Great simile or greatest simile?

[sunnyskywalker]

I'd vaguely heard about ProWritingAid, mainly in the context of it being useful for hunting down words and phrases you've repeated too often. I finally checked out their website out of curiosity. They have a new tool, Rephrase, which uses GPT-3. You can try it out right on the website with no sign-up necessary: just plug in a sentence and get alternative phrasings in categories like "informal," "sensory," and "shorten." How could I pass that up?

Here's the sentence I plugged in:

Unfortunately, now she couldn't think of anything to say.

Most of the suggestions were fine in isolation but worse at capturing the intent--no surprise, since the computer doesn't have the text of the rest of the scene and wouldn't know what it meant anyway. It can only give statistically common combinations of words.

However, one of the "sensory" suggestions was hilarious.

She was desperate to think of something to say, but her mouth just hung open as if glued shut.

Yes, that will make me sound like a literary genius! Now I really want to know what texts GPT-3 ingested that it thinks this combination makes sense. Maybe it's actually calculating the phrases separately? "Passages with the words 'couldn't think of anything to say' include 'mouth hung open' in x percent of cases. Add 'mouth hung open.' Passages with the words 'couldn't think of anything to say' include the phrase 'as if glued shut' in y percent of cases. Add 'as if glued shut.'"

I don't think AI will be replacing human writers just yet.