Living in a totally conceptual space all day has major downsides on your ability to enjoy your meat suit. Meat suit firmware can only apply updates when you are offline. A lot of us are walking around with severe security vulnerabilities and runtime bugs.
On the contrary -- AI would either replace you completely OR (more likely) allow you to produce more per unit time. There was never any thought or suggestion to reducing the total amount of time you would work.
Oh for sure, anyone with half a brain could tell how things were going to go. Mine was a somewhat tongue in cheek comment referring to a common refrain all the AI boosters used to say before reality set in.
What year is this set in? 2027? 2028? A lot of it feels like present day.
About the future: I don't believe it's really necessary to mix traffic and pedestrians on the same road. Certainly not 3000 pound vehicles and pedestrians. I think at some point we will start new cities with completely different assumptions from what we have now.
Scored 100% on a Pangram of the first few paragraphs.
Things that alerted me. (Note that any one of these things could be fine and explainable, but so many in short order makes it obvious).
> And it rang. We both did our jobs.
What is the human's job here? Waking up?
> the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece.
Labored metaphor that doesn't add anything. Laid out a minute? On a table? Even if we accept the non physical metaphor for style, how does that add anything on top of "minute by minute".
> I made two pieces of toast. The left one burned. The left one in my toaster always burns; my toaster has a favorite side.
This sort of short staccato phrasing is an LLM smell. It's hard to describe why precisely and how it varies from natural human text, but LLMs like to do this when writing fiction, especially when told to "write with a good style, don't write like an LLM."
The text read to me like it was, first and foremost, a translation from Russian. It wasn't the names that gave it away to me. It was the text itself. Even in English, it had unmistakable Russianness all over it. I switched the blog language to Russian. Didn't feel like an LLM. Felt rather like written by someone who had read a lot of Viktor Pelevin or maybe Leonid Kaganov.
It could indeed, but it wouldn't work well with "No one won't be making cheese for me for now". Yeah, it's a bad translation overall. The original wordplay is not too good.
Maybe it could be a bit better like:
Gosha: It's not like anybody would take care of making cheese for me.
Just speaking english as a second language will cause your writing to trigger Pangram detectors, for whatever reason. Its a dumb platform meant to scam universities who think it works.
Yes. Waking up, or waiting for the alarm to ring. Also, "what is the human's job" is sort of the theme of the piece, so it's a very relevant question to ask and, in my opinion, doesn't demonstrate AI involvement if the story made you ask it.
> the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece.
> Labored metaphor that doesn't add anything. Laid out a minute? On a table? Even if we accept the non physical metaphor for style, how does that add anything on top of "minute by minute".
You left out the first part, "And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute [...]". Remembering a stretch of time (the morning) "minute by minute" makes a lot of sense, it's not even a metaphor. The metaphor actually is laying it out "on a table" and labelling "every piece", which explains the situation: he can remember the morning extremely well, as if it was a physical object someone helpfully labeled for easy of remembering and identification.
> This sort of short staccato phrasing is an LLM smell
But also a very well-known style of human writing. Comedians like Dave Barry use it all the time. Also, of course, Hemingway.
Now, I'm not arguing this isn't written by AI (or translated with AI, or whatever); it could very well be! I just find your evidence of AI prose extremely unconvincing.
But it's bad writing, as GP points out. The second paragraph is particularly confusing—its central metaphor is clumsy (in my experience LLMs struggle with metaphors).
That said, maybe it's an artifact of being machine-translated from the original Russian.
Let me make the author's case as they aren't here to defend themselves. This is the paragraph,
> I still don't know why I remember it in such detail. I used to forget what I'd had for dinner the night before. And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece. Apparently I have a lot of free time now.
They set expectations with, "I still don't know why I remember it in such detail"
Then they set up the comparator to the past, "I used to forget what I'd had for dinner the night before" which is actually doing double work, because it also means that they were so busy that they used to forget what they had dinner.
This creates the character assumption that the person was / is a workaholic.
> And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute
Heavily hinting that the person has been made redundant, because they've gone from forgetting what they had for dinner (as they'd munch along) to remembering their morning by the minute instead of being stressed by work.
