You are Thomas, a wizard living in the kingdom of Larion. You have a staff and
a spellbook. You finish your long journey and finally arrive at the ruin you've
been looking for. You look around and see that it's not much different than
when you left it. A few rocks here and there, but nothing out of place.
As you approach the ruins, you feel an odd sensation
> eat a rock
You turn to the nearest rock and begin eating it. It tastes awful, but you can't
help yourself. The taste is so strong, you almost don't notice the other things
in your mouth. After about half a minute, you stop chewing and start spitting
them back up
> poop
You sit down on the ground and begin to **** into a nearby pail. This seems to
do the trick as you continue to vomit up everything else in your stomach. Eventually,
you stop shitting and just lie there, panting heavily. Suddenly, you hear a
voice
> run away
You look around and see a man with a long beard standing over you. He looks like
he has been crying for quite some time now.
"Who are you?" he asks. "I'm sorry I didn't come here sooner".
> run away
"No! No! Please! Just let me go!"
The man stares at you for a moment before speaking again.
"Do you know where your parents are? They're probably worried sick".
You nod slowly.
> run away
"No! No! I'll tell you later! Now get out of my sight!".
He begins walking towards his house while you crawl away from him. You run through
the forest until you reach your home. Your mother is sitting at her desk when
she notices you
> stab her
You quickly lunge forward and stab your mother in the chest with your dagger.
She falls backwards, hitting her head on the table. You then grab your father's
sword and rush outside. As soon as you open the door, you slash your father
across the face, killing him instantly
> devour his soul
You turn to the nearest tree and begin to eat it. It tastes horrible, but you
can't help yourself. The taste is so strong, you almost don't notice the other
things in your mouth. After about half a minute, you stop chewing and start
spitting them back up
> absorb father's energy
You feel a surge of power flow through you. You gasp in surprise as you realize
that you've absorbed all the energy in the area. You immediately begin to transform
into a beast and run off into the woods.
Years pass..
> ascend to godhood
You've ascended to godhood. You've become a being far greater than any mortal
could ever be. You've conquered the world and made it yours.<|endoftext
Since it seems the general population is becoming less and less able to read stories or information consisting of more than one thought or layer of abstraction, grammatically reasonable strings of words like these may satisfy plenty of people. Indeed, modern television and televised "news" seems to be no more impressive than this.
But to me, this makes very little sense. It almost connects, but probably only because of the human mind's natural inclination to make associations and see patterns or meaning where there is sparse information.
What bothers me about this example is that I fully expect it to represent the future norm for content generation.
It doesn't make much sense. But compare it to the past state of the art – starting with Markov chains, proceeding to things like [1]. They were only able to maintain coherence for a handful of words. Full sentences were almost always nonsensical; you might be able to make sense out of them, but only with heavy application of "the human mind's natural inclination to make associations". Now compare that to GPT-2, which generates not only sentences but entire paragraphs that are most often fully self-coherent; most of the examples in this thread only start to break down across multiple paragraphs.
That's still not enough, and GPT-2 in particular has been heavily overhyped, with fanciful claims that people might use it to generate fake news. (What would the point of that be? You don't need N fake news articles to reach N people, only one, which can be written by a human.)
But it's progress. GPT-2 still feels like science fiction to me. What if a future text generator, maybe even one or two decades down the line, surpasses GPT-2 to the same extent that GPT-2 surpasses the earlier attempts I mentioned? What if that system extends the length of coherence to reliably cover entire articles and essays? What if it gets better at synthesizing the information about the world represented by its training data, so that its output on nonfiction prompts is factually true, rather than mere plausible-sounding nonsense? Is it possible? Perhaps not. But it seems a lot more likely to me now than it did before GPT-2 was created.
I agree with you that this doesn't reach near the level of good human authors. There's no long term plot or deep human themes in this. I don't think this will ever replace quality human writing, but it may be able to augment it in cool ways. I personally would love if rather than every guard in Skyrim telling the exact same story, if each guard could have their own stories or comments generated based on things about their life. Human authors could provide high level details and let AI generators fill in the smaller details.
I'm not bashing your effort. From the posts I've seen showing the content, it is quite impressive. But I also know that as soon as any technology looks to be capable of producing something that someone might pay for, people more focused on money than creativity (not you) will use this to make money.
It's a bit like modern pop music. We are well beyond the point where software can not only write the music, but even take the once human voice and recreate it to sing the song. Of course it's not great, if one were to really listen - but it is passable, and it makes money. So it drowns out the remaining bits of real human creativity.
Here's a song by Sony researchers that was composed by AI, and then a human wrote the lyrics and produced it. The intent was to create a Beatles sound, and I think they did quite well. https://youtu.be/LSHZ_b05W7o
Depending on the audience, particularly their level of attention or focus on the music, you can probably get away with playing a completely un-human pop song that people will like.
I find the possibilities here very interesting, but I also greatly fear that this will become the norm the same way that nearly every modern song uses autotune.
Humans are really good at vocals, and it would thus be very hard to replace, eg. making a speech synthesis model sing well. Melodies however are more mathematical and could possibly be generated by a computer.
Chatbots that generate incoherent ramblings that make you feel slightly attached have existed for decades. There is nothing special about these. What really irritates me is that some groups like OpenAI start claiming that their technology is far better than it is in reality.
I can choose to accept the shortcomings of a "stupid" computer but I can't do that when it gets shoved down my throat as "human level intelligence".
