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GPT-AUTHOR: Fit for purpose? [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-06-28

Amazon’s KU (Kindle Unlimited) is now chock-a-block with AI-originated trash ‘books’. The covers as well as the content are so egregious that a casual glance should warn anyone. I guess the purpose is to make money by page reads. If a book-dumper uploads 10,000 books and readers read even one page to see how awful it is… well, it’s just grifters.

In light of this new horror I decided to see if GPT -AUTHOR could indeed (as claimed) write me a complete fantasy novel and generate a cover. Please bear in mind the following: I’m a 75 y.o. guy and the last time I coded was in my 30s and it was Smalltalk-80, which is nothing like Python, the script used to create GPT-AUTHOR. Python reminds me of the first language I learned, BASIC.

To use GPT-AUTHOR you need to be a member of both Open AI and Stability AI. Open AI generates the text while Stabilty AI generates the cover.

I already had an OpenAI API key, so I created an account with Stability and got the second key.

You can install Jupyter and Python and its dependencies on your PC and run the code locally, or run it in Google’s Colaboratory where you simply edit the script and follow instructions.

It’s unlikely to work however, unless you’re already authorised to use Chat-GPT 4. It’s not on public release yet.

My first problem was error messages reporting that calls to Chat-GPT4 had failed. The code relies on GPT-4 calls and fails back to Turbo 3.5. But the failback code doesn't work properly and because of that you get call errors for Chat-GPT-4. So I edited the code to make only Chat-GPT Turbo 3.5 calls. This worked but then I got a different error. I had used two sentences in the book description and that’s not permitted. (It’s not easy to divine what the cause is from the error messages. It helps a lot if you have experience with Open AI’s Playground app.)

I fixed that then ran the code again and generated seven chapters before failing with an error regarding insufficient tokens. From my experience with Playground I deduced that Turbo 3.5 has a 4096 character limit which was causing the issue. The prompt gets longer with each generated chapter and unless you have access to GPT-4 you are unlikely to get very many chapters before it errors-out.

So that’s where I am right now, waiting for GPT-4 access and wondering if I should learn Python so as to better edit the code.

I did take a look at examples of novels generated with the app, and oh dear, they are pretty bad by my standards, First, they are in old-fashioned omni point of view. No thanks! And the prose is purple to say the least. Here’s an extract:

Embrace of the Esoteric

In the blustering maelstrom of the world’s marvel, one man stood separate from the crowd, an island amidst the tumultuous sea of awe-inspired humanity. Tim was his name, a man of golden years with hair to match, as whitened as they were by the many moons he’d lived through. As a Cybernetician, he was an artisan of the digital domain, encoding, deciphering and rearranging patterns of information with fluent dexterity. Among the many transfixed by the mesmerising fusion of technology and mystique, his gaze distinguished itself, for it hosted an expression of almost childlike fascination. Tim was entranced by the spectacle…

etc etc.

NO THANKS!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/28/2178173/-GPT-AUTHOR-Fit-for-purpose

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