> as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece
Need for mechanical precision. This person is most likely autistic / nerdy.
> Apparently I have a lot of free time now.
And now the final blow. It's because they're now effectively unemployed. Why? AI. They have a job on paper, but it's uncertain / doesn't truly exist.
It's incredibly concise and well written story telling. I haven't seen LLMs do punchy writing like this since GPT-4o days.
> This is terrible writing, and if you can't tell, there is something deeply wrong.
This is subjective. Countless times in the history of human literature a piece of writing has been called garbage by some authority, only to later become lauded as a great piece of writing. So not being able to tell (i.e. in this case, to match your own taste) is simply par for the course.
Remember all that's been written about Shakespeare's Hamlet and his use of mixed metaphors, "[...] or to take arms against a sea of troubles [...]". What? How do you take arms against the sea? And why was it before "slings and arrows", what does that have to do with the sea? Mixed metaphors are a sin, etc, etc.
Well I think the verdict on Shakespeare is in, and it's positive. I assume you've read some, if you have you'd know that the positives outweigh any minor negatives. We still use some of his phrases today.
Of course Shakespeare made mistakes or made allusions that contemporary audiences struggle to understand, and he's not the be all and end all of writing in English. Saying judgement is subjective does not mean judgement is useless or impossible. He's pretty good though and you can tell when you read him, it's gripping, human and tight, the antithesis of LLM writing.
Back to this particular text. From the start, it smells of AI:
> That morning I woke up at 6:58, two minutes before the alarm. I lay there and waited for it to ring. And it rang. We both did our jobs.
Short choppy sentences more suited to advertising than prose, ambiguity without purpose, pointless personification, melodrama and tension over the most mundane details. One para perhaps could be a bizarrre stylistic choice, but it continues like this for the whole passage.
It's possible this was written by a human so steeped in the language generated by LLMs they don't know what is human and real any more, but it seems much more likely it's a translation which was translated by LLM and 'improved' by taking its style suggestions, or simply generated/written by the LLM based on a much shorter prompt.
However the most important thing is not who wrote it, but the quality of the writing, and I think the verdict of most people disagrees with you.
I think you missed the point of what I was saying about Shakespeare.
> However the most important thing is not who wrote it, but the quality of the writing, and I think the verdict of most people disagrees with you.
"Most people"? Please, show me where "most people" are saying this. Where's the verdict, are you keeping a tally? "Most people" don't agree on anything, either here in HN or elsewhere.
Are you the arbiter of what "most people" consider a good writing style?
I think it's fair to say you didn't like it. I don't like a lot of literature.
I don't see the points that state people disagreed with me, I see 188 upvotes to this story and many comments saying they liked it.
If you meant downvotes to my own comment, they mean nothing. Before, I had +4. Now I don't. I also got downvoted for explaining to someone this is a piece of fiction (hopefully you'll agree with me there is something wrong with anyone who can't understand this), yet I ate some downvotes anyway.
The comment that you wrote that if someone cannot see this is bad writing there's something "deeply wrong" is simply absurd.
The original appears to be written in Russian (there's a toggle in the heading).
In Russian, it sounds quite good, I coudn't detect any smell at all.
Sure, good writing style these days always raises suspicion. :-)
> "Forty percent chance of precipitation." I never understood what forty percent of rain meant.
You don't understand the world's most understandable statement?
> On Monday my manager wrote in the team chat: "On Friday we'll discuss roles." No emoji. For three days I wondered what my role was.
Three whole days with no contact with your manager at all? Zero opportunity to ask anything amongst all the other activities and communication?
> And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute
You have a perfect-as-if-traumatic memory of specifically the day that your manager sent a cryptic message in chat that you didn't follow up on for three days?
> With a shirt, at least, everything is defined: here's the collar, here are the sleeves, here's the crease that shouldn't be there.
Oh, you're going to love when you discover other objects. Just you wait.
I often wonder about the chance of precipitation, what exactly does it mean? Not looking for an explanation here, I'm just saying I found this bit very relatable.
As I was reading it occurred to me, too, that I'm reading something written by an LLM. I was not sure and I'm still not sure, and nothing says that your "tells" are exclusive to LLMs.
