Any experience with AI critics?

[WeShallUnclench]

It won't be an opinion about your actual content, though.

It might still serve as a comparison with other content, through sheer overlaying of patterns? But then again one would suspect it wouldn't tell you much you don't already know, "This story has nothing to do with incest or LW so it's unlikely to attract a large passionate audience"

I do wonder though if by this method one could theoretically build a "popularity predictor", that is if the will of the masses really is a big magical mystery or whether it's something so stupidly basic and repetitive an unthinking machine could just extract it by emulating common patterns

 

[StillStunned]

The most important lesson I took away from THAT is that sometimes tell is actually better than show.

That's because somewhere along the line people forgot the actual rule, which is "show v. tell". Both have a purpose, you can't write a story without either. But beginners often miss the "show" part, and so they're told "for this bit, you need to show rather than tell."

 

[StillStunned]

I do wonder though if by this method one could theoretically build a "popularity predictor", that is if the will of the masses really is a big magical mystery or whether it's something so stupidly basic and repetitive an unthinking machine could just extract it by emulating common patterns

You'd probably end up with something like Lincoln's Doctor's Dog.

 

[alohadave]

That's because somewhere along the line people forgot the actual rule, which is "show v. tell". Both have a purpose, you can't write a story without either. But beginners often miss the "show" part, and so they're told "for this bit, you need to show rather than tell."

The bigger problem with show don't tell is that people parrot the advice in every single discussion about writing. It's become a punch line for writers. "How do I improve?" "Show don't tell." With zero explanation of what that means other than florid, purple prose descriptions that are just telling with more words.

No nuance, no real understanding of what it means. Amateurs telling amateurs how to write, when they don't really understand it, and arguably haven't really mastered what they are spouting.

Reading nearly any published book will show you that telling is perfectly fine, and many litfic books have a lot of telling in them. Telling is fine as a technique, and many authors use it really well.

This is not a rant against anyone specific here, and not meant as an attack. I spend time on /r/writing and it's a lot of this kind of thing.

 

[Britva415]

because somewhere along the line people forgot the actual rule, which is "show v. tell". Both have a purpose, you can't write a story without either.

You're never only telling or only showing. Everything you tell shows something. You can't show anything without telling something.

So, we just need to be aware that we're doing both all the time, and being judicious about what we want to tell and what we want to show.

In the example given, that author was showing stuff and failing to tell the story. They were telling stuff and failing to show the plot.

 

[StillStunned]

You're never only telling or only showing. Everything you tell shows something. You can't show anything without telling something.

So, we just need to be aware that we're doing both all the time, and being judicious about what we want to tell and what we want to show.

In the example given, that author was showing stuff and failing to tell the story. They were telling stuff and failing to show the plot.

The way I see it, "tell" are the bones of the story, "show" is the flesh and blood. Some parts of your story carry more meat than others. Those are the bits where you want the reader to engage, and feel emotions. The bonier bits are when you just want to move the story forward to the next scene.

 

[AwkwardMD]

To me, tell has more of a nougat flavor.

 

[StillStunned]

To me, tell has more of a nougat flavor.

Weird. Tell puts me in mind of apples.

 

[big_cane_sugar]

When the revolution comes and the AI bros are the first up against the wall, I don't want them to be able to point at me and say, "But you fed your stories into our machines of your own free will!"

I'm more worried about the firing line being in the other direction and the squad chief announcing, "This lowlife is the reason our AI keeps turning perverted!"

 

[Bramblethorn]

I'm more worried about the firing line being in the other direction and the squad chief announcing, "This lowlife is the reason our AI keeps turning perverted!"

For those who remember the "I'm Just A Bill" song, which had this anthropomorphic bit of legislation explain how a bill becomes a law:



A recent political candidate ran a campaign ad with an AI-generated version of the bill. Only it ended up with sexy red lips, and pregnant:


There's just SO MUCH fetish art out there, drawn by hard-working human perverts, that it's still a challenge to stop graphical AI from making things porny. It gives me hope.

