Thread

Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines

582 points · 128 comments · supermdguy

mjd · 1790907772 · focus · HN ↗
For those not familiar with it already, the writing and art style are a well-executed pastiche of Arnold Lobel's ”Frog and Toad” books.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog_and_Toad" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog_and_Toad
1. mcphage · 1790946244 · focus · HN ↗
  One of the things I've done periodically with LLMs is asked them to write a story in the style of Lobel's Frog and Toad stories, and... they've always done an incredibly bad job. Either meandering texts that go nowhere, or just straight up ripoffs of the original stories. I haven't asked in a year or two, though.
  1. waltbosz · 1790958955 · focus · HN ↗
    Sometime in the past 6 months, I asked ChatGPT to write stories in the style of a Ramona Quimby book. It does pretty well imitating the style. It writes from the perspective of a child, vocabulary, tone, and pacing are all similar.
    It's never wonderful prose though. It's missing that je ne sais quoi.
    mcphage · 1790961466 · focus · HN ↗
    It has done okay with the style, I think, but the stories had no point, they had no motivation.
  2. WesolyKubeczek · 1790962929 · focus · HN ↗
    I used to play with this on TextSynth when it has very few models and plain design (so GPT-6J or whatchamacallit). “Meandering texts that go nowhere” was the precise defining characteristic of all of the completions, every single one of them.

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