Comment by Nevermark

2 hours ago

Dial down "Contrast" and unrealistic "Highlights", dial up "Exposure" time and "Sharpness". Set "Temperature" per taste.

Wot? The simplest image apps have had these widgets for decades, but we are still waiting for models to ship with basic prose color control?

After the pernicious problem of having to pay money for something useful, my main peeve is fighting the writing.

Seriously though:

Every new model should be delivered with a settings page of slider bars for the 10 most impactful/desirable eigenparams of writing voice. And the ability to name and save combinations, which then appear on a "Writing Voice" popup menu with some standard battle-tested defaults, next to the model popup menu under the chat pane.

This is missing prime priority functionality in my opinion.

My theory is that as models get trained less to simply mimic humans, and more on distillations of their own best practices, they get more performant, but their vocabulary is drifting. The most literal meaning of words for us, are giving way to meanings we would recognize but view as allegorical. But which more usefully capture concepts that models experience as more literal 24/7, than our favored meanings from our direct experiences in our world. Because our world is very much an abstract second hand world to them, especially when you account for the modalities they do not share with us.

And programming and mathematical syntax patterns, that they have incorporated into their basic thought processing patterns, are drifting into human language sentence structure.

Example: "There exists x, such that: ...." -> "The one detail that clarifies: ... ".

The result is writing full of completely recognizable vocabulary and structure, that is somehow becoming more ambiguous and difficult for us to decode. But is perfectly clear to the models.