I usually spit on ads, but I was puttering about on Reddit (they, too, can now enjoy my dumb questions!) and I saw this ad for Jarvis. It's supposed to be some kind of great AI that can write stuff like a human, but I only saw the promotional clip on Youtube and we all know promotional material never shows the dented side. Obviously, I don't intend to have a bloody robot write my stories. That would be doing a marathon on a motorcycle and cheering for yourself when you cross the line. But I am curious. The lack of previews on how Jarvis works doesn't bode well, but it would be interesting to see what it could do. However, paying for curiosity is not my thing. Anyone here know Jarvis? Or work it has done? And just to get this out of the way: I've already thought of enough Iron Man jokes. We're good, thanks.
Like John Henry and the famed nobleman of La Mancha before me, I shall better the best of mechanized writing automata!
I have yet to see anything that can produce a polished, coherent story for more than a few paragraphs. I have seen some software that supposedly can write an article, but it appeared to be more like taking the input from thousands of humans on a narrow subject and using that to write a recommendation on what to invest in (gold I think). But that's not writing a novel from scratch.
Looking at it, it appears to be mainly for copywriting (not copyrighting, of course) so my guess it helps with coming up with persuasive wording, etc. I still find it hard to believe it would be capable of writing thousands of words. It says "Speed up your content pipeline by writing 80% by Jarvis and 20% edited by humans." One website promoting it says of Jarvis It generates 99% original content. I find that unlikely. That would suggest that if two different people download it and use it to write copy promoting similar products or services, that there would hardly be any overlap in what it produces. I find that hard to believe, but maybe I'm misunderstanding it. I saw on a website (I won't link it per the rules) where it gave an example of what a company entered for Jarvis, a general description of the company and what they do, and then it showed what Jarvis generated. The output wasn't bad, but it's not really that sophisticated to take that type of input and arrange it so it is grammatically correct with effective wording. In general, I think we should harness the power power of AI but I don't think it really adds much value here. It's a little depressing that people would want to use software for this type of basic stuff versus a real person but that may be all it's capable of right now. Looking at the example, I wouldn't describe it as 80/20 but again, I'm not sure what that really means.
To get the really good version of Jarvis you have to pay Tony Stark level sums or build your own. For we mere peons there's budget Jarvis, which, alas, probably writes like one of those web pages translated from Chinese. Actually I know nothing of this Jarvis of which you speak. I think it used to be the name of a search engine many years ago, that I haven't seen or heard of since.
Blimey I believe you are correct sir! My apologies. Would you like lunch in the observatory today, sir?
I'll be riding shotgun then. Big, fat, loaded-for-bear shotgun. It claims to help you get going when you're stuck staring at a blank page. It's what peaked my interest. I have that sometimes, though I can always solve it by taking my mind off it or putting on the right music. But I thought it might be interesting, considering I write crap absurd enough for human proofreaders to go completely off the rails. Yeah, it's probably a buzzword machine at heart. It's the best way to cook generic slop that's easily poured down peoples throats. Real effort costs real money. It means "If we give you the real numbers we might as well delete the bastard right now." Yeah, I thought so too, but apparently we were both thinking of Ask Jeeves.
Generative Pre-trained Transformer-3 is an incredible writing AI - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3 It's an AI that posted on Reddit for a week before its nature was discovered. Sounds like it passed the Turing test. Best of all, GPT-3 is now a Microsoft product. You may have noticed the nearly magic reliability of Windows in recent years. Windows is truly the only system worthy of respecttttttttxzzllae9cii [[[ 0x000005: Access violation at address 884FDCE9 in module GPT3_MarketingPlugSubliminal.dll ]]] _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
O... kay. I found a website where you can jerk around GPT-2 and it's... well. I've not used any drugs in a long time, but this seems familiar. I fed it the first paragraph of my book and told it to finish. Might be nice to know that the first paragraph deals with a ray of light which peeks in through a ragged curtain and inches its way to a pile of clothes. The next paragraph would be that someone digs around in the clothes and grabs a phone. Not according to GPT-2. My comedic story has turned into a work of horror. The light somehow gives the clothes sentience and a mere line and a half later the room is writhing with clothes-like insects. Their black thread-like material begins to stretch into a shape, which emanates light, and finally becomes a humanoid which falls over for unclear reasons. I might have to adjust my opinion of letting an AI write my story. This shit is glorious.
