Writing for Snobs

Re:Writing for Snobs by lmm on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @01:11AM (#24489739)

> There's a kind of writing that is actively aspiring to a smooth, shallow, facile surface, a certain kind of boring flawlessness. The writing that most corporations do. That's who GPT-3 will get to first. Not the novelists and the poets but the corporate copy-writers. They came for the writers of car brochures, but I wasn't a writer of car brochures, so I said nothing.

I'm not at all convinced. A car brochure at least has to tell you what's good about the car. Poetry seems to actively aspire to saying nothing substantive, and so does a lot of "literary" fiction and a certain kind of magazine article.

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Re:Writing for Snobs by Thorrez on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @01:23AM (#24489793)

Computers are good at giving you facts, that's why computers will be able to write a car brochure. Poetry is more about making you feel something. That's harder for a computer to do.

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Re:Writing for Snobs by tonyedgecombe on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @11:24AM (#24493546)

Marketing of cars has very little to do with facts, it's all about emotion. There are no pictures of the typical congestion, its all open roads with no other pesky road users. The models are all slim whereas most of their customers struggle to drag their fat backsides into the car. The kids are happy to sit in the back whilst the reality is they will be screaming "are we there yet" after five minutes of a long drive.

Modern marketing is all about emotion.

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Re:Writing for Snobs by lmm on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @01:58AM (#24489961)

That's just not true of GPT-3 though. It's very good at capturing tone and therefore provoking the same kinds of feelings as "real" examples of the same style. It's much less good at conveying facts.

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