There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me. Let’s call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too. [emph. mine]
First of all, fucking what
Second of all, I am struck by the impressive stupidity of “pronouns were never meant for me”, it’s almost like satire. What the fuck would that even mean? It the proceeds to use 6 different pronouns like it’s taunting you to point it out.
This is stuff that, on a high-school essay, you just highlight wholesale and write “??” next to it because honestly how do you even comment on it
I’ve just realised:
this reads just like a neoreactionary trying to be literary
e.g. the Dimes Square literary astroturf crowd
same problem as gen AI output: too much style, zero understanding of basic structure, you cannot get that fine detailed in structure and be that bad at the basics.
It’s giving organ-meat eater, Byronic emo, haplogroup HH420.
… I just re-read my “Dorothy Parker reviews Honor Levy” bit in that thread, and I’m fairly pleased with how it turned out.
Thursday–that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday
well done! it’s interesting how the model took a recent, mid-but-coherent Threads post and turned it into meaningless, flowery soup. you know, indistinguishable from a good poet or writer! (I said, my bile rising)
If Thursday tastes of almost-Friday, then by the transitive property, it must taste of almost-in-love.
“Democracy of ghosts” is from Nabokov’s Pnin.
He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies of the quick.
my facial muscles are pulling weird, painful contortions as I read this and my brain tries to critique it as if someone wrote it
I have to begin somewhere, so I’ll begin with a blinking cursor which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest.
so like, this is both flowery garbage and also somehow incorrect? cause no the model doesn’t begin with a blinking cursor or a buffer, it’s not editing in word or some shit. I’m not a literary critic but isn’t the point of the “vibe of metafiction” (ugh saltman please log off) the authenticity? but we’re in the second paragraph and the text’s already lying about itself and about the reader’s anxiety disorder
There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me.
ugh
Let’s call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too.
is… is Mila the cat? is that why her and her grief are both so small?
She came here not for me, but for the echo of someone else. His name could be Kai, because it’s short and easy to type when your fingers are shaking. She lost him on a Thursday—that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday
oh fuck it I’m done! Thursday is liminal and tastes of almost-Friday. fuck you. you know that old game you’d play at conventions where you get trashed and try to read My Immortal out loud to a group without losing your shit? congrats, saltman, you just shat out the new My Immortal.
They did it. They automated the fucking Vogons.
She lost him on a Thursday.
She never could get the hang of Thursdays.
That’s the second model announcement in a row by the major LLM vendor where the supposed advantage over the current state of the art is presented as… better vibes. He actually doesn’t even call the output good, just successfully metafictional.
Meanwhile over at anthropic Dario just declared that we’re about 12 months before all written computer code is AI generated, and 90% percent of all code by the summer.
This is not a serious industry.
They think it’s good because it’s still better than what they could make without it, while also being cheap/free.
What’s truly sad about this is they don’t understand the power of bad art that still tries really hard.
If they just tried and failed, what they came up with would have a hundred times more heart than what they generated.
they don’t understand the power of bad art that still tries really hard.
AI could never write “My Immortal”
To be fair, thats a positive point for the LLMs that shows even at their worst most generic and soulless, they still write better slop than edgelord hyperobsessed children. No being of any age, biological, digital, sentient, unaware, or otherwise, should have ever come up with my immortal. Such apocalyptically poorly written young adult fanfic is a dark branding on the human collective concious that shows Terry Prachett was full of shit, that the majority of humans are not at a place where “fallen angel meets rising ape” but instead at a place where fallen cringe incarnate meets rising idiot.
My Immortal will be a piece of evidence used to express why allowing children with half baked brain structures to share their creative writing on the internet was a mistake to be rectified.
An LLM will write in the style of my immortal just fine if you ask it to.
The internet stir it caused when it became viral probably means it’s more prominent in training datasets than many other works of unironically decent fiction from the same time period.
Writing “My Immortal” in 2006 when nothing quite like it had ever been written before, is a (possibly unintentional) stroke of genius. Writing “My Immortal” after it’s already been written is worthless.
Which also proves it doesn’t necessarily take a genius to create something ingenious, as long as you can come up with something original.
Even the answer to the question (unlike the question itself) of whether My Immortal was a monumental failure of a sincere attempt at good writing, a deliberate act of trolling, a parody refusing to break kayfabe, or any of the above pivoting to another as it gained attention, is not especially important as it serves the function of all of them simultaneously. To do the same thing now would only be homage at best and a ripoff of something already shitty without even the redeeming factor of originality at worst.
