I think the writing is bad but it doesn’t strike me as implausible as bad human writing. It’s genuinely quite interesting if it is an LLM. The benches / men line makes no sense to me but I’m not sure why a predictive model would come up with it. There’s a line about someone having a “laugh as bright as zinc” that’s fascinating. Zinc isn’t really what you’d normally go to if you were pulling a ‘bright’ material / object from the ether. Zinc is, however, used to coat the galvanised steel roofs of shacks in Trinidad, so shines brightly in the sun in that specific context (sun on the shack roof comes up previously in the story). The off-seeming reference makes sense in the context of the setting and the story but not at sentence level. If that was AI, pulling from some mysterious corpus of Trinidadian writing, it’s pretty impressive.
It’s funny but the first thing I thought of with the zinc was magnesium which makes a very hot white light when burned—I was like, “does zinc do that too?” The roof makes a lot more sense.
You already covered it well, and its provenance is not your concern as you said, I see a lot of AI writing at my day job (digital marketing) and there is really no question that story is by an LLM (I think I can even tell which one). I have become so good at sniffing it out that I am confident that when this horrible bubble bursts, I will be able to make a living fixing all the bad marketing writing generated by AI and its breathless boosters.
It also makes me 100% certain that I will never ever let genAI within a hundred miles of my own creative work. AI writing is impressive to people who don't themselves write or even intentionally encounter good writing -- it has all the appearances of what most people consider "good" writing. It sounds fancy, like a bad English accent.
I agree it’s made by LLM… but I probably wouldn’t have thought that if it hadn’t been pointed out to me first. I would have just been like, wow this is bad. I think. I’m definitely not as attuned to LLM style as you, or the people who caught this. So I don’t mind that the judges failed to notice the LLM but I do mind they did not notice it’s a terrible story that makes no sense.
I got a clearly AI marketing email from an indie perfumer recently and it was so weird—it’s not like I expect handcrafted artisanal emails but one reason to follow indie perfume is because you’re interested in a particular person’s sensibility… like just on a marketing level, it felt like a really strange misreading of your own consumer base. Actually it made me kind of sad.
i think i can imagine (although not construct on command) a context in which i would defend a bridge to an unexpected destination, but (and this goes to what you say later in the post, particularly in the delany example) it would have to be a situation specifically drawing attention to the perceived impossibility or unreality of something... a character experiencing or remembering later the experience of severe dissociation or other altered state, for example, since "i got on a bridge and wound up somewhere it didn't go" sounds like something that might happen in a dream (or might seem to be happening under the influence of certain substances, although in that case it might be less a metaphor and more a literal rendering of a character's distorted perception of reality), or something else you might describe as "like one of those bad dreams where _____" (some dark revelation on a wedding night, perhaps - the discovery of your husband's three secret families makes you feel like you stepped on the bridge to happy married life and suddenly find yourself instead in hell).
to be clear i 100% agree with you on the concept of Words Meaning Things - if anything my time musing about hypothetical bridges to elsewhere have highlighted for me how little the image makes sense if you're trying to describe in characteristic terms something that routinely happens in the real world, like "doing."
also i think until today i thought a petard was a type of rope, perhaps one used on ships and such? no idea where i got that and definitely backfilled half of an invented memory to convince myself it was in the footnotes of hamlet - my best guess is my brain mixed it in with giving someone enough rope to hang themselves - someone hoist by their own petard, my brain possibly decided, had taken a rope for their own nefarious purposes and then hanged themselves with it. if someone had told me it was not a rope i think i would have run out of ideas before i ever got to bomb. also wikipedia tells me it comes from the french word for fart???
yes I think the main metaphor in this piece that I cannot imagine a defensible use of is the one about the benches. Your form of ”I got on a bridge and wound up somewhere I didn’t go” would be a fun opening to a story but it would be fun precisely bc you would be like… “how is that possible?!” and you’d read wanting to be able to understand that description.
I also feel like there’s a kind of careless writing that is enthusiastically bad in a way that can be kind of endearing—I just finished reading Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Angel and I feel like Angel is that kind of writer. You would never really be like “this is good somehow” but you would maybe say “this person is guided by a real albeit untalented Muse” and I think the passion can sweep the readers along for at least one generation. But that’s not really the case with this story.
I think what really drives me crazy is that I’d get it if it worked the other way—like she’s sooo sexy men just become things that long for her to sit on them. That would be a metaphor I’d understand!!
there'd also be the bonus dirty joke/pun of suggesting that she's so sexy that she makes men turn wooden (since the story takes place in a tropical forest community and presumably the benches there are hewn out of wood)
I think the writing is bad but it doesn’t strike me as implausible as bad human writing. It’s genuinely quite interesting if it is an LLM. The benches / men line makes no sense to me but I’m not sure why a predictive model would come up with it. There’s a line about someone having a “laugh as bright as zinc” that’s fascinating. Zinc isn’t really what you’d normally go to if you were pulling a ‘bright’ material / object from the ether. Zinc is, however, used to coat the galvanised steel roofs of shacks in Trinidad, so shines brightly in the sun in that specific context (sun on the shack roof comes up previously in the story). The off-seeming reference makes sense in the context of the setting and the story but not at sentence level. If that was AI, pulling from some mysterious corpus of Trinidadian writing, it’s pretty impressive.
