Yeah, I dunno. Taste is taste. I can imagine someone liking it? I got hater mode activated on “somehow, in all its shabbiness, felt like home”, though I was already annoyed by “cursor hovering over the reply button” (why?) and it feels slightly weird for someone to “pour their soul into a startup” and be “up for a promotion”—the soul pouring makes me suspect he’s a founder? “One overpriced apartment at a time” is really painful too, like, the notion that the apartment was overpriced wasn’t resonant the first time!
Critiquing these feels kind of bad; I don’t mind doing it, but I both feel the irrational sadness of critiquing someone’s creative effort (irrational because there is no such someone) and the sadness of rejecting an offer from an actual person (you), but I dunno. I really do think 4 Opus has a lower enough cringe ratio than 3 Opus to be load bearing (at least to my specific taste).
I both feel the irrational sadness of critiquing someone’s creative effort (irrational because there is no such someone)
Same.
I got hater mode activated on “somehow, in all its shabbiness, felt like home”, though I was already annoyed by “cursor hovering over the reply button” (why?) and it feels slightly weird for someone to “pour their soul into a startup” and be “up for a promotion”—the soul pouring makes me suspect he’s a founder? “One overpriced apartment at a time” is really painful too, like, the notion that the apartment was overpriced wasn’t resonant the first time!
Yeah, I agree with all of those. (Also “an office with an actual door”.) But I think it’s a problem with select individual sentences now, not every sentence being cringe and chaining into more cringe? And if we put the bar on non-annoyingness that high, Opus 4′s story in the OP seems just as bad (I got the sense that the endorphins and the buying-unneeded-vegetables lines were also trying to be deep in some sense, and it’s just that they were so incoherent that it didn’t parse that way). Or maybe I’m actually just blind to the style of flaws you’re picking up on...
Hmm, maybe if we– Okay no I’m not doing that, I’m not tinkering with prompts and reading tons of LLM flashfiction, that was the last one.
To me the difference is something like… the new model stories are capable of surprising me without doing so by being incoherent, and there are things about them I positively like (other than occasionally enjoying a specific turn of phrase). The cringe sentences are there, but they’re a small fraction. Whereas the old model stories (again, quite subjectively), don’t surprise me and tend to frustrate me multiple times per typical paragraph. If I imagine a formal rubric, I think it’d be hard to produce one that gives 4 Opus an extremely higher score than 3 Opus, but in terms of how reading the pieces feels, it’s night and day.
Of course, different people will have this feeling at different levels, all the way from “I generated poetry cooperatively with GPT-3 and it’s brilliant” to “I will viscerally hate all things with any LLM smell at all until the day I die”, and I’m not sure there’s any objective grounding to be had. But for me, I’ve just this generation crossed the threshold from “ugh ugh UGH” to “huh. didn’t change my life, but not bad.”
Yeah, I dunno. Taste is taste. I can imagine someone liking it? I got hater mode activated on “somehow, in all its shabbiness, felt like home”, though I was already annoyed by “cursor hovering over the reply button” (why?) and it feels slightly weird for someone to “pour their soul into a startup” and be “up for a promotion”—the soul pouring makes me suspect he’s a founder? “One overpriced apartment at a time” is really painful too, like, the notion that the apartment was overpriced wasn’t resonant the first time!
Critiquing these feels kind of bad; I don’t mind doing it, but I both feel the irrational sadness of critiquing someone’s creative effort (irrational because there is no such someone) and the sadness of rejecting an offer from an actual person (you), but I dunno. I really do think 4 Opus has a lower enough cringe ratio than 3 Opus to be load bearing (at least to my specific taste).
Same.
Yeah, I agree with all of those. (Also “an office with an actual door”.) But I think it’s a problem with select individual sentences now, not every sentence being cringe and chaining into more cringe? And if we put the bar on non-annoyingness that high, Opus 4′s story in the OP seems just as bad (I got the sense that the endorphins and the buying-unneeded-vegetables lines were also trying to be deep in some sense, and it’s just that they were so incoherent that it didn’t parse that way). Or maybe I’m actually just blind to the style of flaws you’re picking up on...
Hmm, maybe if we– Okay no I’m not doing that, I’m not tinkering with prompts and reading tons of LLM flashfiction, that was the last one.
To me the difference is something like… the new model stories are capable of surprising me without doing so by being incoherent, and there are things about them I positively like (other than occasionally enjoying a specific turn of phrase). The cringe sentences are there, but they’re a small fraction. Whereas the old model stories (again, quite subjectively), don’t surprise me and tend to frustrate me multiple times per typical paragraph. If I imagine a formal rubric, I think it’d be hard to produce one that gives 4 Opus an extremely higher score than 3 Opus, but in terms of how reading the pieces feels, it’s night and day.
Of course, different people will have this feeling at different levels, all the way from “I generated poetry cooperatively with GPT-3 and it’s brilliant” to “I will viscerally hate all things with any LLM smell at all until the day I die”, and I’m not sure there’s any objective grounding to be had. But for me, I’ve just this generation crossed the threshold from “ugh ugh UGH” to “huh. didn’t change my life, but not bad.”