Your qualification for if an LLM can write a novella is it has to be as good as The Metamorphosis?

Yes, those are examples of novellas, surely you believe an LLM could write a bad novella? I'm not sure what your point is. Either you think it can't string the words together in that length or your standard is it can't write a foundational piece of literature that stays relevant for generations... I'm not sure which.

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aerhardt 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think it can write something that's of a fraction of the quality of Kafka.

But GP's argument ("limit the space to text") could be taken to imply - and it seems to be a common implication these days - that LLMs have mastered the text medium, or that they will very soon.

> it can't write a foundational piece of literature

Why not, if this a pure textual medium, the corpus includes all the great stories ever written, and possibly many writing workshops and great literature courses?

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colechristensen 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't know what to tell you. It's more than a little absurd to make the qualification of being able to do something to be that the output has to be considered a great work of art for generations.

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aerhardt 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I agree that the argument starts from a reduction to the absurd.

So at least we can agree that AI hasn't mastered the text medium, without further qualification?

And what about my argument, further qualified, which is that I don't think it could even write as well as a good professional writer - not necessarily a generational one?

	▲	colechristensen 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>AI hasn't mastered the text medium I don't know what this means and I don't know what would qualify it as having "mastered" at all. Seems like a no-true-Scotsman thing where regardless there would always be someone that it couldn't actually do a thing because this and that. >why can't they write a novel? This is what I'm disagreeing with. I think an LLM can write a novel well enough that it's recognizably a pretty mediocre novel, no worse than the median written human novel which to be fair is pretty bad. You seem to have an unqualified bar something needs to pass before "writing a novel" is accomplished but it's not clear what that is. At the same time you're switching between the ability to do a thing and the ability to do a thing in a way that's honored as the best of the best for a century. So I don't know it kind of seems like you just don't like AI and have a different standard for it that adjusts so that it fails. This doesn't match what you'd consider some random Bob's ability to do a thing.