The point though is that regardless of whether this was written by an LLM or not, the reason that I thought it might be, is that I found the writing really poor. Not to say that all poor writing is LLMs but I guess that doesn't rally matter. Bad writing is bad writing.
Before checking the comments I read a couple of paragraphs, but ultimately just closed the tab without finishing it. This was not because I specifically suspected an LLM, but because it just wasn't "working" for me, for reasons I couldn't articulate.
Is this because it's slop? Or because it's a (possibly bad) translation? I can't really say, but regardless this piece was not resonating.
> Will it rain over forty percent of the city? Will it rain for forty percent of the day? Or does the speaker just not know and is too shy to say so?
Unrelated, but to answer his question, it's the probability that a random spot in the covered area will get at least a smidge of rain at some point in the covered time period. A 10% chance of rain can mean either that the forecaster is 100% sure that exactly 10% of the area will get rain, or it can mean that the forecaster sees a large rainstorm nearby which would cover the whole area if it arrived, but which only has a 10% chance of arriving. Or anything in between. If there's a rain cloud meandering over the city, covering 1% of the city at a time, and over the whole day it randomly walks over 10% of the city, that's also a 10% chance.
I had wondered about this. What you're saying makes sense, but, living in Portland, I had come up with my own explanation. When I see 10% here, I usually take it to mean something like "it will rain for six minutes every hour", or for 10% of the day.
That's interesting. If you're usually rained on when there's a 10% chance of rain, that suggests that either you live in a particularly rain section of Portland, or that you move around to a large percentage of the Portland area each day, or that somebody's using a different definition for "chance of rain" than I do. I wonder which one is going on.
It's pretty clear he gets hit by a car. The delivery robot is unrelated, and he's aware of it. He gets hit by the car because he's distracted looking at his phone.
The story is "about" more things though, for example alienation due to AI replacing people at work.
I'm an extremely amateur coder, but a prolific fiction writer. I wasn't expecting this much “Is it real or is it m-AI-beline?” in the comments. (There's a tell for you, no AI would make that joke.) (For now.) What’s interesting is my thought process is probably one you can apply to someone who is a good coder looking at a post to some code.
My thought process:
Hmm, what's this post, a bit cryptic on info, not many comments but not none. Scroll.
[Come back in about an hour.]
Double the comments, probably not pure slop-or-shill. (Or even worse, slop-and-shill.) Click.
Works without javascript… Has the look of an old usenet post, slightly reformated. Ah, fiction/narrative tells… Perhaps one of those “tales from IT” things on reddit, those were decent in the Before Times.
Hmm, has some interesting one-liners. Like someone who writes enough to know you want to give a morsel of style, a clever aside here or there. The flourish an ice skater does with their hands after a triple axle. Probably why it's gaining in comments.
Hmm, seems like the person might be on the spectrum slightly. Not sure if I would think that if it weren't for the tech references. Or the fact that some of it resonates with my most analytical observations of life and human behavior.
[Now I'm not sure if I thought this, but I think I did on some level:]
So that could be a person who's “analytical” or it could be an AI. But it’s actually something I might think, so I’m going to assume human. Else, I’m going to have some uncomfortable thoughts. I don’t want to think that, and it’s pretty enjoyable.
[Back to thoughts.]
Ah, that’s the second Slavic and/or Europeanish name I’ve seen. Okay, likely a second language person. Probably not learned English as a second language late in life. Probably earlier. Maybe dual language even. The dual/second language explains the slight, unnatural feelings I'm getting.
Oh, now here's a metaphor/stylism that just doesn't work. They write: “For now” could mean “so far” or “goodbye.” As in “goodbye for now”. That does not work. I think they are going for something I’ve noticed though, expressions can be fluid to accommodate however the receiver wants. For decades I’ve liked, and told people I like, the expression “Alright” as a response to “How are you doing?” Because it is entirely up to the speaker how they want to interpret it.
