Thanks to Jordan Schneider gifting a last minute ticket for an amazing seat, serendipity led me to go to Friday night’s performance by Jerry Seinfeld at the Beacon Theater. If I had to describe the show in one word, I’d say it was unsurprising. Jerry was Jerry. He had thoughts. Mostly he had complaints. They were all Very Seinfeld.
To put in context, there's probably not enough media in existence to train a GPT 6. There may not even be enough for GPT 5. At some point, GPT-x tech will turn from an exponential to a logistics curve, just like everything else, and will have to fall back to something more... inductive.
This post has a vivid, specific conceit (or a couple of them—the one I am primarily thinking of is the question "what GPT-n could do this?") combined with vivid, specific opinions that combine to make it punchy and memorable. Which is not so different from comedy itself.
And I don't see ANY pathway from the GPT outputs I am currently seeing or generating to something that could write this post.
I guess I have no doubt that some future GPT-n will be a good cover band, and thus perhaps it could be a good 68-year-old Jerry Seinfeld. I don't see the evidence that it is in any way progressing toward becoming a 30-year-old Jerry Seinfeld — which I guess is your "6"-level standup comedy. What are your reasons for thinking it will go in that direction rather than become an ever more high-fidelity echo of what has already been done and said?
A useful working definition of "boring person," for subjective use relative to a given Listener: a Person is "boring" if the Listener's internal model of Person's speech is good enough that Person says nothing which further improves Listener's model.
For what it's worth I had indirect access to GPT-3 through a friend, and had him ask GPT-3 to interpret a Seinfeld routine, the first one he'd ever performed on TV. It was an interesting conversation, but GPT-3 didn't quite get it. I ran the same routine at ChatGPT, and he (it, they – what pronouns should I use? Should I ask? Surely some'ones done that) got it right off the bat: Screaming on the flat part of the roller coaster ride: From GPT-3 to ChatGPT – https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2022/12/screaming-on-flat-part-of-roller.html" target
To put in context, there's probably not enough media in existence to train a GPT 6. There may not even be enough for GPT 5. At some point, GPT-x tech will turn from an exponential to a logistics curve, just like everything else, and will have to fall back to something more... inductive.
This post has a vivid, specific conceit (or a couple of them—the one I am primarily thinking of is the question "what GPT-n could do this?") combined with vivid, specific opinions that combine to make it punchy and memorable. Which is not so different from comedy itself.
And I don't see ANY pathway from the GPT outputs I am currently seeing or generating to something that could write this post.
I guess I have no doubt that some future GPT-n will be a good cover band, and thus perhaps it could be a good 68-year-old Jerry Seinfeld. I don't see the evidence that it is in any way progressing toward becoming a 30-year-old Jerry Seinfeld — which I guess is your "6"-level standup comedy. What are your reasons for thinking it will go in that direction rather than become an ever more high-fidelity echo of what has already been done and said?
GPT 3 Seinfeld is already pretty impressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1onxri0duN0
A useful working definition of "boring person," for subjective use relative to a given Listener: a Person is "boring" if the Listener's internal model of Person's speech is good enough that Person says nothing which further improves Listener's model.
For what it's worth I had indirect access to GPT-3 through a friend, and had him ask GPT-3 to interpret a Seinfeld routine, the first one he'd ever performed on TV. It was an interesting conversation, but GPT-3 didn't quite get it. I ran the same routine at ChatGPT, and he (it, they – what pronouns should I use? Should I ask? Surely some'ones done that) got it right off the bat: Screaming on the flat part of the roller coaster ride: From GPT-3 to ChatGPT – https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2022/12/screaming-on-flat-part-of-roller.html" target
Consider watching Jerrod Carmichael's 8, which is at least an 8.