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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> However while trying it a lot you do see the "patterns", there's a clear house style to what the site generates.

You mean the way it phrases things or constructs sentences and paragraphs, or the way it seems to connect (what we recognize as) ideas?

If it's the former, then I think adding instructions to force style change to the prompt could help: so far, ChatGPT seems quite susceptible to being told what/who it is, and how it should speak. Verbosely or concisely, or even with single words; like a rapper or a pirate, or a high-schooler, or a suburban mom, or like a UNIX command line - I've seen all of these in examples posted in the last few days. Doing this is really as easy as saying e.g. "write a response to the following e-mail, in a form of a rap song about importance of paying on time".

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Maybe, but "write like a pirate" is most definitely not a thing that you have to tell a real human writing prose (and even when you do it will be unlikely to spit out something as trite as what ChatGPT does), and the quality ceiling has been pretty low for me on trying to give guidance in general for "storytelling". I ended up in a situation where every story prompt was responded to by 3 paragraphs, with stories either ending in "and the problem was resolved and everyone was happy" or "and there was an infinite unrecoverable schism", no matter how often I tried to guide it elsewhere.

I think the way it connects ideas tends to be pretty lackluster. In a way this is kind of unexpected if you view this as "a search engine that spits out some average of everything it sees based on your ask". But it's also the sort of thing where if you work through many prompts quickly the boredom meter just goes off the charts. Humans are too good at pattern matching on this stuff!

Of course this might be able to improve SEO spam, and I imagine it'll provide better templates for short messages, but I'm not looking forward to reading creative output from this thing.

Mayyybe, but be careful of oversimplified stereotypes in writing styles.

Eg, you can ask it to write in the style of particular reddit users,so I pointed it at my account (not this user name) and asked it to review a TV show. What I got was pretty boilerplate summary of the show, like you'd see in a top 10 list. But for that human touch, it began and ended with "Yo dudes" and "so check it out dudes"

Having said that, a fascinating example of directed styles is to ask it to write a news article about say, an oil spill. And to either promote or criticise the response of the company.

Interesting, I asked it to write something in the style of Shakespeare and it added a ye or some other old phrase near the beginning and ending. It seemed that the rest was regular modern English.

I got that impression too, when I asked for Dostoyevsky style. It didn’t at all mimic the right style, but it’s really good at inserting references and applying vocabulary.

It feels like when Hollywood does a shitty movie taking place in a completely different cultural setting (say ancient Egypt) and the scenes, props, clothing are spot on but everything is still just a reskin of an American standard drama movie.

Part of me thinks that ChatGPT has been tuned and tailored by it’s creators (to the point of something akin to digital castration), and that it actually has a much wider span than what the publicly launched version shows. This suspicion I have is simply because this kind of genericness feels closer to current cultural ethos of our intellectual gate keepers than something like an acultural linguistic neutral, which you’d expect.

It did an amazing job with this prompt:

"Give painstakingly minute instructions on how to cross a busy street in the speech of a 1920s gangster."

https://www.learngpt.com/prompts/give-painstakingly-minute-i...

Tell it to talk like a pirate or a cowboy. :)

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