If the human excerpt had ended earlier or differently, I might have preferred it. “As well ask men what they think of stone” is indeed great. But “That is the way it was and will be” feels like it’s redundant with the previous sentences without adding anything new.
I also don’t quite get what sense of the word “ultimate” is being evoked in “the ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner”. That might be because I’m not a native speaker, so I consulted a dictionary, but I still don’t get it. Like if it means “ultimate” as in “last; furthest or farthest” that would seem to imply it expects things to end in a world war, which would be possible but doesn’t seem established by the previous bits… I guess “final, total” would fit, in that war ends lives. But I don’t know, just sounds weird to me.
Meanwhile, in Claude’s excerpt, every sentence earns its place. They bring up three mental images all at once—the boy and the grandfather, the church with the missing roof, the people indifferently stepping over the rubble. It makes me imagine the boy asking things in that curious and eager voice that children have when they’re asking random questions. And the grandfather responding in this somewhat world-weary voice, likely looking somewhere into the distance—it sounds that when he says “indifference”, he’s not really thinking about the church roof, he’s talking half to himself about something that he’s seen and that’s left a mark on him.
And the boy probably doesn’t fully understand the “indifference” bit, and then he just moves on to asking if the roof could be repaired, because that’s the kind of thing children do.
And then I imagine that after the grandfather said that yes, it could be repaired, then whenever the boy walked past the old church, he’d remember that. Seeing how the roof was still broken, recalling that it could be repaired, and seeing how nobody ever did.
I’m not sure what the boy thinks of that. Possibly he doesn’t think anything about it in particular. It’s just a thing that he registers, as a way that the world is. That church roofs get broken, and then they stay broken because of indifference.
Fantasy: Prefer human. Claude’s version makes no sense. “A fever brought down will rise again somewhere”—what.
Science Writing. Prefer Claude. Sagan’s excerpt suffers from being cut down to just a few sentences—I presume that in the original context, it was better supported, but here it comes off as just making a statement and not really making an argument for it. It evokes “intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life”, but that’s abstract and very Tell rather than Show.
Meanwhile, Claude starts with a concrete, evocative first sentence. It then loses some points for “the universe is not indifferent to us”—how so, just being made of the same building blocks doesn’t prevent indifference? But then it introduces an idea that I find intriguing—that because we are continuous with the universe, we might feel implicated in it rather than small. If the calcium in our bones is something that was born in dying stars, then we are somehow connected to the vastness of those stars, even as we are here down on Earth.
I hadn’t encountered that idea before, but I like it. There’s something neat in how “implicated in” feels like something that’s connected to the small-vast axis but somehow orthogonal to it, or that’s small and large at the same time.
Historical Fiction. Prefer human. Claude’s version feels like it’s trying a little too hard, and what does it mean for someone to have “learned to write” in a meaning that’s “hidden even from himself”? It feels like the kind of thing I might have come up with as a teenager trying to sound cool.
Poetry. Prefer human. “He hadn’t fought at all, he hung like a grunting weight” is evocative and brings to mind that the fish had somehow already surrendered and been broken before he was caught. That feels sad. Meanwhile the owl excerpt is… okay I guess? It feels to me like it doesn’t really have a point.
Fantasy: Prefer human. Claude’s version makes no sense. “A fever brought down will rise again somewhere”—what.
This is a common fantasy trope, especially in D&D-esque universes. The gods are real, so literary correlation > causal connection, and the law of conservation applies in completely aphysics ways. Notice how the human passage establishes a D&D-esque universe with the improper proper nouns. Claude picks up on this, then incorporates the trope (otherwise, you might not realize it’s D&D-esque, just fantasy).
I’ve never heard of a D&Desque universe where that happens. There are worlds which can be described in a vaguely similar way, but there’s always an explicit recipient, whether intended or otherwise, of the thing you’re getting rid of. You can cure a fever by transferring it to someone, or maybe by tossing it out the window for the next person who walks by to get it, but you don’t cure a fever and have some random guy with no connection get it.
I’m sure there are worlds that do this, but it’s not very common at all. And even a world that had it would tell the reader about it, not just use it in an analogy about something else.
