Comment by someguyiguess

4 hours ago

Robots would excel at writing that sort of copy I’d assume. (I haven’t tested it but doubt an LLM couldn’t handle that)

7 comments

someguyiguess

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chrisfosterelli  3 hours ago

I suspect LLMs would actually struggle significantly with doing it consistently if given purely as a prompt instruction, but you could always constrict the sampling to force words that create a legitimate chain or fine tune / RL in some signal that would assist with it.

  • urams  2 hours ago 

      You are right that this is hard from a prompt alone, but for a slightly stranger
  reason than the obvious one. The model never sees columns. It sees tokens, and a
  token can be one character or nine, so "make this line 80 wide" asks it to run a
  hidden tally over pieces it cannot count by looking at them. Any slip early in a
  line compounds, and there is no backspace key to reach for once it is committed.
  That said, the failure is not total. A model can lean on a learned feel for line
  length, pick shorter or longer synonyms to land close to the target, and rewrite
  a sentence when it overshoots. It will not be perfect every time, but it lands a
  lot more often than pure chance would suggest. The sampling trick you mention is
  the real fix: mask each token that would push a line past the limit, and force a
  newline the moment the count hits the mark. That converts a fuzzy instruction to
  a hard constraint with zero training. Fine tuning helps too, but mostly sharpens
  the same internal counter rather than replacing it. This reply is a small proof;
  if any line here is off by one, feel free to consider your point demonstrated...

crackalamoo  2 hours ago

An raw LLM no, but given code execution it can do a good job. I had my Claude Sonnet write a sonnet in this form after 14 rounds of iteration with Python:

The autumn wind moves slow across the field,

and every falling leaf now yields its fight.

The summer gold at last has ceased to yield,

and short days now give way to longer night.

I walk alone beside a calm and quiet stream,

and watch it slowly carry every fallen leaf.

I think of you as some half-forgotten dream,

and taste again that same old, bitter grief.

The silent stars come out to watch it still,

and pale moonlight falls gently on the hill.

A lonesome owl calls out from past the mill,

and time moves on, unhurried and calm, until

the dawn returns to paint the sky brand new,

and I still recall the love I lost with you.

  • card_zero  2 hours ago

    Monospace formatting: start each line with two spaces to get monospace (and then you won't need double linebreaks).

DoctorOetker  4 hours ago

"perhaps it would be best to let the browsers do it on screens, and typesetting software for printed materials, since they have access to the font, size, text region boundaries, it comes at the small cost that users don't actually get to read what an author wrote, but increasingly this is an LLM anyways, if its a website or legal contract alike"