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?
adding my two cents here that was sth i had noticed too about those AI examples and how they do prose, and how they take away your agency when it comes to describing environments and places and how... most people seem to not notice nor care? and with regards to that cultural shift, of stories being primarily plot-forward rather than building upon a world the characters inhibit (cus those details are unimportant, just prose and placeholders to get the characters from one place to another), is weird and concerning
not like im not guilty of that, my descriptions are famously light, but they harp more on the emotional resonance they give to the characters, which is still an important aspect of grounding the world; and what description of a physical space is given is one that usually ends up standing out because it brings attention (and resonates) with an emotional stake the characters are involved with
but letting AI do that for you feels bad cus it just leaves you dry and with no substance underneath, like bullshitting an essay you did not want to write for school. The important question to ask here is: why does writing feel like homework to you when it comes to bits of characterization and description like that?
and the solution kinda is - if you don't like it, you can skip it, mull on it, and decide later if you want to come back and add on it, or cut it out entirely because it doesn't add anything that you want implement in your creative work
