12 Comments
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Anonymole's avatar

"Here's an interesting writing tool -- but you can't use it."

Gee thanks, Google. NOT.

Charlotte Dune's avatar

Very interesting. I’d just love a perfect one click copy editor and proofreader. Fix it all instantly and perfectly. That’s the dream. Sorry human editors.

Alberto Romero's avatar

I don't think human editors have to worry (yet). In the cases where writers need an editor, Wordcraft won't suffice (for instance, the editor may give feedback on tone and style, more than mistakes or typos--and Wordcraft simply can't do that). But, for those of us who don't have editors (I'm my own), I agree--a tool like this one can be super useful.

Charlotte Dune's avatar

Also, as a novelist and someone who converses often with other novelists, I could really see this benefiting the plotters-- the people like James Patterson who totally plot out their books in advance. If the AI could take a plot summary and write it in your voice you’d really be able to scale up novel production. Many authors would LOVE to churn out a quality book every month...

Alberto Romero's avatar

I see this being possible soon. If you finetune GPT-3 with one single author, the output is often quite reasonable.

However, these tools are still super unreliable in general. If you used Wordcraft to write an entire novel, you'd have to edit it thoroughly--and given that you'd be just another reader in that case, it'd be probably more work than just writing it from scratch (in the end, as you know much better than I do, a novel can be very complex structurally and these tools are horrible with long-term coherence and keeping a narrative voice).

The problem of unreliability requires language models to be trained differently, with a different objective (not just getting the most likely next word given some context) and not as generalist models, but specific ones--and even with that, may not be enough (I'm confident Google is already doing something like this, so we'll see!)

Charlotte Dune's avatar

Agreed. Honestly, I wish Pro Writing Aid would just add a “correct all” button cause it would be 75% correct and that’s still way faster that changing everything one by one.

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Nov 29, 2022
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Charlotte Dune's avatar

The most successful authors financially are those that scale themselves into becoming a company/franchise themselves, like James Patterson. But people still love variety, so there is plenty of room for many authors, even if they do become franchises.

Also room for very personal books, like maybe a real human author writes a book only for you.

Charlotte Dune's avatar

Human-written books could become rare like handmaid jewelry or handmade couture clothes.

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Nov 29, 2022
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Charlotte Dune's avatar

Yes. The book “Content” published by MIT press goes into great detail on how magazines like Forbes already rely on AI to create exponentially more posts with fewer staff writers. It’s already happening.

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Nov 29, 2022
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Charlotte Dune's avatar

The only person I hear talking a lot about this is Andrew Yang, but I’m not super looped in. I’m sure others are writing about it.

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Nov 29, 2022
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Alberto Romero's avatar

Phil, I think one of my other articles answers to some of your questions. I don't see if you read that one, so here's the link: https://thealgorithmicbridge.substack.com/p/everyone-is-wrong-about-ai-writing

Please, let me know what you think of my arguments there.