[Not thought at the time:]
Ascending in pitch: Doing well. Descending in pitch: Getting by, but could be better. If pitch is needed to be truthful, then woe to the tonedeaf. And if the receiver wants a different pitch bad enough, they will assume I am simply a poor vocalist, which I’d rather, than have them deal with uncomfortable truth. 99% of the time when I’m asked this, it is by the cashier / retail worker for whom, like this writer, all I may remember from my last encounter is their name tag. Though, actually, not really. If I remember their name, I likely also remember if they are pleasant/chatty. And I likely remember that more than names. For Europeans, this can be different, as they say my locale is more pleasant/chatty with strangers, so that might be why this writer only remembers names.
[Back to thoughts.]
But this doesn't work. “Goodbye for now” is not the same as “goodbye goodbye.” If anything, it’s the same thing as “goodbye so far.” Meaning only one meaning for “for now.” “For now” does not work on its own as a salutation. “Well, thanks for checking me out, cashier.” “You’re welcome.” “Have a good day.” “For now.” That would be a very interesting response from the cashier, but it would not mean “goodbye.”
So, what's happening? Why this assumed double meaning that I am not getting? Hmm, perhaps this is a story originally written in another language and was translated to English. They had an idiom that wo...
I liked it, felt the translation "ate" something."For now" is more organic in the original language.
The dialog with the cheese-maker would convey the mood better (consider that so far = so long in the original):
- Why cheese?
- So far no one is doing this for me.
- So far?
- So long.
While defending my reception of this writing is the last place I would have expected to start, the comments here were so dissatisfying that I feel both defensive and dissapointed.
I had excitedly clicked to see what 72 people thought about the perspective of the story. I was excited to read others ideas of time and how mechanical boundaries were contrasted to physical or human boundaries of life.
Instead I read singularly negative takes mostly accusations of the story being LLM produced or not.
Ok, but what a bummer.
I appreciate this story’s focus on time’s relationship to culture.
I found the language reminiscent of other translations. That quality of translation drew my attention to turns-of-phrase that don’t mean the same thing in English, while wielding meaning anyway - perhaps by being fulcrums in the story that they are contextualized around. I appreciate how it makes language feel new.
The question of time made me think of the film Unrest, and it feels pertinent that we can accept each others idiosyncratic time, (people who run late or early), but experience mechanical time that is unforgiving and ruthlessly precise, regardless of the outcome- or anti-vital consequence (flower disappearing/ forgetting) potential, one to which we increasingly we design the world as beholden to.
It seems many of us, in this political and cultural moment, are facing (watching, seeing, witnessing) the untimely demises of vital things we know and love, and consider core to living - our careers, our hopes, our jobs, our climate, our people - the cause of this loss is almost always attributable to that compelling mechanical potential being wielded carelessly, it mechanic zeal what we are also so coerced to pay attention. This experience of negotiating our attention and technical relentlessness -is the relationship that increasingly determine the flavor of our time in the material worlds.
And yet, even in the HN comments, the debate about the artificiality or potential use of LLM dominates - only highlighting the very wound being written about.
Even if the story was written by a human, the fact that we feel we have to ask about the use of LLMs already illustrates a distance that has been placed, a widening gap between ourselves and creative expression.
We question everything, lest we be fooled - or be seen being fooled.
I find the felt necessity of the inquiry itself the most devastating aspect of generative LLMs. We deserve to experience creative expression and then deconstruct it - but the use of LLMs has increasingly constrained us to deconstruct all creative expression - towards ensuring we can allow ourselves to experience it.
We have been robbed of culture twice, once by the training of LLMs, and now again in our attempt to shield ourselves from their presence.
It’s all so exhausting, and I’m angry we can’t just enjoy critiquing interesting and unforgivably clichéd writing, without first modeling an LLMs version in our heads to compare it to before assigning it value.
AI has some value as a tool, but the outright robbery of creative culture by current tech giants is an unforgivable and cruel theft that is plowing down huge swaths of what gives vital meaning to our lives - for so many of us.
62 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 37.6 ms ] threadYes!
Curious how they determine that, if anyone knows or if the paid version has more details, write please.
Thank you for sharing.
Anyone else here interested in road course tracking (HPDE) or racing? If so, where do you go?
I'm in the US Midwest and have been to Putnam Park, NCM, mid-Ohio, Pitt Race (private now...sad), and Ozark's.
