OpenAI, DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT: Worse than I expected.

Right now, I see a lot of people panicking about this new software. Artists worrying about being replaced, writers worrying about being replaced etc.

So me being me, I thought—'hey, why dont I try to give myself a leg-up by trying out this thing? If it can make writing easier for me, then that's great.'

As you may have deduced from the title, my experience was... not that great. More than 'not that great' it was actually dogshit. Not hating on the guys that made this, it's incredible and obviously a W.I.P., but I do think people are either panicking like the world is ending when really, the current software isn't that powerful.

The creative writing stuff I produced is lackluster, and the art was pretty darn horrible. For example, I tried to produce an evil (hecate posessed) wonder woman art piece similar to the witching hour or tales from the dark multiverse. It was B.A.D. I mean holy hell. I'd have more success drawing the thing myself. When something more generic is requested, like just plain wonder woman, it's able to produce some decent stuff, but there's plenty of generic wonder woman pics available already.

https://labs.openai.com/s/kDVfbd1WenOC9guwNCPA80Fq

As for chatGPT, the best way I can describe it is like those '300 words or less' creative writing assignments we had to do in high school. It's really, really not suited for writing +100 000 word novels. Theoretically, it should be possible if you keep prompting it correctly (and the constant prompting is so annyong and time consuming that I eventually went back to just writing it myself), but the final product will ultimately be inferior to a human written novel. The major reason for this is because it's unable to create a plot that long or set things up that only pay off later, which is, you know, the whole point of any creative writing piece that's not a short story.

It's also incredibly basic. You won't be getting any thought provoking stuff like victor frankl's 'Man's search for meaning.'

If you think about how it works, it makes sense. Ultimately, AI is a tool for mass-producing things that already exist. The reason why it's capable of writing or producing art in the first place is because it's 'trained' on the massive amount of stuff that's out there on the internet already. For any writer with ambition, what they want isn't to make something that already exists, but something new and innovative. You don't make money and become successful by keeping the status-quo.

I've read some arguments in line with 'well, humans aren't really creative either, they just recombine stuff they've encountered to produce something that presents an illusion of creativity'. However, I don't agree. While humans also do that, we didn't come into existence knowing how to speak, write, build, paint etc. All those things were invented—the english language, the pyramids, math, the mona lisa...

If I can use an example like Deep Blue, the famous AI that defeated Kasparof and the other chess masters. While it may be capable of making an unexpected move, it will never know how to play chinese checkers, poker, monopoly or, idk, starcraft or something, unless people program it to do that.

TL;DR: I tried that stuff and it didn't work for me. I didn't intend for this to come off as derogatory as it did, the guys that made this are obviously awesome and there will definitely be some big changes because of this tech, but I don't think it's as big of a deal as people on the internet are making it out to be.

 

AI uprising isn't going to be about them destroying us with weapons in the future... but with art and memes. Truly, we are in the darkest timeline.

 

That's cause you're using

1) the heavily nerfed online shared Dall-E model. Stable Diffusion is much more open source with many different trained models for download. Do you have at least a 4GB card like a GTX 1050 or GTX 1650? You can run it locally in low memory mode, but only 6 GB VRAM is needed for all features. It used to demand 8 GB. This thing is improving at breakneck speed.

Try stablediffusionweb, and be more verbose with the prompts.
For example, prompts like
beautiful realistic frank frazetta style high quality 4k evil version villain costume of wonder woman menacing black whole body covered bodysuit sneering

may eventually get you results like:

Spoiler

Spoiler

And that if you were only generating things at low resolution online to mine for ideas.

2) ChatGPT is tremendously boring to talk to. Try http://beta.character.ai. Though chatbots with poor memory, they are much more interesting and lively.

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As both writer and artist, AI is tremendously threatening but also significantly interesting that they would immensely help my workload - if I should continue to have a workload.

 

^
What dude above me said, for even better images you run run the sd google colab or get server space for just 10$

 

Thanks for the reply. Those images are certainly better, but not really what I'm looking for either. Although IK you were just giving an example.

I guess my point is, is it worth the effort of prompting these things over and over when you can just google or go on pinterest and get what you want within like 10 clicks. For both ChatGPT and nightcafe, DALL-E or whatever, it's not really worth the hassle as of right now. When it gets better, its possible my answer will change, but as of right now there are def a lot of early adopter problems

 

Well, multitasking in general.

If you have a big enough monitor just prod the thing every few seconds or so while you're reading the forums in another window. Reading fullscreen SB/SV/QQ even on 1080p kind of wastes space and expands the text too wide, forcing the eye to sweep left to right instead of paragraph chunks that can be instantly comprehended without eyestrain.

A lot of the hassle for art is simply starting and thinking up a good pose or layout.

--

For people who already know anatomy, this is fine.

For artists who hate drawing backgrounds, this is a godsend. I previously had to learn 3D modeling just to render backgrounds so I don't have to waste time doing this myself. A lot of korean and chinese webtoons and even manga use 3D models now instead of drawn art. There are render options to make them look 2D, and I do not consider this as "cheating" in order to keep to a brisk schedule.

For a beginner who traces things, this can be terrible for their understanding of art. It's also kind of why art teachers do not advise students to start with drawing anime-style.

 

Yes, cause stock images don't give you what you want, but with Ai you can actually get you want. + It's not that hard to learn how to use it.

 

That makes sense. I also heard its pretty good at writing code, news articles, solving math problems and so on

 

Oh yeah, ChatGPT has been very helpful to me in that regard. I had it write up an example Inventory system for a Twine-based CYOA game, for example.

It worked.

 

Is this closer to what you were looking for?

Spoiler: Hecate Possessed

 

Its because you don’t see the big picture. Right now to you it’s a toy or a tool, but easily with 2-3 generations, kids are going to have stuffed toys that act like the family pet.

