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Honestly, I think that Slate article is just pure lazy snark, zero analysis. Literally just points out things like object-verb inversion and large words and pr
by jszymborski 4y ago
Honestly, I think that Slate article is just pure lazy snark, zero analysis.
Literally just points out things like object-verb inversion and large words and pretends they are intrinsically bad.
Look, if you don't like it, that's fine, but you're going to have to do a lot more work than "Ha! That word isn't in common use!" to convince me that it's bad.
- tptacek 4y agoI'm not so much saying that it's great criticism, so much as that if you took those observations and built prompts around them, you could make a song that sounded much more like Colin Meloy. The formula is something like: * Start with a Smiths song * Make it melancholy. * Rewrite all the references and allusions so that they jarringly alternate between Chaucer era early English lit and Victorian Gothic. * Deliberately invert subject-verb order in places to make things sound more poetic. * Employ archaic synonyms. * Employ multi-line alliteration.
- jszymborski 4y agoPoint taken, it is indeed easy to ape anything with a distinctive style... Seurat paints with points, Hemingway writes in short sentences, Hitchcock shoots train scenes and dutch angles. If LLMs can do anything, it's maybe copy style. But the end result won't be better than the worst parodies you'd find. Sidenote: If there's something that I dislike irrationally, it's bad parody. Good parody has something to say. Bad parody is someone making something because they think they're awfully clever for "cracking the code" of some artist because they can describe overt style and themes. Sorta like the person who thinks the entire appeal of magic is figuring out how an illusion is performed.