About the future: I don't believe it's really necessary to mix traffic and pedestrians on the same road. Certainly not 3000 pound vehicles and pedestrians. I think at some point we will start new cities with completely different assumptions from what we have now.
Things that alerted me. (Note that any one of these things could be fine and explainable, but so many in short order makes it obvious).
> And it rang. We both did our jobs.
What is the human's job here? Waking up?
> the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece.
Labored metaphor that doesn't add anything. Laid out a minute? On a table? Even if we accept the non physical metaphor for style, how does that add anything on top of "minute by minute".
> I made two pieces of toast. The left one burned. The left one in my toaster always burns; my toaster has a favorite side.
This sort of short staccato phrasing is an LLM smell. It's hard to describe why precisely and how it varies from natural human text, but LLMs like to do this when writing fiction, especially when told to "write with a good style, don't write like an LLM."
Maybe it could be a bit better like:
Gosha: It's not like anybody would take care of making cheese for me.
MC (confused by the word choice): "Take care"?
Gosha: Take care. (hangs up on MC)
Yes. Waking up, or waiting for the alarm to ring. Also, "what is the human's job" is sort of the theme of the piece, so it's a very relevant question to ask and, in my opinion, doesn't demonstrate AI involvement if the story made you ask it.
> the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece.
> Labored metaphor that doesn't add anything. Laid out a minute? On a table? Even if we accept the non physical metaphor for style, how does that add anything on top of "minute by minute".
You left out the first part, "And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute [...]". Remembering a stretch of time (the morning) "minute by minute" makes a lot of sense, it's not even a metaphor. The metaphor actually is laying it out "on a table" and labelling "every piece", which explains the situation: he can remember the morning extremely well, as if it was a physical object someone helpfully labeled for easy of remembering and identification.
> This sort of short staccato phrasing is an LLM smell
But also a very well-known style of human writing. Comedians like Dave Barry use it all the time. Also, of course, Hemingway.
Now, I'm not arguing this isn't written by AI (or translated with AI, or whatever); it could very well be! I just find your evidence of AI prose extremely unconvincing.
I suggest polite rebellion. Write well. Get better than the machines.
That said, maybe it's an artifact of being machine-translated from the original Russian.
Then they set up the comparator to the past, "I used to forget what I'd had for dinner the night before" which is actually doing double work, because it also means that they were so busy that they used to forget what they had dinner.
This creates the character assumption that the person was / is a workaholic.
Heavily hinting that the person has been made redundant, because they've gone from forgetting what they had for dinner (as they'd munch along) to remembering their morning by the minute instead of being stressed by work. Need for mechanical precision. This person is most likely autistic / nerdy. And now the final blow. It's because they're now effectively unemployed. Why? AI. They have a job on paper, but it's uncertain / doesn't truly exist.It's incredibly concise and well written story telling. I haven't seen LLMs do punchy writing like this since GPT-4o days.
This is subjective. Countless times in the history of human literature a piece of writing has been called garbage by some authority, only to later become lauded as a great piece of writing. So not being able to tell (i.e. in this case, to match your own taste) is simply par for the course.
Remember all that's been written about Shakespeare's Hamlet and his use of mixed metaphors, "[...] or to take arms against a sea of troubles [...]". What? How do you take arms against the sea? And why was it before "slings and arrows", what does that have to do with the sea? Mixed metaphors are a sin, etc, etc.
Of course Shakespeare made mistakes or made allusions that contemporary audiences struggle to understand, and he's not the be all and end all of writing in English. Saying judgement is subjective does not mean judgement is useless or impossible. He's pretty good though and you can tell when you read him, it's gripping, human and tight, the antithesis of LLM writing.
Back to this particular text. From the start, it smells of AI:
> That morning I woke up at 6:58, two minutes before the alarm. I lay there and waited for it to ring. And it rang. We both did our jobs.
Short choppy sentences more suited to advertising than prose, ambiguity without purpose, pointless personification, melodrama and tension over the most mundane details. One para perhaps could be a bizarrre stylistic choice, but it continues like this for the whole passage.
