I’m not sure how this was done, 9 Billion names of god style, but I really liked the structure and would love to see other authorial versions. Well done and IMO, artistic.
I had the premise in my head for a while (are LLMs writers of slop only because of their ubiquity? What is the cultural effect of having fluent writing on hand for everyone? What if a famous author was available to everyone, how would that writing be perceived? What if that famous author had the same failure modes of an LLM?).
When that happens and you finally get around to writing it, you tend to write very quickly. In this case the pace was assisted because I could draw on Hemingway quotes/snippets and use them as the centre of each episode.
This is pretty close to a first draft, looking at my tracked changes. Every section I wrote made it in bar one. It was about a publisher dealing with endless Hemingway submissions. The structure was just to have each section escalate the downstream effects of the premise, barring the last section which is more of a coda.
I have thought about doing other authors. Hemingway is kind of perfect because his theory of writing and style are more or less the go-to for teaching writing, which fits well for an LLM surrogate.
I’m not sure how this was done, 9 Billion names of god style, but I really liked the structure and would love to see other authorial versions. Well done and IMO, artistic.
Thanks, that’s very kind.
I had the premise in my head for a while (are LLMs writers of slop only because of their ubiquity? What is the cultural effect of having fluent writing on hand for everyone? What if a famous author was available to everyone, how would that writing be perceived? What if that famous author had the same failure modes of an LLM?).
When that happens and you finally get around to writing it, you tend to write very quickly. In this case the pace was assisted because I could draw on Hemingway quotes/snippets and use them as the centre of each episode.
This is pretty close to a first draft, looking at my tracked changes. Every section I wrote made it in bar one. It was about a publisher dealing with endless Hemingway submissions. The structure was just to have each section escalate the downstream effects of the premise, barring the last section which is more of a coda.
I have thought about doing other authors. Hemingway is kind of perfect because his theory of writing and style are more or less the go-to for teaching writing, which fits well for an LLM surrogate.