I don't know how you compare, but ChatGPT's English grammar and vocabulary are significantly better than mine. And when I prompt it appropriately, it also seems to be a better creative writer than I am, at least for short pieces.
> Chatgpt (and other LLMs) are awful at creative prose.
As are most humans.
Don't get me wrong, what I've seen from even the better LLMs have a certain voice and tropes and sacherine worldview that isn't dark enough where it needs to be for the story to work; but on the other hand, what I see on some fiction writing subreddits… the AI is often a genuine improvement over amateur writers, even in cases where the AI contradicts itself about plot elements.
Which is frustrating, because I have the feeling the novel I've been trying to finish writing for the last decade may be usurped by AI before I get my final draft.
> what I see on some fiction writing subreddits… the AI is often a genuine improvement over amateur writers
What point are you trying to make here? That amateur writers are amateurs?
That AI is only "often" an improvement over an amateur?
> Which is frustrating, because I have the feeling the novel I've been trying to finish writing for the last decade may be usurped by AI before I get my final draft.
This statement shows such a warped attitude towards art and the creative process. What do you mean "usurped?" Do you actually believe that LLMs will overtake humans when it comes to creative works?
If so, you don't really understand what is compelling about the written word or what makes for good writing and reading and it's no wonder you feel as though your own writing is so substandard.
I highly doubt your writing is that bad. Especially if you've been working on it for a decade.
Just so we're clear, you're not sure what I'm saying and nevertheless think that I'm a better writer than you believe that I believe myself to be and you are confused by an imaginary "only" that wasn't in what I wrote and that you are skeptical of the idea that an LLM might overtake humans in creative works generally and writing in particular?
I'm not sure if the following statement will help your confusion, but most who judge the quality of a story do so without being able to write that story. Critiquing and writing are different skills.
It's giving a reply that "sounds right to a human" in context. Which, on small scale, is exactly what they, me and you are also doing when writing (or speaking), except for the infrequent cases when we force ourselves to reason through stuff very. slowly.
(This is why I believe LLM performance is best judged against human inner voice/system 1 reasoning, not the entirety of human thinking. When thinking with system 1, people don't really have an idea what they're doing either - they're just doing stuff that feels right.)
Also note that "sounds right to a human" is literally the loss function on which LLMs are trained, so between heaps of training inputs and subsequent extensive RLHF, the process is by its very construction aiming optimizing for above-human-average performance across the board.
Like speaking english and coding?