It's possible this was written by a human so steeped in the language generated by LLMs they don't know what is human and real any more, but it seems much more likely it's a translation which was translated by LLM and 'improved' by taking its style suggestions, or simply generated/written by the LLM based on a much shorter prompt.
However the most important thing is not who wrote it, but the quality of the writing, and I think the verdict of most people disagrees with you.
> However the most important thing is not who wrote it, but the quality of the writing, and I think the verdict of most people disagrees with you.
"Most people"? Please, show me where "most people" are saying this. Where's the verdict, are you keeping a tally? "Most people" don't agree on anything, either here in HN or elsewhere.
Are you the arbiter of what "most people" consider a good writing style?
I don't see the points that state people disagreed with me, I see 188 upvotes to this story and many comments saying they liked it.
If you meant downvotes to my own comment, they mean nothing. Before, I had +4. Now I don't. I also got downvoted for explaining to someone this is a piece of fiction (hopefully you'll agree with me there is something wrong with anyone who can't understand this), yet I ate some downvotes anyway.
The comment that you wrote that if someone cannot see this is bad writing there's something "deeply wrong" is simply absurd.
Literally none of these statements are true.
> "Forty percent chance of precipitation." I never understood what forty percent of rain meant.
You don't understand the world's most understandable statement?
> On Monday my manager wrote in the team chat: "On Friday we'll discuss roles." No emoji. For three days I wondered what my role was.
Three whole days with no contact with your manager at all? Zero opportunity to ask anything amongst all the other activities and communication?
> And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute
You have a perfect-as-if-traumatic memory of specifically the day that your manager sent a cryptic message in chat that you didn't follow up on for three days?
> With a shirt, at least, everything is defined: here's the collar, here are the sleeves, here's the crease that shouldn't be there.
Oh, you're going to love when you discover other objects. Just you wait.
It's always been considered bad writing, and strongly reminds me of a elementary student trying to hit their word quota for an essay.
The point though is that regardless of whether this was written by an LLM or not, the reason that I thought it might be, is that I found the writing really poor. Not to say that all poor writing is LLMs but I guess that doesn't rally matter. Bad writing is bad writing.
Is this because it's slop? Or because it's a (possibly bad) translation? I can't really say, but regardless this piece was not resonating.
Unrelated, but to answer his question, it's the probability that a random spot in the covered area will get at least a smidge of rain at some point in the covered time period. A 10% chance of rain can mean either that the forecaster is 100% sure that exactly 10% of the area will get rain, or it can mean that the forecaster sees a large rainstorm nearby which would cover the whole area if it arrived, but which only has a 10% chance of arriving. Or anything in between. If there's a rain cloud meandering over the city, covering 1% of the city at a time, and over the whole day it randomly walks over 10% of the city, that's also a 10% chance.
The story is "about" more things though, for example alienation due to AI replacing people at work.
My thought process:
Hmm, what's this post, a bit cryptic on info, not many comments but not none. Scroll.
[Come back in about an hour.]
Double the comments, probably not pure slop-or-shill. (Or even worse, slop-and-shill.) Click.
Works without javascript… Has the look of an old usenet post, slightly reformated. Ah, fiction/narrative tells… Perhaps one of those “tales from IT” things on reddit, those were decent in the Before Times.
Hmm, has some interesting one-liners. Like someone who writes enough to know you want to give a morsel of style, a clever aside here or there. The flourish an ice skater does with their hands after a triple axle. Probably why it's gaining in comments.
Hmm, seems like the person might be on the spectrum slightly. Not sure if I would think that if it weren't for the tech references. Or the fact that some of it resonates with my most analytical observations of life and human behavior.
[Now I'm not sure if I thought this, but I think I did on some level:]
So that could be a person who's “analytical” or it could be an AI. But it’s actually something I might think, so I’m going to assume human. Else, I’m going to have some uncomfortable thoughts. I don’t want to think that, and it’s pretty enjoyable.
[Back to thoughts.]
Ah, that’s the second Slavic and/or Europeanish name I’ve seen. Okay, likely a second language person. Probably not learned English as a second language late in life. Probably earlier. Maybe dual language even. The dual/second language explains the slight, unnatural feelings I'm getting.
