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Dunno. Writing fiction myself; asked AI to read it aloud. Narrative paragraphs worked fine: a clear, if a bit deadpan, slightly tone-deaf delivery. But dialogue

Dunno. Writing fiction myself; asked AI to read it aloud. Narrative paragraphs worked fine: a clear, if a bit deadpan, slightly tone-deaf delivery. But dialogue was horrendous: it didn't understand emotional reactions and connotations at all. More so than cringey and robotic, it felt soulless. And the distance from "something that makes sense" to "something that feels human" felt unsormountable. Yes. Many novels will be written with LLMs in the coming years. They might even touch us. But this little Text-to-Speech experiment felt like an evidence that this technology has a void at its core: it doesn't have access, like a human does, to a gargantuan emotional spectrum, which allows us to understand all sorts of subtleties between what is being said, and why, and what does it actually mean, and why does it affect us (or, hell, how should the next line be read in this context, because it has no context, it doesn't feel).

ben_w 3y ago
I'm also writing a novel, and using text to speech to hear how it sounds. One of the ones built into Mac OS. And I'd agree with your assessment, I value the synthesiser for bringing my attention to things my eyes gloss over, such as unnecessary repetition and typos which are still correctly spelled words (a common one for me is lose/loose). But: AI was seen as "decades" away from beating humans at go, even 6 months before it did. I don't know how far we are from them writing award winning novels (awards we care about, it doesn't count if it's an award for best AI), though my gut feeling is we need another breakthrough as significant as the transformer model… but even then, that's only a 1σ feeling.
fennecfoxy 3y ago
You wrote a book with an LLM and it has bad dialogue _today_. So why do you act as if all this progress hasn't only been in the last couple years? Fast forward 10 years from now and you think LLMs won't have the capability to write compelling fiction, that what we have then will be exactly what we have now?

ben_w 3y ago

I'm also writing a novel, and using text to speech to hear how it sounds. One of the ones built into Mac OS. And I'd agree with your assessment, I value the synthesiser for bringing my attention to things my eyes gloss over, such as unnecessary repetition and typos which are still correctly spelled words (a common one for me is lose/loose). But: AI was seen as "decades" away from beating humans at go, even 6 months before it did. I don't know how far we are from them writing award winning novels (awards we care about, it doesn't count if it's an award for best AI), though my gut feeling is we need another breakthrough as significant as the transformer model… but even then, that's only a 1σ feeling.

fennecfoxy 3y ago

You wrote a book with an LLM and it has bad dialogue _today_. So why do you act as if all this progress hasn't only been in the last couple years? Fast forward 10 years from now and you think LLMs won't have the capability to write compelling fiction, that what we have then will be exactly what we have now?