If we had this tag it might also stop the comments from turning into another Great AI Debate every... single... time...
It's lovely to see some Pratchett on HN, a nice chance to talk about our favourite Discworld books, but then the top comment is just some boring AI hater.
Not this exactly, but IMO they're saying that since the text is presumably AI-generated, it kind of can't be beautiful? Or shouldn't feel beautiful? Or it's beautiful, but... it's AI-generated and thus "bad", not the right kind of beautiful. Or "it's beautiful, but that's because it's AI-generated", which is again not good for some reason.
How to get your AI company's blog to No. 1 on Hacker News:
1. Pick an author nerds like.
2. Tell Claude "Write an article about Terry Pratchett, in his style."
3. Don't even fix the faux-witty phrases that, upon closer inspection, make zero sense, like "Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most", or "Most physics departments would settle for that." or "The Author, refusing to let the Narrator off the hook".
> He was the perfect protagonist for a teenage boy: a coward, an underachiever, technically a wizard but only on a technicality, and frequently the most powerful spell in the universe was lodged in his head against his will. This will be familiar to anyone who has been sixteen.
s/frequently/initially
Also, how is a cowardly underachiever "the perfect protagonist for a teenage boy"?
"technically a wizard but only on a technicality" is obviously redundant
And what part of any of this is supposed to be familiar?
> Also, how is a cowardly underachiever "the perfect protagonist for a teenage boy"?
It seems to have resonated a lot with male millennials at least. Many of my friends growing up loved Terry Pratchett. I loved those guys but calling them "cowardly underachievers" is probably fairly accurate, if a little mean.
All of the ones I kept in touch with have settled for a lot less than they probably could have done if they had been a bit braver. Few of them were even willing to move even an hour drive away from our hometown for better opportunities
They loved Terry Pratchett or they loved Rincewind? The amount of ways to do the former without the latter are high, and you seem to be jumping from a point about the latter to one about the former...
They loved his writing at least, I don't really know if they knew much about the man himself beyond that.
I think it's fair to assume that the loved his protagonist. They certainly loved how Pratchett played with tropes and often inverted them unexpectedly.
It's probably safe to assume that they loved Rincewind, since he represents a pretty big inversion of typical protagonist tropes.
How does that sentence support the idea that he knew "more about furniture than most"?
The bit you quote isn't even something he said! In the original post[1] it was assigned to "certain very old and very tired philosophers", but that's now been edited to just being credited as "a theory, not necessarily a really good theory".
The furniture line is clearly tied to the direct quote that follows it ("Rincewind tried to force the memory out of his mind, but it was rather enjoying itself there, terrorizing the other occupants and kicking over the furniture.") as well as the introduction sentence that preceeds it. As a sentence it works since it's part of a metaphor that is even tied to a line of Pratchett's own.
However, I don't think the rest of the post supports the Pratchett-as-expert-on-memories bit of that little aside, so it could be critiqued for not being followed up on or further supported. It's not a "make an argument for Pratchett as an expert on memory" post, it's a "tell a story of his writing connecting with me" post, in which case, meh.
But apparently the post was edited again, and "The Author, refusing to let the Narrator off the hook" is gone (along with some other things), which is a bummer as it seems like one of the most Pratchett-like of the attempts. In context I don't think it works, but generally it fits well with Pratchett's writing style and his relationship with his protagonists.
I spent ages trying to work out what "who knew more about furniture than most" meant, thinking it would be expanded upon or referenced later. It hadn't occurred to me that it's just slop.
> I spent ages trying to work out what "who knew more about furniture than most" meant, thinking it would be expanded upon or referenced later.
Assuming it was an intentional, it could be a reference to one particularly violent piece of furniture. (I forget what kind exactly, it's been a while.)
Given it comes immediately after the bit about philosophers comparing memories to furniture, I simply assumed that was meant to be read as “Pratchett, who knew more about the goings on inside people’s heads than most”.
I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're trying to say by this either.
Monty Python was deliberately absurdist humour and nonsensical. Prachett however was much more grounded and observational, with a satirical rather than fully absurdist bent, although of course sometimes he would find the absurd in the everyday.
Coming in and kicking over the furniture, to paraphrase, is a wonderful image of an idea causing chaos in the mind, it isn't Monthy Pythonesque random absurdism.
is this just slander or are you basing this on something?
I feel like the only way to make an AI slop universe worse is to accuse people of using AI when they're not. So I worry we might be doing that is all...
maybe but its not like people don't also do these things (erroneous sentences, weird fluff). I mean editors exist specifically to slap that shit out of writers.
That said, it's mildly compelling. I just fear that our future is gonna be full of this and the idea of the false positive is so brutal that I'd rather give the benefit of the doubt.
Perhaps we end up demanding no doubt. Human only community meet ups to discuss and share ideas, music and art. No recording allowed.