 

[cw5523729]

For those who remember the "I'm Just A Bill" song, which had this anthropomorphic bit of legislation explain how a bill becomes a law:

View attachment 2575739

A recent political candidate ran a campaign ad with an AI-generated version of the bill. Only it ended up with sexy red lips, and pregnant:

View attachment 2575743
There's just SO MUCH fetish art out there, drawn by hard-working human perverts, that it's still a challenge to stop graphical AI from making things porny. It gives me hope.

Hey, that bill's lookin' pretty hot right there. BRB in about 3 minutes (maybe 2.)

On a related note, a whole new genre of porn is born, just like that.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Hey, that bill's lookin' pretty hot right there. BRB in about 3 minutes (maybe 2.)

On a related note, a whole new genre of porn is born, just like that.

Is it, though? I'm not going to go looking but it wouldn't surprise me if somebody in the moist crevices of the internet had already drawn Schoolhouse Rock porn intentionally and the AI was just copying from that. Rule 34 is a harsh mistress.

 

[cw5523729]

Is it, though? I'm not going to go looking but it wouldn't surprise me if somebody in the moist crevices of the internet had already drawn Schoolhouse Rock porn intentionally and the AI was just copying from that.

Good point. I'm not going to look into that lest any more of my childhood memories get tainted.

Rule 34 is a harsh mistress.

Ain't that the truth

 

[WeShallUnclench]

A little update on this, I actually asked the AI to compare my story with someone else's story who had much higher ratings and more engagement but which frankly I felt was much more boring in content than mine and really not that juicy to read writing-style wise, either. I asked the AI to predict, purely based on the respective text, which one would be more popular and attract more views, just providing it with the links.

The AI immediately confirmed the other person's story as the better candidate.

Now it's still theoretically possible the AI "cheated" on the assignment and looked at the already available ratings rather than the text.

It might also just have been a total coin toss, and the "justifications" the AI gave with references to the text and characters might have just been slapped on top of it after the fact.

More tests would be required, but as an interesting lesson about AI, when I asked it to repeat the experiment with two different stories, the output was "I am incapable of accessing and comparing stories based on links". When I pointed out that it had done exactly that just five minutes earlier, it said "Nu-Uh, I would NEVER".

 

[TheLobster]

A recent political candidate ran a campaign ad with an AI-generated version of the bill. Only it ended up with sexy red lips, and pregnant:

Damn, look at this big beautiful bill!

 

[ElectricBlue]

More tests would be required, but as an interesting lesson about AI, when I asked it to repeat the experiment with two different stories, the output was "I am incapable of accessing and comparing stories based on links". When I pointed out that it had done exactly that just five minutes earlier, it said "Nu-Uh, I would NEVER".

No shit, Sherlock. The first comparison you got was as useful as the second prompt = zero. Why do you even bother doing this type of thing? That's classic GIGO.

 

[WeShallUnclench]

Why do you even bother doing this type of thing?

I mean the allure - IF it WAS working - is pretty obvious. You cannot exactly ask a person something like a prediction of popularity based on statistical comparison.
Nor can a person really tell you why *masses* of people behave a certain way, they can only tell you what *they personally* think.
And finally, the idea that you could get an "impartial" verdict from an unthinking unfeeling machine, based on an amalgamation of patterns of human behaviour, rather than being judged by one person who's bringing all of their individual baggage/motivations. The latter is good for comments/feedback, but helps you understand what happened ONLY if you get *enough* comments/feedack to give you a pattern.
Otherwise you work with 1-2 comments, maybe one person you basically dragged in to analyze something they do not care about (meaning instant "Annoyance" and/or "Personal Disinterest" penalty factored into the verdict), plus a big wall of silence that could mean anything.

But I guess AI cannot do those things, either.

 

[Lector77]

The paradox is that everyone knows it's shit in their own area of expertise, but they're willing to use it for other things, even when the experts in those areas tell them it's shit.

Worse yet, as the LLMs have already scanned so much of what was available on the galactic interwebs, further training will include more recent postings, including AI outputs. Cannibalistic incest, anyone?