Taxpaying Adult.

Made/is currently making Don't Take It Personally, I Just Don't Like You and other gay video games to make you sad.

Watches too many horror movies.



SamKeeper
@SamKeeper

it's this one here:

and the bit I keep coming back to is:

Here’s a boring sentence I wrote: “Quinn entered the dark and cold forest.”

And here’s a sentence Rephrase gave me: “Quinn shivered as he stepped into the cold, dark forest, the air thick with the scent of damp earth.”

I can build off that! Now I’m more excited to write this scene that was feeling bland.

this is so weird to me. like, ok, first off, the whole premise here is oh look how this tool let me replace a boring placeholder sentence with something better? but the llm's sentence also feels pretty "it was a dark and stormy night" tier to me you know? this is nothing to (literally) write home about surely. it's, by definition, a statistically cliched sentence and it shows.

but it's also like... ok you've allowed a statistical algorithm to make a ton of choices for your setting and narrative here! did you even notice?


DeCosterMakesThings
@DeCosterMakesThings

I just love how they compliment sandwiched the shit out if it.

"Here's two suggestions that aren't wrong but are also so ubiquitous they're completely unhelpful, the "have you tried turning it off and turning it back on" of writing advice. Here's a plug for an LLM. Here's a final tip so limp it make the first two look revolutionary."


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in reply to @SamKeeper's post:

This makes me think of fantasy/sci-fi writing that ends up treating any hard rules established early on as a literary technical debt that hinders the narrative. Brushing it aside is something that risks coming across as not having that much care about the worldbuilding in a way that cheapens the experience as a reader.

The topic has been on my mind because I can see this happening in the Dragonblood Assassin books as I read them, but at the same time Murder Drones dropped some of the rules established early in the show without feeling like it's suffering from the same cheapening of the world so I've been mulling over the exact line of how that happens.

The solution definitely ain't generative AI and the incurious people promoting it.

just makes me think about holodecks

just walk into a magic box and spout a time period or a genre and get the most cliched possible version of that generated on the spot

and then you pack it onto a chip and you can call yourself a "holonovelist"

The only way I could defend this dark forest example is that you see the machine suggestions and go "oh god, not like that, I now realize I have to specify that the forest is a dry, snapping cold, the trails hardened by frost"

kind of like the joke about how the best way to get an answer online is to confidently post the wrong solution to the problem, it can be inspiring to see work so bad it makes you think "well, okay, I may doubt my abilities sometimes but I know I can do better than that."

But I don't think this is the intended use.