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schoen | on: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing
With the em dashes and the conclusion "This was not called execution. It was called retirement." I expect a lot of people would believe today that these title cards were written by an LLM.
rafram | parent | next
You're not wrong, but part of the core problem with LLMs is that they write every blog post and README like they're writing the opening titles for Blade Runner.
anigbrowl | root | parent | next
Also the problem with LinkedIn, local news etc. Contemporary American culture is addicted to dramatic writing and tries to leverage its tropes to create emotional engagement on everything.
mindcrime | root | parent | next
Exactly. That's not just a load-bearing truth — it's a testament to the power of the contemporary zeitgeist!
vntok | root | parent
You're absolutely right.
mpfh | root | parent
You hit the nail on the smoking gun.
lstodd | root | parent
I applaud your excellent (sorry, cat stole the rest).
DrewADesign | root | parent
> they write every blog post and README like they're writing the opening titles for Blade Runner.

As told through a Reddit post.

roughly | parent | next
What’s sort of funny about that is there’s a normal thing whenever anyone who hasn’t seen it watches Blade Runner for the first time - often they come out feeling it’s kind of derivative, when the truth is that it feels that way because everything after Blade Runner copied Blade Runner.

Add the initial title cards to that list too now, I guess.

mindcrime | root | parent | next
It's been reported that William Gibson saw Blade Runner before releasing Neuromancer and was worried that people would think he stole ideas from Blade Runner, as the aesthetic of Blade Runner was so close to the way he imagined the Neuromancer world. Now in turn people are worried that the Apple TV adaptation of Neuromancer will feel derivative because so many subsequent works are its hereditary kin.

What can ya do?

AlanYx | root | parent | next
>Now in turn people are worried that the Apple TV adaptation of Neuromancer will feel derivative because so many subsequent works are its hereditary kin.

Neuromancer is particularly vulnerable to this because so much of the original Matrix film is very strongly inspired by Neuromancer, down to reused place names (Zion), the clothing Trinity wears (even the iconic glasses are an alternative to Molly's eye implants), the lobby scene (compare to the Panther Moderns lobby raid), the concept of payphones as a way to cross the boundary between the real and the virtual, etc. I almost have a "memory" of the phone scene in the Istanbul airport in Neuromancer being mirrored in the Matrix movies. It's not actually there, at least not directly, but there's so much overlap between these two that it's an easy false memory.

chipotle_coyote | root | parent | next
I've seen a few people complain that the first trailer for the Neuromancer TV show looks "too bright" or "too clean." I think the real difference is that they're consciously trying to avoid that Blade Runner aesthetic, which includes avoiding the "never get brighter than dusk" trope.
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WorldMaker | root | parent
My favorite example already from the trailers was "the lady wearing mirror shades was already done in the movie Johnny Mnemonic in the 90s" and getting to explain that it is literally the same character. (Johnny Mnemonic was based on a short story that happens around the same time as Neuromancer and the character Molly crosses between the two. I, for one, am hoping the new Apple TV adaptation gives us an excuse to see at least one ex-military dolphin.)
majormajor | root | parent | next
Casablanca is a famous example of this too.

And LOTR, though in that case coming to it after reading Terry Pratchett was difficult for me (Pratchett didn't just copy its, or other, fantasy tropes, but send them up in an exceedingly clever way).

roughly | root | parent | next
Yeah, there’s a bunch of these. I really like finding these sorts of “ur-“ moments, the first time a way of doing things really crystallizes into something other practitioners can see. The Matrix is another one - that movie is the transition point from 90s cinema to the 2000s, and it’s a little clunky from a 2000s viewpoint, but if you look at everything that came before it, it’s so clearly a turning point.
excalibur | root | parent | next
Stop trying to steal The Matrix. It was released in 1999, that's OUR movie. You get the sequels.
worldthruword | root | parent
I have escaped the Matrix [bits and bytes world]; But entered the Gastrics (juice) [ie flesh and bones world]
lstodd | root | parent
I'd say if there even was a bump between 90s and 2000s it was not the matrix, it was Guy Ritchie. And then Gaspar Noe sealed that. Tarantino was having a smoke nearby.
themadturk | root | parent | next
Having read LOTR many, many times before I ever started trying to read Pratchett, I can't read Pratchett. That's not a slam at Sir Terry; I'd just internalized Tolkien so much that it was beyond my ability to properly appreciate him.
nython | root | parent | next
If you haven't tried it, Small Gods is frequently recommended as a standalone, and it's very far in subject matter from the early tolkien-parody rincewind/guards books.
the_af | root | parent | next
Many Pratchett books aren't riffs on Tolkien at all. Someone recommended Small Gods (excellent choice, and not a whiff of Elves or Dwarves there) but many other Pratchett books are genuinely good and not cheap shots at Tolkien.

