I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. Not sure why it isn’t getting more engagement.
If you avoided reading it only because you assumed it would be AI slop you should give it a read.
That being said, it being “pretty good” may not be that much of an endorsement of GPT-5′s writing skills. I expect most of the credit for its quality should go to Trevor the, presumably human, editor.
...Except that you’ve got me wondering exactly how much I did change it. So for a rough approximation, I threw GPT-5′s version and my version into the first diff tool I found:
I got rid of markdown formatting and normalized the whitespace/capitalization (I figure these things shouldn’t really count); the result seems to be that 18-20% of it is my interference, at character-level granularity. A cursory glance shows that’s probably an overcount, too, since there are a few rearrangements of paragraphs and stuff that didn’t get flagged as equivalent. I suspect it’s more likely to be in the 12-15% range.
There are probably arguments to be made either way about whether that’s a lot or a little—as changing the right word in a sentence can be far more impactful than adding or removing paragraphs—but that’s the number.
I do think my version flows better and has fewer awkward constructions, but to reiterate, the reason I bothered at all is because GPT-5′s raw story very much grabbed me, and there were a number of passages I thought qualified as beautiful writing.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. Not sure why it isn’t getting more engagement.
If you avoided reading it only because you assumed it would be AI slop you should give it a read.
That being said, it being “pretty good” may not be that much of an endorsement of GPT-5′s writing skills. I expect most of the credit for its quality should go to Trevor the, presumably human, editor.
Thanks!
...Except that you’ve got me wondering exactly how much I did change it. So for a rough approximation, I threw GPT-5′s version and my version into the first diff tool I found:
https://www.diffchecker.com/EAXsk4DX/
I got rid of markdown formatting and normalized the whitespace/capitalization (I figure these things shouldn’t really count); the result seems to be that 18-20% of it is my interference, at character-level granularity. A cursory glance shows that’s probably an overcount, too, since there are a few rearrangements of paragraphs and stuff that didn’t get flagged as equivalent. I suspect it’s more likely to be in the 12-15% range.
There are probably arguments to be made either way about whether that’s a lot or a little—as changing the right word in a sentence can be far more impactful than adding or removing paragraphs—but that’s the number.
I do think my version flows better and has fewer awkward constructions, but to reiterate, the reason I bothered at all is because GPT-5′s raw story very much grabbed me, and there were a number of passages I thought qualified as beautiful writing.