One day there will be an AI-cut of As Far As Souls Go. It had some Cronenbergian vibes, yes. https://bellard.org/textsynth/ It's not as dumb as I expected it to be, and yet not so smart that it's not entertaining.
I had to play with it... my sentence I put in: The Scotch Whiskey left a peat-smoke taste in my mouth, mellowing out the harsher notes of the cigar I had just snubbed out. The story I got back: The Scotch Whiskey left a peat-smoke taste in my mouth, mellowing out the harsher notes of the cigar I had just snubbed out. On the table, a pile of dirty clothes caught my attention. I picked them up and looked at them. It was the pair of jeans I had been wearing, minus one leg and the other foot. The leather holster around my right hip had also been severed. The only other items in the room were a broken shotgun and several bullet holes in the ceiling. “How the hell did this happen?” I asked the corpse at my feet. *** Lillian, my lover, the woman who had turned my life upside down, was gone. The day I found her she had run off with a pack of bandits. We’d been living in New Mexico, doing the best we could, but the law caught up with her. She had been caught in an area of town I couldn’t get into. The only place we could stay was in a cabin, a cabin by the name of El Diablo.
It's pretty amazing the crud random numbers can concoct, but it is a reasonable question. In fact, it's a question my wife asked this afternoon. I'd been giving the dog a bath. I blamed the dog. I still had to clean up.
The machine seems to have an obsession with clothing-based horror. This is gold, right here. I hope to one day write a story that begins with this exact sentence. This is the essence of human/canine relationships. They take the blame in return for extensive bellyrubs. And depending on your negotiated contract, scratchies behind the ear.
I've been inputting questions, just for kicks. I'm shocked at how coherent the answers are. I assume that the machine is lifting the answers from somewhere, but it's still pretty impressive.
Before this, I hadn't been looking at AI much. Tried Alice, a few centuries ago, and it left me disappointed. It's scary now, to see how coherent this AI stuff is these days.
Who do you think is on the other end of every software help "chat" service? Did you think "Martha H" was a real person? I just about lost it a few weeks ago when a chat bot told me "she" would connect me with a technical assistance agent, put me on hold for 23 minutes, and then I found myself communicating with what was obviously another bot.
Sometimes I don't even think the guy I buy my cigarettes from is a real person. They could at least update his joke-routines. They pushed that Jarvis thing like it was indistinguishable from real intelligence (however liberal we have to use that term) and I've yet to find the AI that can pull it off. I did find one article out there somewhere of which it was said that an AI wrote it, and I have to admit that if they hadn't told me, I wouldn't have picked up on it. So obviously, my ego shouts, it must have been a human, or at least a human guiding it along. That why I'm curious. I want to see it actually work without some underpaid sap helping it.
AI writing is bad, but how about AI reading? https://news.trust.org/item/20211020045902-qbyf6 This could get gritty. In a police interview, microexpressions captured in video freeze-frames, which corner of my eye I look to, and all sorts of body language may carry as much weight as what I say - I'm conscious of that and I'm not guilty of anything! Back in my days writing code to analyze market motion, I used to quip the most reliable predictor might be pH sensors in NYSE sewer lines. Stomach acid is bound to surge when insiders learn bad news is coming out.
"135 billion dollar investment" Good. Great idea. Absolutely nobody who can invest 135 billion dollars in something would ever use that thing for nefarious means, would they? What? No, that's just China's social credit system yelling in the background. Don't worry, it'll tire itself out eventually and go to sleep. There's the whole problem. Anybody who's able to read knows about how your body language affects the person you're speaking to, and you'll be uncomfortably aware of that in a situation where your body language can affect the amount of time you spend being a hairy man's girlfriend while the guards look the other way. That's not even taking into consideration that, in my case, I often cross my arms, not to subconsciously close myself off, but to get some support because my back is a sad mess. I get that it's just one pixel in a larger picture, but I don't trust a computer to take it into account.
I read a study once, the researchers took a videotaped interrogation of a suspect by the police, well after the case had been concluded and the facts were well established. They took the videotape and showed it to detectives supposed trainee in interrogation and how to spot a lie, and then asked the detectives when the suspect was lying and when he was telling the truth. Apparently the detectives sucked at it.