Oh, now here's a metaphor/stylism that just doesn't work. They write: “For now” could mean “so far” or “goodbye.” As in “goodbye for now”. That does not work. I think they are going for something I’ve noticed though, expressions can be fluid to accommodate however the receiver wants. For decades I’ve liked, and told people I like, the expression “Alright” as a response to “How are you doing?” Because it is entirely up to the speaker how they want to interpret it.
[Not thought at the time:] Ascending in pitch: Doing well. Descending in pitch: Getting by, but could be better. If pitch is needed to be truthful, then woe to the tonedeaf. And if the receiver wants a different pitch bad enough, they will assume I am simply a poor vocalist, which I’d rather, than have them deal with uncomfortable truth. 99% of the time when I’m asked this, it is by the cashier / retail worker for whom, like this writer, all I may remember from my last encounter is their name tag. Though, actually, not really. If I remember their name, I likely also remember if they are pleasant/chatty. And I likely remember that more than names. For Europeans, this can be different, as they say my locale is more pleasant/chatty with strangers, so that might be why this writer only remembers names.
[Back to thoughts.]
But this doesn't work. “Goodbye for now” is not the same as “goodbye goodbye.” If anything, it’s the same thing as “goodbye so far.” Meaning only one meaning for “for now.” “For now” does not work on its own as a salutation. “Well, thanks for checking me out, cashier.” “You’re welcome.” “Have a good day.” “For now.” That would be a very interesting response from the cashier, but it would not mean “goodbye.”
So, what's happening? Why this assumed double meaning that I am not getting? Hmm, perhaps this is a story originally written in another language and was translated to English. They had an idiom that wo...
The dialog with the cheese-maker would convey the mood better (consider that so far = so long in the original): - Why cheese? - So far no one is doing this for me. - So far? - So long.
I had excitedly clicked to see what 72 people thought about the perspective of the story. I was excited to read others ideas of time and how mechanical boundaries were contrasted to physical or human boundaries of life.
Instead I read singularly negative takes mostly accusations of the story being LLM produced or not.
Ok, but what a bummer.
I appreciate this story’s focus on time’s relationship to culture. I found the language reminiscent of other translations. That quality of translation drew my attention to turns-of-phrase that don’t mean the same thing in English, while wielding meaning anyway - perhaps by being fulcrums in the story that they are contextualized around. I appreciate how it makes language feel new.
The question of time made me think of the film Unrest, and it feels pertinent that we can accept each others idiosyncratic time, (people who run late or early), but experience mechanical time that is unforgiving and ruthlessly precise, regardless of the outcome- or anti-vital consequence (flower disappearing/ forgetting) potential, one to which we increasingly we design the world as beholden to.
It seems many of us, in this political and cultural moment, are facing (watching, seeing, witnessing) the untimely demises of vital things we know and love, and consider core to living - our careers, our hopes, our jobs, our climate, our people - the cause of this loss is almost always attributable to that compelling mechanical potential being wielded carelessly, it mechanic zeal what we are also so coerced to pay attention. This experience of negotiating our attention and technical relentlessness -is the relationship that increasingly determine the flavor of our time in the material worlds.
And yet, even in the HN comments, the debate about the artificiality or potential use of LLM dominates - only highlighting the very wound being written about.
Even if the story was written by a human, the fact that we feel we have to ask about the use of LLMs already illustrates a distance that has been placed, a widening gap between ourselves and creative expression.
We question everything, lest we be fooled - or be seen being fooled.
I find the felt necessity of the inquiry itself the most devastating aspect of generative LLMs. We deserve to experience creative expression and then deconstruct it - but the use of LLMs has increasingly constrained us to deconstruct all creative expression - towards ensuring we can allow ourselves to experience it.
We have been robbed of culture twice, once by the training of LLMs, and now again in our attempt to shield ourselves from their presence.
It’s all so exhausting, and I’m angry we can’t just enjoy critiquing interesting and unforgivably clichéd writing, without first modeling an LLMs version in our heads to compare it to before assigning it value.
AI has some value as a tool, but the outright robbery of creative culture by current tech giants is an unforgivable and cruel theft that is plowing down huge swaths of what gives vital meaning to our lives - for so many of us.