AI fails to win a writing competition
According to a story in the South China Morning Post that created a lot of excitement, a professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University used AI to generate a novel that won a “national science fiction award honour.”
However, the story gets less impressive the closer you look into it — something that’s apparently also true of the “novel” in question called The Land of Memories by Shen Yang.
It’s apparently only 6,000 Chinese characters long — which equates to roughly 4,000 English language words, give or take — so it’s a short story. The first draft took 66 prompts to generate 43,000 characters, which were then whittled down to the 5,900 characters that comprised the submitted story.
It didn’t even win the competition, which is aimed primarily at teenagers (though anyone under 45 can enter, and there are no restrictions on AI usage). The story took home “second prize” in the Jiangsu Youth Popular Science Science Fiction Competition … and, even then, shared “second prize” with 17 other stories.
An analysis of more than 3,000 AI tools using SEMrush found the top 50 sites attracted 24 billion visits in the past year, mostly from nerdy men.
The top 10 most popular AI tools include a few surprises:
ChatGPT — a large language model (LLM) that had 14.6 billion visits.
Character.ai — an LLM in various disguises, 3.8 billion visits.
Quillbot — a paraphrasing tool that Harvard’s Claudine Gay probably wishes she’d used, 1.1 billion.
Midjourney — an image generation tool, 500.4 million.
Hugging Face — a platform featuring open-source AI models and tools, 316.6 million.
Bard — Google’s ghetto version of ChatGPT, 241.6 million.
NovelAI — an AI story writing “assistant,” 238.7 million.
CapCut — a video editor, 203.8 million.
Janitor AI — an “unfiltered” LLM that appears to be mostly used to create porn bots, 192.4 million.
Civitai — an image…
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