Timothy Wilcox

"Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum Of things forever speaking, That nothing of itself will come But we must still be seeking? "Then ask not wherefore, here, alone, Conversing as I may, I sit upon this old gray stone, And dream my time away." – William Wordsworth

New York Mag was a bit scummy here. The Commonwealth contest story wasn't chosen by Granta editors. And the story did not, in fact, appear in Granta magazine, a *print magazine* literary ppl respect for good reason. Some writers empaneled by Commonwealth Foundation chose it. It appeared on the Granta website labeled as such. NY Mag knew no one would care about a bunch of obscure lazy writers fooled by an AI. So they implied w a photo that it appeared in Granta, though the story makes clear it did not. If Granta eds *had* chosen it to run in their mag, that would be a much more remarkable event. But they didn't.

@truhtnac The problem with some of the writing, which hasn't really changed since 5 years ago, isn't just poor use of metaphor but specifically that the formulation is so alien to natural human sensation in so many of the cases.

what if it wasn't AI? what if it was just really terrible writing?

on the granta story. it’s clearly written by gpt. you can see all the motifs it loves and overuses like rain, weather, teeth, spine, memory. extreme overuse of figurative language and contrastive negation. it has the level of over-baking of probably GPT-5-thinking or 5.2-thinking the story is … something ? I don’t think it has no value. the model develops an indo-Caribbean world register, man tries to murder his wife and chickens out. there’s some reasonable religious imagery where he combining three mythologies there with the names and whatnot all of that is obviously overshadowed by the GPT prose style, and it’s hard for your eyes to not glaze over. there are various metaphors in there that boggle the mind. stuff like “the girl smiled like sunrise over a sink”. what’s interesting is I went through the story and asked Claude Opus - a different model than the author model - and it seemed to find each and every one of the metaphors I hated brilliant. it finds a just so explanation for each of them when you press it which makes you think, do these models have a shared internal vocabulary or compress various ideas in ways we don’t? the failures are quite interesting in that they reveal some different, and maybe bad, understanding of the human sensorium than a human has. why is pretraining knowledge compressed this way across all models? idk

@ann_manov I love to read stories with a human core.

Time to wrap it up I guess

@BobMann2001 @jwilcox79 None of the food looks like food. I'd never go up and order pork strings topped with, seemingly, couscous.

@jwilcox79 What is the issue with this?

There’s a BBQ place at a street food festival I go to every year whose new banner is made with AI. I know that most ads, flyers, and banners will be done this way soon, but yea this is bleak that this will soon be everywhere. Slopulism.

Not sure why people are hating on this. Live text in photos only goes back a few years. A thin device tucked in your book and not constantly pulling out your phone still has a clear use if you read physical books. Price is similar to other pen scanners. Just needs to be faster.

To settle a troublesome discourse, I have provided here the most faithful and poetic possible translation of the beginning of the Odyssey. We male sex. We complex. We fake horse. We off course. We sail long. We hear song. We pig crew. We home soon.

@PatrickMKehoe1 @giantgio @L0m3z Tenet is kino.

@giantgio ONCE auteur cinema was intimate LOVING agreement-principles between mind & lens, detailing particulars of an often unseen, totally felt world as revel, study & authentication; NOW it's just an ideological hammer-time & we are all useful-nails, lining-up? @L0m3z @PreCursorPoets

For the record: I find all Nolan films I’ve seen to be pretentious and highly subversive.

- Ezra Pound

it happened to my buddy leopold bloom.

I feel dumb but I never thought to read “We Real Cool" as playing with Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven"

Holy moly, Sir Walter Raleigh!

@cafeviolenza The communication medium so important, apartments install full-size garbage bins next to where it is delivered.

no idea if this is true but in my hierarchy of the filthiest things in the universe “the mail” is like barely one rung below literal feces

@TheeRespecter @loveallwives Funnily enough, the collection for this variant is still called The Bean Eaters.

@loveallwives THE CHUD GAMERS SEVEN IN THE PRIVATE DISCORD.

We loooksmax. We Ask chat. We Doomscroll. We Post hole. We Dox opps. We MAGA cock. We Peptide goon. We Die soon.

feat. @moldbugchaser (whose username never fails to make me laugh), @drivenbyboredom, and @PreCursorPoets, in addition to my own writing the PDF is $3 and the print copy is $13 (shipping included) get it here! sonyasupposedly.gumroad.com/l/falsehope

@olivertraldi @ChrisExpTheNews Wrong. Brooks is high-tier.

@ChrisExpTheNews Would be an above average verse in like a Blondie song

I like how people can't just be like "No it's fun ur just being a hater" it has to be some pretentious bullshit about how he must be some savage troglodyte and ALCHALLY if you are an enlightened genius like me you can understand it. This is also why English class sucked ass

Three-fourths of the books on this chart were published after Mark McGurl's Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon in which he discusses the "great unread" masses of books read by little to no one.

@molochofficial She has problematic use of AI as evident in her punctuation.