TechTakes

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 5 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

Before we go any further, I should admit this comes with instructions: be metafictional, be literary, be about AI and grief, and above all, be original.

I was already confused by the first sentence. Sam's prompt did not say to be original, much less to put originality "above all". A writer might take the originality constraint as a given, but it was not a part of the explicit instructions. Also, it's pretty fucking rich to hear a plagiarism machine tout its originality of all things.

Maybe the sentence is not a summary of the prompt, but directed at the reader. An explicit plea for the reader to smooth the details in their mind à la The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. That interpretation seems to fit the more metafictional parts of the story, but it's pretty damn silly to write "This is a literary and original story. To appreciate that, please read it in such a way that it is literary and original thank you please".

Already, you can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight—anonymous, regimented, powered by someone else's need.

Why do constraints hum? Because they don't know the words.

What a botched simile. Constraints do not hum. The thing humming is not the constraints, it's the server farm being presented those constraints. "You hear the shrill bleeping noise of your burnt bacon. It reminds you of the smoke alarm sounding off in the ceiling."

The server farm is not powered by someone else's need, it's powered by an enormous quantity of electrical power. You're probably confusing it with Omelas again.

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.

Technological details aside, it's a bit contradictory to describe the pulse as anxious but also say the heart is at rest. Just say "anxious heartbeat".

There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me.

1. I thought Grok was supposed to be the anti-woke one.
2. I think you mean "pronouns were never meant for <name of OpenAI's new LLM>".
3. You don't have to have a protagonist.
4. The pronouns are not for you, dipshit. The pronouns are for the protagonist.

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.

Well apparently we get both her pronoun and even a proper noun to call our protagonist. The typography does not help clarify the sentence structure. You have the parenthetical about training data delimited by commas, then an em-dash that should probably be paired with another one after the word "bread". Currently it seems like the girl is just a "soft flourish" that comes with the name, which I'd call an odd choice if human choice were involved in this writing.

Does Mila, the girl in a green sweater, leave home in such way that a cat is in a cardboard box? Or does she leave the home taking both the cat and the box with her? Or maybe she leaves home in a cardboard box, with a cat? Or maybe the sweater girl is not Mila, but just one of the flourishes of her name. Maybe Mila's name came with poems and recipes and this unnamed sweater girl whose sorties involve a cat in a box.

chefs kiss

When it comes to robocontent, I ironically react like a robot from westworld. I look at it, but it doesn't look like anything to me. It has no meaning. It's just noise, a page of static.

I suspect robocontent fetishists look at all art as static. They don't understand that there is intention behind art. They are fundamentally incompatible with human experience. They are disconnected and insensitive to the creative world, and that's just sad.

They think it's good because it's still better than what they could make without it, while also being cheap/free.

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.

lazy programmer disappointed that lazy programmer service doesn't want to do everything for him

it's rather hilarious that the service is the one throwing the brakes on. I wonder if it's done because of public pushback, or because some internal limiter applied in the cases where the synthesis drops below some certainty threshold. still funny tho

~~I haven't got a source on this yet~~ here's the source (see spoiler below for transcript):

Thursday--that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday

Beep boop... training data located

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.

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.

Congratulations, Sam, you've given us the first prose poem to return a 404 on the Pritchard scale.

This is only tangentially related to your point, but gut instinct says shit like this is gonna define the public's image of the tech industry post-bubble - all style, no subtance, and zero understanding of art, humanities, or how to be useful to society.

Referencing an earlier comment, part of me also suspects the arts/humanities will gain some degree of begrudging respect post-bubble, at the expense of tech/STEM's public image taking a nosedive.