy relationship with risk analysis in the opposite direction, to the point where Human starts ignoring imminently dangerous situations.
> I.E. I may feel better if I pretend covid is not real though I am not making a healthy choice if I do.
Covid is actually a pretty good example here. Anxiety Wolf wants you to get vaccinated (which is a very good idea, because you should be scared of catching Delta). But Anxiety Wolf was also the voice early on in the pandemic telling people to dip their fruit in bleach in case somebody in the grocery store had touched it. It's important to figure out how to distinguish between those two suggestions.
My play through definitely implied that social media was good and that not using it was bad. Seems to me that anyone could play this and decide their own interpretation of "anxious wolf" which is exactly my criticism of it. Things that contain more depth are less subjective in their interpretations. I would even take aim at the idea that "fear of being a bad person" is something we over-estimate, I often wish more people had this fear (like vaccines because it's good).
It reminds me of the whole Colbert paradox, where he polls equally well with all sides of the political spectrum despite engaging with politics daily. No matter what you believed you felt he believed the same things as you.
This is not that I disagree with your overall view here - I don't, people should absolutely apply logic in reasoning to their rick/reward calculations rather then going on pure gut feeling - however I just do not believe this game really goes into any of this in a manner fitting to the complexity of the subject. But really, how could 6 min flash game do that?
> Seems to me that anyone could play this and decide their own interpretation of "anxious wolf" which is exactly my criticism of it.
Right, I think this is very intentional. The author even interrupts the game at one point to tell the player that they should choose the choices that personally give them the most anxiety. My playthrough ended up focusing in on a lot of the "productivity" lines; are you wasting time doing X, is it responsible to engage with people if you don't have a clear set of goals about where it will end, that kind of thing.
> Things that contain more depth are less subjective in their interpretations.
I'm not sure about this. A vision of anxiety that focuses on "this specific action causes stress" would be less subjective, but I think it would also be less accurate. Anxiety (particularly clinical anxiety) is often all-encompassing, when anxiety gets really "fun" is in the moments where you're simultaneously scared of every possible choice at the same time, including inaction. I've been fortunate enough to avoid the worst of these experiences in my life, but from what experiences I do have, the feeling the game invokes of being scared almost just for the sake of being scared, as if fear itself is some kind of defense against the world falling apart -- that does resonate with me, and I think the game does a good job of capturing that.
The other thing that I suspect that some people online have latched onto with this game is just the process of sitting down and visualizing yourself and asking "what am I scared of right now." It's not universal, but for a lot of people I think disassociation can often be a really powerful cognitive technique both for self-analysis and for staging self-interventions during some types of panic attacks, and disassociation is not always something that comes intuitively to everyone.
It's interesting to see the different reactions though. :) It's funny because if anything my criticism of the game is that near the end it gets a little too specific and too prescriptive for my tastes about how to address fears. I like the idea of having a healthy relationship with anxiety, and I do think that idea captures something meaningful; but I don't think that's something that can be set up in only one conversation, and I don't think the motivations/solutions the author lays out for fear are broad enough to capture what that process will or should look like for everyone, the game feels overly optimistic about how hard that process is.
But like you said, it's a short game. I think it suffers a little bit from not having the necessary time available to avoid an abrupt ending that sort of implies treating anxiety just requires having an emotional breakthrough that solves everything.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I do not think with disagree very much on this topic, other than our subjective impressions of the game - liking and/or disliking. I do think that we may be talking on slightly different levels of abstraction. Which is tough for me to get right with short online comments.
Thanks for engaging on this, though. I enjoyed reading your thoughts very much.
How's a news story reality, and social media not? News stories (especially the sorts you'd share on social media) are usually virtual, detached from reality.
I was not expressing a critical view of news media simply because it is not contextual in this situation. The “game” is actually very non-specific as to what the “news” is - or anything else for that matter. So, I was simply applying something like covid or global warming to it in order to show that the generalized premise of the game does not hold as a very insightful view of human being’s relationships with their anxiety.
Slightly off topic but I wanted to add a quick story to this.
In my neighborhood I made some waves with the HOA when I complained about secret hidden cameras I found at our pool. After investigating I found out rather quickly that members of the board decided to put them up with out telling anyone including most of the rest of the board, which my girlfriend was a member of at the time. When I complained I was told the same thing: you can’t make a complaint without offering a solution. I was told this two more times when we suggested that they should not be having big meeting and gatherings during the pandemic, and when we suggested they should not be illegally miscounting property owners votes (this one ended up involving us paying a lawyer to straighten out).
Every time I was told I was not being constructive and offering a solution and every time I had to explain that I was. The solutions were very simple do spy on your neighbors and take secret videos of them, in their bathing suits especially. Don’t invite people to large in person gatherings during a pandemic when an online meeting will do. And follow the already legally established way of counting peoples votes without creativity reimagining it in your own favor.
For all those solutions my girlfriend was removed from the board and we are no longer allowed to vote.
Stallman is offering a similar simple solution “do not use Apple products.” The parent comment here is simply mad that Stallman has not invented a way for people
To have their cake and eat it too.
>Every time I was told I was not being constructive and offering a solution and every time I had to explain that I was.
That's when I would have said. 'I'll be back in ten minutes with the solution.' Then returned with the smashed cameras in my hand and said. 'Problem solved.'
