1. Pick an author nerds like.
2. Tell Claude "Write an article about Terry Pratchett, in his style."
3. Don't even fix the faux-witty phrases that, upon closer inspection, make zero sense, like "Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most", or "Most physics departments would settle for that." or "The Author, refusing to let the Narrator off the hook".
4. Bask in the praise for your wonderful writing.
s/frequently/initially
Also, how is a cowardly underachiever "the perfect protagonist for a teenage boy"?
"technically a wizard but only on a technicality" is obviously redundant
And what part of any of this is supposed to be familiar?
It's just a strange essay.
It seems to have resonated a lot with male millennials at least. Many of my friends growing up loved Terry Pratchett. I loved those guys but calling them "cowardly underachievers" is probably fairly accurate, if a little mean.
All of the ones I kept in touch with have settled for a lot less than they probably could have done if they had been a bit braver. Few of them were even willing to move even an hour drive away from our hometown for better opportunities
Assuming it was an intentional, it could be a reference to one particularly violent piece of furniture. (I forget what kind exactly, it's been a while.)
Two: Terry Pratchett "Hold my beer."
Clearly as an appreciator of hats, and arguably furniture, Sir Terry was echoing Monty Python.
I feel like the only way to make an AI slop universe worse is to accuse people of using AI when they're not. So I worry we might be doing that is all...
That said, it's mildly compelling. I just fear that our future is gonna be full of this and the idea of the false positive is so brutal that I'd rather give the benefit of the doubt.
The book has to be small enough to disappear when a teacher looks up. Pocket editions, as their name suggests, were engineered for this. Pratchett’s were small, fat, slightly battered, and printed on a kind of paper that already looked guilty.
Not only does the paper "look guilty", but it's doing so "already"? As if guilty paper is normal, but not on THIS time scale.
It's nonsensical; even bad writers don't end up with stuff like this.
I mean seriously? We're so cooked if this is the "red flag".
More importantly, both of those sentences make complete sense in context, and neither is phrased in a way that AI would. They are phrased in the way that Terry Pratchet would have. Have you never read him?
This new trend of pointing out that everything you dont understand is AI has become a flashing warning sign about our declining literacy rates.
Literacy is in serious trouble, and worse it has effected the way humans THINK. We are all poorer for it.
Read more books people!
Right. That's one of the suspicious things here. They're phrased in the way that an LLM might write if you told it to imitate Pratchett.
Edit: that's effectively what happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247127#48248070
> I wanted the sentences to feel a bit more Terry Pratchetty and thought a lot of Claude's suggestions were really better than what I had made.
There is a theory, popular among certain very old and very tired philosophers, that all memories take up a kind of furniture in the head. The good ones are armchairs. The painful ones are filing cabinets, usually full. And then there are the memories that are neither: the ones that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.
The City Watch came later, the way reading the Watch books always comes a little later than reading the Rincewind ones, on the same shelf but a little further up.
Furniture is established as an image for memories just a few lines earlier. And the quote directly afterwards is framed precisely in this image.
But the claim was that it "makes zero sense".
What a terrible, terrible timeline we live in now. Seriously. I genuinely hate it.
What I dislike is "AI SLOP" seems to be the default response to anything remotely creative anymore.
It's a good point, and one I hadn't considered.