The Internet becomes primarily a passive stream of information vetted by government and Mega Corps, just like the TVs of old. Except for the nifty buy with one click button of course
There have been mail spam, link farming, non-AI slop content sites, and other forms of scamming looking to take advantage of people on the Internet for something like a quarter century by now. Even HN's /new submissions queue is filled with such rubbish. There is zero reason to give any benefit of the doubt on the Internet for anything and there hasn't been for years, absolutely zero.
> There is zero reason to give any benefit of the doubt on the Internet for anything and there hasn't been for years, absolutely zero.
I feel like that's just an argument for cruelty. The issue is that generative content makes it hard to tell and people confidently call borderline issues now, more than they used to.
The book has to be small enough to disappear when a teacher looks up. Pocket editions, as their name suggests, were engineered for this. Pratchett’s were small, fat, slightly battered, and printed on a kind of paper that already looked guilty.
Pratchett's Pocket editions were slightly battered? Pre-sale, even?
Not only does the paper "look guilty", but it's doing so "already"? As if guilty paper is normal, but not on THIS time scale.
It's nonsensical; even bad writers don't end up with stuff like this.
Presumably the ones from the library, which the author mentions was his source? Every Pratchett book I read as a kid matched this description, including being battered.
Tell me more about this already-guilty-looking paper, and how this kid was "sliding" an entire paperback book into a math textbook with "a centimetre to spare".
You wouldn't be able to open it and keep it open flat against the textbook though, not without the teacher noticing. It simply doesn't work, now that the author has acknowledged they used AI to spruce up their blog post, we can agree this part (hiding pocketbooks in open textbooks) was 100% slop.
I dont know what kind of pockets you have, but most Pratchetts book did not fit into mine. And yes there were whole series of books that fit. But, pratchetts ones did not.
I found this odd too. And the notion you could hide a Pratchett pocket book inside an open textbook. Anyone who has read Pratchett, or knows pocketbooks, knows this wouldn't work. They are voluminous (regardless of their name) and won't stay open on their own.
In fact, it seems a uniquely AI mistake to make to believe pocketbooks go in pockets. Anyone knows they don't fit, unless you have really big pockets and don't mind the weight and bulge.
they battered if you put it in your pocket. The idea of paper looking guilty chimes with the idea that you're reading it in the back of the classroom when you're not supposed to be.
I mean seriously? We're so cooked if this is the "red flag".
In france, there was an edition of the discworld series literally called "pocket", and yes it sometimes fit in pockets (which had to be on the bigger end of pockets though), especially if you bended the book a little. Looked like this: https://www.babelio.com/livres/Pratchett-Les-annales-du-Disq...
we can talk about the others if you like, but we were discussing this one and I am a little disappointed about us just moving elsewhere. Are you yielding, or do you still think guilty paper is somehow sus?
> You are holding the English language to an incredibly low standard.
I'm holding humans to a low standard. That's why editors exist.
What does it matter? The AI slop universe is only going to grow worse no matter what we do. Accusing stuff you don’t like as being AI is just a thing you do, not an actual serious observation.
This was not AI, or at least was only proofread/edited by AI.
More importantly, both of those sentences make complete sense in context, and neither is phrased in a way that AI would. They are phrased in the way that Terry Pratchet would have. Have you never read him?
This new trend of pointing out that everything you dont understand is AI has become a flashing warning sign about our declining literacy rates.
Literacy is in serious trouble, and worse it has effected the way humans THINK. We are all poorer for it.
Do not bring literacy into this; because the sufficiently careful reading of the post surfaces multiple ridiculous (worse, witless) passages no person would write. How closely did you read it?
There is a theory, popular among certain very old and very tired philosophers, that all memories take up a kind of furniture in the head. The good ones are armchairs. The painful ones are filing cabinets, usually full. And then there are the memories that are neither: the ones that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.
Pratchett would not have mixed the metaphors of memories being furniture and also people who kick over furniture. An LLM would/did absolutely make this mistake, given that Pratchett quote as a prompt.
The City Watch came later, the way reading the Watch books always comes a little later than reading the Rincewind ones, on the same shelf but a little further up.
Ah yes, that familiar old way the Watch books always occupy a shelf that is simultaneously the same and also higher up. And never mind that the Watch books are newer...
Feels weird. There is not that much books between The Colour of Magic and Guards! Guards!. So as engineer I would fully expect them to be on same shelf. Or the later book being on lower one due to the usual western sorting of left to right top to bottom... Unless you go for alphabetical sort I suppose...
The first paragraph, and the one directly above the one about knowing more about furniture:
> There is a theory, popular among certain very old and very tired philosophers, that all memories take up a kind of furniture in the head. The good ones are armchairs. The painful ones are filing cabinets, usually full. And then there are the memories that are neither: the ones that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.
Because the objective truth is that what the LLM or author outputted was CLEARLY only using furniture as a metaphor. The metaphor wasn't good but HNers are taking it completely out of context. There's nothing mean here. Just objective facts.
This is exactly what I was trying to say, but kindly. The metaphor wasn't great, and I dodnt want to he unkind to the author. Enough people were doing that.
I found the fact that people couldn't identify it as a metaphor was much more alarming.