I was so furious when I found the camera I confronted the president of the board that day on the street. He cooped to it in that conversation, said something about ‘our neighborhood is changing and we need to do something about it’, which was a referencing to a recent event involving a friend of a black family not being wanted at the pool. He was scared because he knew it was wrong, as cowards often are when confronted, and told me it would be removed, which it was, the same day. I mentioned it in the next meeting and was promptly called a liar, screamed at for 5 minutes and kicked out. The board made an official statement at the next meeting chastising my conduct and denying the entire incident.
Of course I still have the pictures of the camera, though I realized quickly I was the only one concerned with the surveillance, and rumor was I was the nefarious person that needed to be watched out for because ‘what does he have to hide then anyway?’
The board continues to hide cameras around the neighborhood whenever they see fit.
The real kicker to the whole thing was that at the same time I found out our Vice President, the one behind the whole shtick, was a disbarred ex DA, who is now an ex felon because he stole a gun out of an evidence locker gave it to his mistress and told her to kill his wife. What a world!
Thanks for sharing your story and it was definitely relevant. I find that many people demanding solutions with complaints are not really looking for a solution, they just want you to shut up.
I see this a lot actually in politics as well. They think they are successfully browbeating you with their "hard truths" but what they're really showing is they lack imagination and the ability to evaluate their own position critically.
Sometimes I see articles about a wrongfully convicted man being let out of prison. This usually comes with a cash payment of some sort. The whole we took 20 years of your life, oops, here’s a million dollars. Every time I see this though I think ‘no, no way does money replace my time.’ That’s simply not good enough. And not because the payments are usually ludicrously low, but because there is no amount of money that would buy off my life.
Same as there is no amount of money you could give me to end my life, a position which I assume is shared by a vast majority of humans.
Time is not money. It’s not even close as an exchange rate. I would never put myself through these types of interview processes (not to mention that I would assume that sort of thing to be indicative of the job itself and company as a whole) because I value my actual life and dignity far and above what I value as an upper middle class income.
I value my actual life and dignity far and above what I value as an upper middle class income.
I am at least 90% sure that part of these interviews is to filter out people who these sorts of views. These employer would much rather have someone who wants to work 100 hour weeks and be the 'hero' over someone who works exactly 8-4 monday-friday and then goes home.
IDK, if the interview is just a few hours of misery to get a significant financial upside, it's not such a big deal. People always assume the job will be miserable too, but that varies from team to team. Especially because the salary is high enough that you may be able to save enough to buy your life back if you're careful and have time on your side.
Be sure to price in general life risks like accidents, cancer, stress induced hearth attacks etc. The problem with this approach is, that a non zero number of people will not live long enough to buy their life back.
I remember having some issues the year when I switched schools and states in 3rd or 4th grade (not sure exactly). The school district we moved to had kids memorizing all their multiplication tables and would do 2 min tests to ensure they were memorized and not thought about. I did terribly on these tests because I had not memorized them the year or a half year before like the other kids since I was at a different school. My mother got upset that I was being failed in math because she knew I was good at math. So she took me with her to parent-teacher day made me do double-digit multiplication in my head in front of my teacher. This was something no other kid in my class could do and made it apparent to my teacher that I should not be failing math.
As an adult, I have mixed feelings about this experience. My mother used to brag about this she had me do it in front of her friends, other parents with kids my age. I distinctly remember during this in a Perkins while trying to enjoy my breakfast. For me, this was simply a trick involving a larger “working memory” as opposed to “rote memory”. Being that it was still a matter of being a “trick” that required practice albeit a different kind of practice it becomes something I thought of as a trained monkey scenario.
This has come up a lot I’m my life. I worked in construction for a while out of high school and my boss would treat me this way as well. He would have me be his human calculator to help him figure out measurements. One time this was going on in a complicated octagonal room where we were trying to lay out brackets for a projection screen. He asked me to run some numbers for him and I refused. I did this because I understood what he thought he was doing but knew that his method was flawed. So I refused to give him the wrong answer, even though it was the right answer to the numbers he gave me. It caused I really big fight where he began talking down to me and tried to put me in my place.
Another Forman was there who witnessed the whole thing and I ended up doing a job with that other guy like 6 months later, but he had not forgotten the incident. He brought it up and gave me a long speech about how I should have just given my boss what he asked for instead of the correct measurements. Something I, to this day, steadfastly disagree with. Fast forward a year or two and my boss was fired due to his incompetence in measuring and ordering the materials that cost the company many tens of thousands of dollars.
Intelligence and thinking skills, in general, are practiced and exercised. However, they are not trained-monkey tricks. It is a method of living well and garnering fullness from life. And to no other end is it acceptable to waste such a thing.
I’m not sure I understand why people would violently react to a picture of a typewriter. If these same people saw a young kind with an original game boy would the urge be to punch them. Nor do I see how it’s ironic. The only real irony being that people who are striving for online attention are enraged when perceiving someone else as trying to get attention. It’s seems anytime I hear or read the word “ironic” it’s used in some novel way and is impossible to get a read on what it means in any given context.
“Hipster”, “ironic” and “pretentious” seem all to be very slippery words that are really just a judgements of how “normal” or not something is. It smacks of assimilate or die. Which are typically a projection of how little that person values their own life and how easily shaken they are by someone not make if their same choices. It’s no real wonder to me that a hyper-competitive culture would bring about this sort of behavior though.
I’m also 31 and obviously into tech to be here, so not an old man waving sticks at trains. What bizarre assumptions you have.