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Comment by sieve | Hacker News Reader

Did you read the original by Saki (Exhibit 12)?

Ideally, you should read all 14 exhibits. Each has been produced by a different LLM, some local, others frontier models of the time.

E4 = Claude

E6 = ChatGPT

E8 = Mistral

E11 = DeepSeek V3

E12 = Original

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Sorry, I'm not doing all that work for you, I read the first one and was sick of parsing it for meaning by the end.

The work you posted was distinctly unimpressive, particularly as it had a seed text to impersonate and improve. The 'window' is I assume a french door, which I suspect is a mistranslation. If you want to seed LLMs I'd start with texts that are not translated!

Honestly compare it to the human writing examples I showed you and consider the differences in intent and style, which are vast.

I see why you're interested in this, I myself am interested in what these models can do and have tried similar experiments, but you should always be aware when you're asking others to waste their time on word generator output.

> The 'window' is I assume a french door, which I suspect is a mistranslation.

It is a french door/window. The original story is by Saki (HH Munro), one of the greatest short story writers of all time. He was English. The story is literally called "The Open Window."

> Sorry, I'm not doing all that work for you

Well, you asked. And I gave you stuff that I generated for comparative analysis. I am quite satisfied with the output. Most human writing, including genre writing, is subpar. LLMs are far superior to that. If you want to read only Faulkner and Eliot, then stick to them I guess?

> human writing examples

You must provide a solid prompt. And you must use a strong model. Deciding LLMs suck at writing based on output from Gemini 2 Flash, and expecting writing like Graham Greene is a bit much. The day LLMs start writing like him based on one-line prompts, writers will have no option but to look for other jobs.

In the past window could mean a glass door? I wasn’t aware of that, please forgive my ignorance. A minor point anyway and most problems were stylistic. I think it is clearer in the original work that it is more a door than a window in the contemporary sense, which is interesting.

I would not be satisfied with this output, I mean if your goal is mildly satisfying potboiler fiction I guess it could be ok?

I have read almost every kind of fiction under the sun. My standard for what is great is pretty high. This is why I am perfectly willing to accept LLM output as lot as the writer has put in sufficient work into the same. Because this kind of writing can produce middling to good enough fiction, like most genre fiction. Which I enjoy for the plot, characters and environment.

If a great writer used LLMs, then the output would be outstanding. Of that I have no doubt.

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