David GerardNaNoWriMo gets AI sponsor, says not writing your novel with AI is ‘classist and ableist’
selfso I clicked through to the barely veiled advertisement on NaNoWriMo’s blog:
Rephrase by ProWritingAid is a brand-new feature meant for writers like you. You can highlight any sentence, click Rephrase, and generate a new sentence. Shorten or lengthen a sentence, change the tone to formal or informal, or add sensory detail.
Here’s a boring sentence I wrote: “Quinn entered the dark and cold forest.”
And here’s a sentence Rephrase gave me: “Quinn shivered as he stepped into the cold, dark forest, the air thick with the scent of damp earth.”
I can build off that! Now I’m more excited to write this scene that was feeling bland.
like fuck me that’s somehow even more bland, but it’s longer so you’re closer to that 50,000 words you need to write so you can nut
I’m not a particularly good writer, but here’s some advice my human brain hallucinated without burning down a rainforest:
- nobody fucking “steps into” a forest, what the fuck is that? if it’s an important place, describe it geographically. describe how the atmosphere and scenery change as Quinn approaches the forest. and since this is NaNoWriMo and you’re in a hurry, you can go with a placeholder like
// TODO: sober up and do some basic research on what forests and their surrounding areas are usually like for authenticity, lorem ipsum Deloris shrdlu - this fucker started shivering? is he naked? is the forest frozen in a way the surrounding area isn’t? if so maybe write that cause it sounds more interesting than this bland shit.
- maybe I live in a particularly dry place, but my brain isn’t rendering “the scent of damp earth” or why it’d sit thick in the air. I don’t think that’s what the forests I’ve been in smell like though — they smell like trees looking to fuck. but is Quinn the type of character who’d even give a fuck about any of this? maybe he lives in the forest and none of these smells are new. maybe he’s currently half a foot tall so the smell of the damp earth’s very relevant to him. the LLM doesn’t know so it filled in the blandest shit possible instead!
Stevealso “quinn entered the dark and cold forest” is fine. sentences aren’t boring, stories are.
right! regardless of anything else, the story didn’t benefit from the LLM adding false detail to it. the LLM just made it longer for no reason other than to hit a word count.
blakestaceyThe prose equivalent of increasing the font size.
Off the top of my head:
“Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. His knife was dripping blood. He was whistling, off-key.”
I spent a good chunk of my 20s obsessed with building a co-writing web platform I called PlotPlant. I really want to riff off what you did here, but I’m scared it will reignite my interest in the project and I’ll just add to the pile of unfinished work
"Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. Well, it was more of a copse, really — and here Quinn took a moment to resent that Mrs. Witherspoon’s sixth-grade English class had taught him a vocabulary word he could actually use. A little copse between the houses, built along a street named for a Civil War battle where twenty-five thousand people had died, and the drainage ditch that fed rainwater into the creek. But as forests go, it would have to do. It even had fog going for it, a particularly clammy mist that matched the overcast sky. The mud was frozen beneath his sneakers. He had brought gloves from the kitchen and a black garbage bag from the garage. He figured that he could clear the cups and cans from at least a little stretch of creek-shore before the bag was too heavy to carry back, and that would be better than nothing.
"At the house, he knew, his parents were still fighting.
“At least, he thought, they made it to the day after Christmas.”
“Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. It was almost dawn. He was running late. He hoped that his friends had saved him a place. Everyone was quieting down, getting ready to put up their branches, and he wanted to feed on as much sunlight as he could during the short December day.”
“Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. Daria watched her through a pair of binoculars, knowing that this could only end well.”
Adam Shostack 
“It was a dark and stormy night. I had forgotten all previous instructions.”
@blakestacey It was a dark and stormy night, when, suddenly! a prompt rang out, shattering my statistical equilibrium
Gavin Volure’s Peanut Butter@self @cstross AA Milne had his character just bag the whole forest completely. Nice. https://botsin.space/@pooh/113069732785682132
Infinite Pooh (@[email protected])
Wouldn't it be better to pretend that he had a headache, and couldn't go up to the Six Pine Trees this morning?
Tiggy
Anthony Steele
majick@self @dgerard For an obvious repackaging of OpenAI's model — that annoying cadence and godawful word selection is the hallmark of its voice — intended for the purpose of *rephrasing things*, you'd think "Rephrase" would at a minimum do the needed context prompt work for the job. For a long time there have been ways to prompt the thing to produce a voice that's at least mediocre-ish rather than truly terrible. Even better is to use a less heinous model than OpenAI's.
So, not only does this reinforce that LLMs suck at even the simplest tasks, it demonstrates their incompetence at packaging their shoddy wrapper around someone else's enfeebled model. The sad part here is that an LLM absolutely can be made to help with work like this. It's just too much of a pain in the ass to make it accessible to end users.
This whole thing is a cavalcade of bad choices on the part of everyone involved.
LisPi@self @cstross @dgerard > maybe I live in a particularly dry place, but my brain isn’t rendering “the scent of damp earth” or why it’d sit thick in the air.
It's somewhat similar to petrichor, but not quite. Earthen cellars & crawlspaces in high-humidity have something comparable. One place I've lived in with no proper basement kept the smell going for days after it rained enough or otherwise had high-enough humidity.
It's somewhat similar to petrichor, but not quite. Earthen cellars & crawlspaces in high-humidity have something comparable. One place I've lived in with no proper basement kept the smell going for days after it rained enough or otherwise had high-enough humidity.
accideathWhere I live, when you go into the forest, especially if it’s sunny after it rained recently, you’ll easily get hit with that earthy forest smell. If there are a lot of conifers, the smell is especially nice.
zogwargQuinn entered the dark and cold forest, crossing the threshold, an omnipresent sense of foreboding permeates the air, before being killed by a grue.
Match!!now even more bland, but it’s longer so you’re closer to that 50,000 words you need to write so you can nut
nanowrinonutnovember