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Writing done entirely by AIs is currently pretty awful, but I'm sure that it will get better over time. There was a prof on Twitter (can't find the tweet now) who assigned his class to generate and then critique an essay written by ChatGPT and it caused all of them to stop using it.

The problem is that moderation doesn't scale. Newspapers, TV, radio, film all evolved to have or to conform to some kind of standards and practices department, which played well with advertiser needs. The issue with contemporary media companies is that it's not practical to do that at Internet scale -- see all of the routine stories about moderation teams at Facebook, for instance.

There are also large, structural similarities across the plays and poems that suggest a single authorship; that 'not very good' poetry has interests and stylistic tics in common with the later, more universally revered work. It's also relatively recently (1800s on) that the plays gained that the reputation that they did. The argument that William Shakespeare couldn't have written the plays is one that is extremely recent, historically-speaking, and it relies on snobbish negatives ('A son of a glove maker who had an excellent education grounded in the classics and spent his life in the theater couldn't have written the plays') rather than any affirmative evidence against. We also have text of contemporaries that are generally trustworthy sources describing his work (and offering criticisms). It's not the exciting answer, but it probably was William Shakespeare that wrote the works in question.

Hey this is a former coworker of yours from GU back in the day. Nice post! Hope you're doing well and congrats on the IIe. I grew up coding on one of these as well. :)

Amateur Shakespearean here. I've often wondered why these statistical approaches don't look for stylistic signatures. For instance, several plays are linked by their use of doubles (in Hamlet, this scales from "too, too solid flesh," up to the running joke on the interchangeability of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). Shakespeare also seems to be especially fond of puns on "bear" and "born" -- the "to be or not to be" monologue has three or four of these. There are also ways in which scenes repeat their designs -- 1.2 of Hamlet is similar in some ways to 3.2 of Julius Caesar, etc.

I've been thinking about this and Shakespeare's King Lear may be an example of this as well.

I don't think that I can correct the original post at this point, but I meant "episodes" not "books."

That's interesting, where can I read more about this?

Yes, this is the order of the journey, not the book order.

You might have? Odysseus chooses Scylla, but then is punished by Zeus after his crew slaughters the Oxen of the Sun; his ship is destroyed and he is sent on its timbers back to Charybdis.

I wonder if there's a good term for when people confuse what an element in a popular work is most famous for for the actual details of that work. Call it the "Play it again, Sam" fallacy.

Also in Milton's Paradise Lost, I believe.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey#Textual_history

Oh, yeah, we don't even have a canonical version of _Hamlet_, let alone for oral poems from the 8th century BC.

Yep, all of the "wine-dark sea"s and "rosy-fingered dawn"s might have worked as filler while the poet was queueing up the next part of the narrative.

I think that the oration of these poems might be akin to jazz playing, where a musician knows the broad, basic structure of a work and fills it in with improvisation.

This is how the books of the Odyssey are structured:

TROY

----

1. Kikones (innocent city is ambushed)

2. Lotus Eaters (temptation, delay)

3. Cyclops (monster)

4. Aeolus (greedy crew delays journey)

5. Laestrygonians (monster)

6. Circe (temptation)

7. HADES

8. Sirens (temptation)

9. Scylla (monster)

10. Cattle/Sun (greedy crew delays journey)

11. Charybdis (monster)

12. Calypso (temptation, delay)

13. Phaecia (innocent city is ambushed)

----

ITHACA

The episodes make a perfect reflection across the Hades episode; Circe and Sirens are both forms of temptation, Scylla and Laestrygonians are both monsters, etc. Also notice the smaller reflections inside of this large one: Scylla and Charybdis are similar monsters in the same way that the Cyclops is similar to the Laestrygonians.

It's perhaps easier to remember a number like 12140904121 than it is to remember a series of random digits.

The "choose one" meme, but with "stay informed" and "stay sane."

_In the Swarm_ by Byung-Chul Han does a good job explaining why this happened.

In retrospect, it's perhaps more of a miracle that we got a decade or two of relatively low toxicity from the Internet.

Most of Infinite Jest is highly indebted to Wittgenstein's Mistress. Markson's is the better novel.