It’s funny but the first thing I thought of with the zinc was magnesium which makes a very hot white light when burned—I was like, “does zinc do that too?” The roof makes a lot more sense.
You already covered it well, and its provenance is not your concern as you said, I see a lot of AI writing at my day job (digital marketing) and there is really no question that story is by an LLM (I think I can even tell which one). I have become so good at sniffing it out that I am confident that when this horrible bubble bursts, I will be able to make a living fixing all the bad marketing writing generated by AI and its breathless boosters.
It also makes me 100% certain that I will never ever let genAI within a hundred miles of my own creative work. AI writing is impressive to people who don't themselves write or even intentionally encounter good writing -- it has all the appearances of what most people consider "good" writing. It sounds fancy, like a bad English accent.
I agree it’s made by LLM… but I probably wouldn’t have thought that if it hadn’t been pointed out to me first. I would have just been like, wow this is bad. I think. I’m definitely not as attuned to LLM style as you, or the people who caught this. So I don’t mind that the judges failed to notice the LLM but I do mind they did not notice it’s a terrible story that makes no sense.
I got a clearly AI marketing email from an indie perfumer recently and it was so weird—it’s not like I expect handcrafted artisanal emails but one reason to follow indie perfume is because you’re interested in a particular person’s sensibility… like just on a marketing level, it felt like a really strange misreading of your own consumer base. Actually it made me kind of sad.
Thought petard was like a long spear and getting hoist was like when you get beheaded and you’re head is stuck on a pole.
feel like there should be an anthology now of everything people mistakenly thought a petard was
I had the same visual image as you, but thought it referred to the hook, not the jacket.
i think i can imagine (although not construct on command) a context in which i would defend a bridge to an unexpected destination, but (and this goes to what you say later in the post, particularly in the delany example) it would have to be a situation specifically drawing attention to the perceived impossibility or unreality of something... a character experiencing or remembering later the experience of severe dissociation or other altered state, for example, since "i got on a bridge and wound up somewhere it didn't go" sounds like something that might happen in a dream (or might seem to be happening under the influence of certain substances, although in that case it might be less a metaphor and more a literal rendering of a character's distorted perception of reality), or something else you might describe as "like one of those bad dreams where _____" (some dark revelation on a wedding night, perhaps - the discovery of your husband's three secret families makes you feel like you stepped on the bridge to happy married life and suddenly find yourself instead in hell).
to be clear i 100% agree with you on the concept of Words Meaning Things - if anything my time musing about hypothetical bridges to elsewhere have highlighted for me how little the image makes sense if you're trying to describe in characteristic terms something that routinely happens in the real world, like "doing."
also i think until today i thought a petard was a type of rope, perhaps one used on ships and such? no idea where i got that and definitely backfilled half of an invented memory to convince myself it was in the footnotes of hamlet - my best guess is my brain mixed it in with giving someone enough rope to hang themselves - someone hoist by their own petard, my brain possibly decided, had taken a rope for their own nefarious purposes and then hanged themselves with it. if someone had told me it was not a rope i think i would have run out of ideas before i ever got to bomb. also wikipedia tells me it comes from the french word for fart???
yes I think the main metaphor in this piece that I cannot imagine a defensible use of is the one about the benches. Your form of ”I got on a bridge and wound up somewhere I didn’t go” would be a fun opening to a story but it would be fun precisely bc you would be like… “how is that possible?!” and you’d read wanting to be able to understand that description.
I also feel like there’s a kind of careless writing that is enthusiastically bad in a way that can be kind of endearing—I just finished reading Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Angel and I feel like Angel is that kind of writer. You would never really be like “this is good somehow” but you would maybe say “this person is guided by a real albeit untalented Muse” and I think the passion can sweep the readers along for at least one generation. But that’s not really the case with this story.
Definitely thought petard was a sort of leotard
would that mean being hoist by your own petard = getting a wedgie
100% the image I’ve always had of it
Now that I know it’s a bomb, “atomic wedgie” seems like it has some esoteric meaning I was hitherto unaware of
"I have no idea what makes benches into men here."
When she sits on them?
Once the benches have seen how she walks, they get the masculine urge to have her in their laps?
I feel like I’d get it if it were “men into benches”
You could have some Byronesque fun with this (I think I'd've hated Byron personally, but he was a good humorist) –
"And ev'ry bench would sigh as she sat down,
'How blessed that you've made a man of me!'"
(Det. Frank Drebin voice) "She was a surly blonde, with legs that could turn beanbags into men."
I think what really drives me crazy is that I’d get it if it worked the other way—like she’s sooo sexy men just become things that long for her to sit on them. That would be a metaphor I’d understand!!
there'd also be the bonus dirty joke/pun of suggesting that she's so sexy that she makes men turn wooden (since the story takes place in a tropical forest community and presumably the benches there are hewn out of wood)