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This is exciting to see. In the start AIs will be used as assistants to human writers, but I imagine that in the future they'll progress to the point where they're able to write on their own with little to no human intervention. If programs can author books/screenplays/etc. for free, that's going to revolutionize the world of fiction. I don't think we need to get to the point of AGI to see bots that can hold their own against human authors.

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To get a real story you need AGI that has some understanding of what it's writing about. What GPT-3 churns out is really just pleasant prose about a theme, but it's meaningless/directionless and won't make sense beyond individual paragraphs. It doesn't really make sense within paragraph either, but we're able to read meaning into any string of five or six sentences so it doesn't jump out as much.

I'm not claiming that this is something that GPT-3 could ever accomplish, but I do believe there exists a middle ground between GPT-3 and full AGI that can produce creative works such as fiction novels.

Writing a novel that holds together requires a coherent model of how the world works, and if you've got that you've basically got AGI. An AI author that can write a compelling account of a person or institution's behavior over a non-trivial period of time could also serve as a real person's manager and have a conversation with a real person.

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