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News Huddle – Beat The Bot!

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AgentPete

Capo Famiglia
Guardian
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Joined
May 19, 2014
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In the most recent Huddle (you should have been there…!) our doughty Huddlers took part in a live, creative challenge: to finish sentences first crafted by distinguished authors… and them we compared the human-produced results with those generated by… a bot!

The point is this: I’m hearing a rising chorus of dire predictions that writers will soon be displaced by ChatGPT and the like. Is this really likely? Let’s find out.

Across twelve prompts, participants crafted their own sentence-endings before reviewing ChatGPT’s output. We came to our own conclusions… wonder if you’ll agree?

Issues with LLM-generated text (I prefer to call it “slop”, but maybe I’m biased) include ridiculous verbosity, generic metaphors that mean very little, an insufferably pompous pseudo-philosophical tone, and a total lack of restraint ("less is more”)… contrasted with the specificity, unpredictability, and grounding-in-experience demonstrated in both our Huddlers’ responses and the original authorial sentences.

If our culture is really, seriously going to task AI with creating the next generation of best-sellers, then I predict (a) a catastrophic decline in the quality of mass-produced books, and (b) the erosion of consumer trust in published work.

But as I say… see what you think!
 

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