every work of fiction now feels like a call-out. it doesn't have to be GOOD fiction, even. in fact it's almost worse with bad fiction because then I am painfully aware of the gap between the ambitions of the creator and the actual product, and I feel like a heel—making even a really cheap and bad movie, or writing a whole damn novel, is hard work! even conceiving a complete idea is hard work—no wonder people want shortcuts like LLM stuff.
it hadn't occurred to me until just now that a long time ago, I had actually read a story about the dream of making a universal creation machine of sorts. it was called The Universal Library, by Kurd Lasswitz, and I read it in a collection called Fantasia Mathematica, ages ago. Lasswitz suggests that the idea is ridiculous because there's no way to tell the good work from innumerable number of bad works that closely resemble the good ones. suppose you generate a table of logarithms with your "universal library"—at a glance, how do tell if your generated table is correct? or if you know you've got a dud, how much more searching through your "universal library" is necessary before you get something correct? Lasswitz's story ought to have reminded me that creation is hard work.
~Chara