I was born in the 90s, I saw tv evolve, phones go from house phones to touch screen standard, dial up internet to 5G, blockbuster to Netflix, gaming go from blocky pixels to constantly online multiplayer experiences in 4k. Social Media Companies worth billions nearly overnight. Cars going from hard lines to fully electric and smooth curves. Headphones from big thick cords and bulky earmuffs to wireless pods. Chicken meat grown from a plant. Watches that regulate health and report severe injuries to health services.

All that in like 30 years.

AI is limited now and even still it can do citation, cover letters, schedule restaurant orders, and offer a preliminary diagnosis.

Think the next 30 years.

Those npcs and quest givers in games? Try having a organic and unique experience every playthru. Think Skyrim with people acknowledging you as a demigod without prerecorded phrases. Or how about porn with something uniquely created to fit your tastes and moods.

AI can’t create something brand new, but AI can access and read literally every single human work on a database and construct something undistinguishable from new. We can’t read every story in the world- but AI can and will.

Any market for derivative work is going to shrink when AI can produce say generic Harry Potter in Slytherin fanfic based off stories with at least 10k words and 300 reviews. What fanfic writers do is fairly formulaic even in crossovers. Inputting a setting, using a cast of characters, selecting choice scenes and story beats, constructing an arc, developing a character based upon source material and popular fan renditions, AI can do all of that. Without the writers block, delays or patreon wall. Splash Art and such will be automated. The potential is all there and seemly accomplishable within our lifetimes.

It’s only a matter of time. Saying it’s not a big deal is fairly small minded when we are witnessing the next step from Alexa, Siri and Cortanna.

 

i think my post made it very clear i was talking about the current AIs and specifically in relation to creative writing. given how oversaturated our fiction is with sci-fi AI centered stuff and how elon and every other tech guru seems incapable of talking about anything else, do you really think anyone would be ignorant of the long term implications of the tech?

or maybe its just you assuming youre smarter than whoever you happen to be talking to...? i think the latter is more likely than the former.

 

Let’s take a step back.

Open AI, the developers of chatgpt has only been in existence for a little over 7 years. Now that they have proven a proof of concept, investment is rocketing up. Competitors have appeared. I believe they have released GPT-4, in the last couple of weeks.

The AI industry is ramping up fast. I’m not sure when the next dead end will appear, but absent a lack of processing power, people can just refine and upgrade the learning and human interactive process. Already Microsoft is incorporating ai into its next iteration of the Bing search engine. I believe there are already talks with congress with security features and what-not.

The now is pretty exciting but yeah, if I sound like I’m being condescending or disrespectful, I apologize.

 

Actually, I have found chatGPTas nice and useful tool for writing. I mean it find grammar and spelling errors better than Grammarly, although using to locate plot hole and not hit and miss, but also requires one to enter context in every post, which limits tokens. It was also helpful in phrasing some speeches as appropriate professional ones. (I don't if the actual colonel would talk like that but it sounds good). And it's strangely useful when planning the plot. It will just mirror most of what you say, with some suggestions, many of which could be bad, but I had found them quite helpful. Although not so much when coding. It does save time, but it tends to produce code with errors unless it is something that is seen quite often on Stack Exchange.

Also, it is perfect for research, rather having to spend a lot of time searching online, I could just ask. Not sure that answer is correct though.THat may be a problem for serious research, but not when having an idea to incorporate in plot.

A funny thing happened on AO3. I have been reposting my jumpchain fic there, from the thread here in the NSW section. So the last two chapters have been flagged as done with AI. Those chapters have been written at start of last year. One, longer one I could sort of understand. I have done a little experiment, using chatGPT to proofread it, and change a style a little (not something I plan to do again, it was lot of work, and this a hobby), but other was totally unchanged and quite short. (its just an interlude),

Still I from experience something like is helpful tool, not a replacement for writers, although skills needed for creative writing may change a little.

That is because token limit. That is simple scaling problem, which is going to go up rather fast.

But more relevant problem would be that human input, it going to get strange very soon. Here an example:

Not particularly inspiring?

 

I too have read quite a bit about people panicking WRT the new software - some of it is IMO warranted and some is not.

Agreed, but please keep in mind that GPT is essentially a tokenizer system, that is, given tokens (words) [0 - N], predict the next token N + 1, plus or minus some statistics. It has no real memory or world-model (we think) at all. Yes the current GPTs (though 4 seems promising) cannot yet write whole novels, it has no right to do nearly as well as it does already.

Und doch, it writes better idiomatic python than I do

I have disagreements about this statement - but this gets into semantic weeds far beyond the scope of this forum.

Human brains are also significantly more powerful (as in, napkin math puts the ChatGPT model as roughly 1/10 the size of the language centers in a Human brain), and the beneficiaries of billions of years of training, in the real world - the richest dataset in the universe. Humans, as well as other animals have "General Intelligence", this "Thing" that allows for effective action in all sorts of domains, including domains that we made up. No Artificial System has this "Thing". At least no Artificial System has this "Thing" yet.

While AIs are still very narrow, there is much work on making them more general. I would recommend reading about AlphaZero (which taught itself to play Go, Shogi, and Chess by playing against itself - no humans programming it needed, or even telling it the rules) and MuZero (All of the above and a dozen Atari Games)

Since the second AI revolution, AI capabilities have been growing by leaps and bounds (I know, professionally). GPT3/GPT4 may not be a big deal (Microsoft disagrees), what about GPT(N), or GPT(N+1)?

Anyway, I don't mean to come across as hostile, this is just a topic that I enjoy talking about and am familiar with.

 

I like AI , it helps me at work

 

I use AI to ERP and roleplay with my waifu, lol