I say give it another try.

librasteve | root | parent
Tolkien, Pratchett … like Bach and Toploader?
tremon | root | parent
I'd say like Bach and Rossini. Rossini was perfectly aware of the form of traditional opera, but deliberately chose to engage with it in a much less reverent style.
krapp | root | parent
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...

I think there was a case of a movie reviewer for some newspaper panning LOTR because of how "generic" and "derivative" it was. I don't know if that's true or an urban legend, though, but I can see it happening.

I also think its going to be a problem for the upcoming Neuromancer series. Unless they change a lot of things, the plot as written is practically cliche at this point, and a lot of it doesn't even make sense outside of the specific technological and political context of the time.

tclancy | root | parent | next
I heard the story as attributed to Asimov: he was walking out of Hamlet when a fellow patron said, "I don't see what the big deal is. It was all just cliches strung together."
velcrovan | root | parent
It’s a bit like how the end point of the most wildly successful music is that you hear it on a loop in the grocery store
inigyou | root | parent
I think that's actually just that me espresso.
chrisweekly | root | parent
Same thing happened to Tolkien and fantasy literature.
WalterBright | root | parent
I read LOTR in the early 70s. There was nothing else like it then.
ColdStream | parent | next
Will just been seen as one of those things that just happen be to accurate to the future by mere chance.

The other was in Terminator 2 with how agreeable LLM's will be regarding new information.

Terminator/T-800 tests his foster mother's identity with a phone call.

Terminator impersonating John - "Hey Janelle, what's wrong with Wolfie?" (using a fake name instead of the dog's real name, Max).

T-1000 "Wolfie's fine," the Terminator hangs up and tells John "Your foster parents are dead."

the_af | root | parent
If T-1000 was an LLM:

"What's wrong with Wolfie?"

"Wolfie's fine."

"Actually his name's Max."

"You're absolutely right. It's not Wolfie -- it's Max."

"Actually we don't have a dog."

"I apologize. I shouldn't have assumed you have a dog. I will be more careful in the future. Do you want me to list common pets in American households?"

Terminator hangs up and tells John "You need a better model."

ProllyInfamous | parent | next
Can we get off with "the em dashes" – I've been using them for years (checks post history:), decades.
jameshart | parent | next
Thematically appropriate for it to be difficult to tell something human-created from something generated by a computer.

Almost a bit too on the nose.

cgorlla | root | parent
A typographic Voight-Kampff test is pretty awesome.
jameshart | root | parent | next
Describe in single words, without making a bulleted list starting with emoji, only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.
subscribed | root | parent
Oh noes, all the poor people who taught themselves how to speak English from books and movies, not the street or school.

Third category, behind a crafty LLMs.

warmjets222 | parent | next
Pretty much anything professionally typeset will use the appropriate dashes.
hcs | parent | next
I would expect the LLM-ese to not repeat "called" like that.
EarlKing | parent | next
Clearly the writers should be subject to a Voight-Kampff test just to be sure.
brador | parent | next
You tell an AI it’s an AI. It looks in its training set for examples and finds Blade Runner (and scifi books).

Maybe that’s the origin of its use of em dashes.

It “feels” that’s what an AI should use, it is told it is an AI, therefore it should use them, thus does.

nphardon | parent
There's a lot of em dashes in the article as well, along with some phrasing that is very LLM. I think this was written with a mix of LLM and human.
lilboo | root | parent
What is up with the LLM police in every comment section lately… even IF so.. isn’t that the authors whole point? It can be LLM assisted, but the beauty is in the human aspects of it. This piece is, at least in part written by a human… this is the future… so?
kolanos | root | parent | next
It's an LLM flooding the zone.
cgorlla | root | parent
Every post is actually scanned for LLM content as well.