Yeah, a lot of the suggested topics there seem to be borrowing from the specific stories you included, which makes sense (and I don’t think is a flaw, really). Like the first story you included in the context is a funeral witnessed by a little girl, with the deceased’s dog freaking out as a major plot point, so it’s sensible enough that it’s coming up with ideas that are fairly closely related.
I’m not sure what you mean about twist endings? I tend to think they’re pretty bad in most flash fiction, at least literary flash fiction, but certainly plenty of humans write them and occasionally they’re fine.
I still hate the “earth’s hunger” sentence, and am confident I would if this was a story by a human, mostly just because I evaluated and hated lots and lots of submissions by humans with similar stuff! That being said, I don’t think I understood what 4.5 was going for there, and your explanation makes sense, so my objection is purely aesthetic. Of course, I can’t prove that I’m not just evincing anti-LLM prejudice. It’s possible! But overall I really like LLM outputs often, talk to multiple LLMs every day, and try prompting them in lots of different ways to see what happens, so I don’t think I go into reading LLM fiction efforts determined to hate them. I just do in fact hate them. But I also hated, say, Rogue One, and many of my friends liked it. No accounting for taste!
I am curious, since you are a writer/thinker I respect a lot, if you like… have a feeling of sincere aesthetic appreciation for the story you shared (and thanks, by the way, for putting in the effort to generate it), or any other AI-generated fiction. Because while I point to a bunch of specific stuff I don’t like, the main thing is the total lack of a feeling I get when reading good flash fiction stories, which is surprise. A sentence, or word choice, or plot pivot (though not something as banal as a twist ending) catching me off guard. To date, machine-generated stuff has failed to do that to me, including when I’ve tried to coax it into doing so in various conversations.
I look forward to the day that it does!
Edit: also, I now notice you were asking about what the latent features of good flash fiction would be. I think they’re pretty ineffable, which is part of the challenge. One might be something like “the text quickly creates a scene with a strongly identifiable vibe, then complicates that vibe with a key understated detail which admits multiple interpretations”; another might be “there is an extreme economy of words/symbols such that capitalization/punctuation choices are load bearing and admit discussion”; a third might be “sentences with weird structure and repetition appear at a key point to pivot away from sensory or character moments, and into the interiority of the viewpoint character”. None of this is easy to capture; I don’t really think I’ve captured it. But I don’t feel like LLMs really get it yet. I understand it may be a prompting skill issue, or something, but the fact that no LLM output I’ve seen really plays with sentence structure or an unusual narrative voice, despite many celebrated flash fiction pieces doing so, feels somewhat instructive.
Yeah, a lot of the suggested topics there seem to be borrowing from the specific stories you included, which makes sense (and I don’t think is a flaw, really). Like the first story you included in the context is a funeral witnessed by a little girl, with the deceased’s dog freaking out as a major plot point, so it’s sensible enough that it’s coming up with ideas that are fairly closely related.
I’m not sure what you mean about twist endings? I tend to think they’re pretty bad in most flash fiction, at least literary flash fiction, but certainly plenty of humans write them and occasionally they’re fine.
I still hate the “earth’s hunger” sentence, and am confident I would if this was a story by a human, mostly just because I evaluated and hated lots and lots of submissions by humans with similar stuff! That being said, I don’t think I understood what 4.5 was going for there, and your explanation makes sense, so my objection is purely aesthetic. Of course, I can’t prove that I’m not just evincing anti-LLM prejudice. It’s possible! But overall I really like LLM outputs often, talk to multiple LLMs every day, and try prompting them in lots of different ways to see what happens, so I don’t think I go into reading LLM fiction efforts determined to hate them. I just do in fact hate them. But I also hated, say, Rogue One, and many of my friends liked it. No accounting for taste!
I am curious, since you are a writer/thinker I respect a lot, if you like… have a feeling of sincere aesthetic appreciation for the story you shared (and thanks, by the way, for putting in the effort to generate it), or any other AI-generated fiction. Because while I point to a bunch of specific stuff I don’t like, the main thing is the total lack of a feeling I get when reading good flash fiction stories, which is surprise. A sentence, or word choice, or plot pivot (though not something as banal as a twist ending) catching me off guard. To date, machine-generated stuff has failed to do that to me, including when I’ve tried to coax it into doing so in various conversations.
I look forward to the day that it does!
Edit: also, I now notice you were asking about what the latent features of good flash fiction would be. I think they’re pretty ineffable, which is part of the challenge. One might be something like “the text quickly creates a scene with a strongly identifiable vibe, then complicates that vibe with a key understated detail which admits multiple interpretations”; another might be “there is an extreme economy of words/symbols such that capitalization/punctuation choices are load bearing and admit discussion”; a third might be “sentences with weird structure and repetition appear at a key point to pivot away from sensory or character moments, and into the interiority of the viewpoint character”. None of this is easy to capture; I don’t really think I’ve captured it. But I don’t feel like LLMs really get it yet. I understand it may be a prompting skill issue, or something, but the fact that no LLM output I’ve seen really plays with sentence structure or an unusual narrative voice, despite many celebrated flash fiction pieces doing so, feels somewhat instructive.