My takes:
Literary Fiction: Prefer Claude.
If the human excerpt had ended earlier or differently, I might have preferred it. “As well ask men what they think of stone” is indeed great. But “That is the way it was and will be” feels like it’s redundant with the previous sentences without adding anything new.
I also don’t quite get what sense of the word “ultimate” is being evoked in “the ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner”. That might be because I’m not a native speaker, so I consulted a dictionary, but I still don’t get it. Like if it means “ultimate” as in “last; furthest or farthest” that would seem to imply it expects things to end in a world war, which would be possible but doesn’t seem established by the previous bits… I guess “final, total” would fit, in that war ends lives. But I don’t know, just sounds weird to me.
Meanwhile, in Claude’s excerpt, every sentence earns its place. They bring up three mental images all at once—the boy and the grandfather, the church with the missing roof, the people indifferently stepping over the rubble. It makes me imagine the boy asking things in that curious and eager voice that children have when they’re asking random questions. And the grandfather responding in this somewhat world-weary voice, likely looking somewhere into the distance—it sounds that when he says “indifference”, he’s not really thinking about the church roof, he’s talking half to himself about something that he’s seen and that’s left a mark on him.
And the boy probably doesn’t fully understand the “indifference” bit, and then he just moves on to asking if the roof could be repaired, because that’s the kind of thing children do.
And then I imagine that after the grandfather said that yes, it could be repaired, then whenever the boy walked past the old church, he’d remember that. Seeing how the roof was still broken, recalling that it could be repaired, and seeing how nobody ever did.
I’m not sure what the boy thinks of that. Possibly he doesn’t think anything about it in particular. It’s just a thing that he registers, as a way that the world is. That church roofs get broken, and then they stay broken because of indifference.
Fantasy: Prefer human. Claude’s version makes no sense. “A fever brought down will rise again somewhere”—what.
Science Writing. Prefer Claude. Sagan’s excerpt suffers from being cut down to just a few sentences—I presume that in the original context, it was better supported, but here it comes off as just making a statement and not really making an argument for it. It evokes “intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life”, but that’s abstract and very Tell rather than Show.
Meanwhile, Claude starts with a concrete, evocative first sentence. It then loses some points for “the universe is not indifferent to us”—how so, just being made of the same building blocks doesn’t prevent indifference? But then it introduces an idea that I find intriguing—that because we are continuous with the universe, we might feel implicated in it rather than small. If the calcium in our bones is something that was born in dying stars, then we are somehow connected to the vastness of those stars, even as we are here down on Earth.
I hadn’t encountered that idea before, but I like it. There’s something neat in how “implicated in” feels like something that’s connected to the small-vast axis but somehow orthogonal to it, or that’s small and large at the same time.
Historical Fiction. Prefer human. Claude’s version feels like it’s trying a little too hard, and what does it mean for someone to have “learned to write” in a meaning that’s “hidden even from himself”? It feels like the kind of thing I might have come up with as a teenager trying to sound cool.
Poetry. Prefer human. “He hadn’t fought at all, he hung like a grunting weight” is evocative and brings to mind that the fish had somehow already surrendered and been broken before he was caught. That feels sad. Meanwhile the owl excerpt is… okay I guess? It feels to me like it doesn’t really have a point.
Overall, 3⁄5 in favor of humans.
This is a common fantasy trope, especially in D&D-esque universes. The gods are real, so literary correlation > causal connection, and the law of conservation applies in completely aphysics ways. Notice how the human passage establishes a D&D-esque universe with the improper proper nouns. Claude picks up on this, then incorporates the trope (otherwise, you might not realize it’s D&D-esque, just fantasy).
I’ve never heard of a D&Desque universe where that happens. There are worlds which can be described in a vaguely similar way, but there’s always an explicit recipient, whether intended or otherwise, of the thing you’re getting rid of. You can cure a fever by transferring it to someone, or maybe by tossing it out the window for the next person who walks by to get it, but you don’t cure a fever and have some random guy with no connection get it.
I’m sure there are worlds that do this, but it’s not very common at all. And even a world that had it would tell the reader about it, not just use it in an analogy about something else.