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Comment by xosc | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure terry pratchett, were he alive, would not appreciate the ai gif on this otherwise interesting article

I also suspect Terry Pratchett would have had a lot to say about this sentence: "Pratchett’s [pocket editions] were small, fat, slightly battered, and printed on a kind of paper that already looked guilty." And this one: "It had Heroes, capital H, walking grimly towards their Destiny across a landscape that smelled of dwarves."

Some odd turns of phrase there that are grammatically correct, but... you know...

I thought those sentences were examples of excellent writing.

They don't sound AI to me - is that the implication, that it is? And the bit about 'Heroes' reminds me of his descriptions making fun of heroes in the stories about Cohen the Barbarian.

That's what I think the comment meant.. I was trying to put my finger on the word (other than slop) for the sort of low-effort, gimmicky pastiche that LLM's enable..but it might not exist yet.

Giving objects interiority is a very Pratchett move.

It sounds very AI. Current AIs' ideas of good writing involve weird metaphors, references to sensing things you can't sense, and tricolons.

I'm really surprised to see everyone praising the article. It's... it's slop, isn't it?

> And then there are the memories [...] that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.

> Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most, put it this way:

> "Rincewind tried to force the memory out of his mind, but it was rather enjoying itself there, terrorizing the other occupants and kicking over the furniture."

He "put it this way", in the exact same words you just used? Also, he knew more about furniture than most? What? Why?

> "Mathieu and I had read every Pratchett the school library would admit to owning, plus several it would not."

This has the cadence of a witty sentence unless you're paying attention and realize it makes no sense.

> “In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”

> Nine words. A complete cosmology. Most physics departments would settle for that.

It's eight words, and the thing about physics departments makes no sense.

> The Author, refusing to let the Narrator off the hook.

Again, cute sentence, unless you're paying attention and you realize it doesn't mean anything.

I just sort of subconsciously glossed over these, thinking they were very clever jokes I was too dense to get. Upon re- reading — yeah, it’s quite bizarre. It’s nailed the cadence, but completely butchered the content.

The bit that sounds the most AI out of all of this is “A complete cosmology. Most physics departments would settle for that.” It sounds absolutely like something Claude would output. “Most physics departments”? Why would any physics department be so taken by these eight (or nine) words that they’d choose to stop doing physics? If some were, though, why not all of them? Are there contrarian physics departments that wouldn’t want to adopt the very trendy eight-to-nine word Grand Unified Theory of Everything that’s all the rage nowadays? Argh.

The funny thing is, Pratchett would have a field day with this. I can imagine it now, one of his golems starts writing these bizarre things and becomes a literary sensation in Ankh-Morpork, and there's like one actual writer, William de Worde or someone, who's just like, but it doesn't mean anything! But nobody is listening to him.

... then they find out that the golem is actually just outsourcing all the "work" to a small army of pissed off, underpaid, chain-smoking imps. The punchline being that GolemAI is "actually imps."

And then the golem suddenly starts writing about goblins all the time?

Interestingly each of those sentences also tripped me up but I let it go as it read good enough.

This comment is pushing me to think critically about those weird sentences rather than just accepting it. Thanks for this comment.

This is like that short story with the various llm troubleshooting jobs in some solarpunky future. I loved it but the fact it was AI gives me a form of sadness. This is likely the same now.

> This has the cadence of a witty sentence unless you're paying attention and realize it makes no sense.

...was Aaron Sorkin really just AI all along?

Have you seen his computer setup?

It's hotlinked from the AI company's website, so it'll be gone in 6 months.

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