Because they don’t believe it is slop. They believe you are unable to comprehend a not too advanced literary device and based on that accusing that the text is slop.
On the topic of kindness: You might be right and it is AI generated slop. You might be wrong. If you are wrong what you are doing is deeply and utterly unkind. Not calling out the other commenter, but calling the writing slop.
It has happened with me before. I wrote a comment on reddit with my own hands and own mind and commenters accused me of being a bot. There is nothing more rage inducing. How can one respond to that? Have you thought that maybe that is what you just did? Are you 100% sure that it is slop?
The thing is that whether it's AI-assisted or not doesn't really matter. It's still clearly a metaphor.
Maybe I was being mean - I don't know if the person I replied to has English as their first language, and if not, then perhaps I'm railing against the wrong comment. If so, I guess I should apologise.
If English is their first language, though, well I would expect my 13-year-old son to be able to tell me that was a metaphor instantly, and I tend to expect better-than-teenager-level reading comprehension from people in general. It's kind of disconcerting just how many people on HN seemed to be flummoxed by the prose.
My initial reading was that the author intended to imply that philisophizing about memories was a repeated thing in Pratchetts writings. Which - given my limited exposure - seemed plausible to me.
Good article? Definitely not. But I've also read similar try-hard / pseudo literary blog posts pre AI.
That's the exact problem: you wasted mental energy thinking about whether the author was implying that Pratchett was known for philosophizing on the role or memories and their similarity to furniture, when actually it was Claude spitting out a sentence that looked like the kind of thing Pratchett might have written.
Wasting time and mental energy is why this kind of thing upsets me so much.
I think we would all save a lot of time and avoid a lot of stress if it was the standard thing to do to declare at the start of a piece of writing how much of it was written by hand, and how much with or by AI and in what sense (i.e. was it fully vibe-written or just proofread to correct grammar etc).
I mean I really, really wish people did that. I don't want to fulminate since it's against the guidelines but presenting a piece of text that you haven't written entirely yourself and claiming its authorship as entirely your own is the definition of plagiarism. I think that's what bothers me the most. If you use AI and it contributes to the content of your text at all, why not just let us know? It's the fair thing to do. Don't make it look like you wrote something, or wrote it entirely on your own, when you haven't.
I think that would suffice to cool down the debate quite a bit, because then we wouldn't be constantly trying to double-think each other all the time. We'd be free to concentrate on the merits and demerits of a piece of writing for its own worth.
Not saying I, for one, wouldn't still be prejudiced, but if AI writing really gets better than human writing there will come a time that even hard-headed curmudgeons like me will have to admit it. Or just go and fume alone in the corner.
This is certainly not the case now and since almost nobody ever says "this was written with/by AI" we end up in the kind of double-guessing spiral we're in here.
1. The previous paragraph establishes a metaphor between furniture and memories. So you can take that sentence to also be metaphor, not literally about furniture.
2. A sentient animated luggage is a main character in the first two Discworld novels.
I guess it would be something like an “ad inhominem,” but that something was AI generated is a legitimate gripe so I hope we don’t start using that phrase.
The reason why ad hominems are a fallacy is because it fails to engage with the actual argument being made. The same seems likely to happen when arguments are dismissed because of their AI origin. While that dismissal is somewhat reasonable now, at least as a heuristic, I expect it to become increasingly less valid.
Finished reading the article, having really enjoyed it (I grew up with Terry's books), came back to the HN comments and the top comment is someone ranting "dIS iS aye-EyE sLoP"
What a terrible, terrible timeline we live in now. Seriously. I genuinely hate it.
I suppose in the AI era, we need to assume AI. For me, I feel like 'attempted Pratchettisms' might well be the result of a human writing. It's hard to be as good as Pratchett but understandable to write a post like this trying to be.
That is, with ambiguity, I try to assume the best. I expect that is somewhat naïve.
I genuinely read (and still do) the blog as a human voice. I don't think writing about AI is enough to assume that a blog is authored by AI.
If the AI-generated content doesn't push out all the good stuff, the absolute flood of accusing everything written everywhere as being written by AI will.
There are plenty of valid criticisms of the article, but this isn't one of them. I'd be embarrassed to call myself a fan of Pratchett while failing to recognize dramatic anthropomorphization (indeed, Pratchett was where teenaged-me first learned the word)
It's not a matter of not recognizing it. It's just nonsensical, it's completely free of wit or cleverness. Speaking as an enthusiastic fan of the man's actual writing.
I'm really surprised to see everyone praising the article. It's... it's slop, isn't it?
> And then there are the memories [...] that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.
> Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most, put it this way:
> "Rincewind tried to force the memory out of his mind, but it was rather enjoying itself there, terrorizing the other occupants and kicking over the furniture."
He "put it this way", in the exact same words you just used? Also, he knew more about furniture than most? What? Why?
> "Mathieu and I had read every Pratchett the school library would admit to owning, plus several it would not."
This has the cadence of a witty sentence unless you're paying attention and realize it makes no sense.
> “In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”
> Nine words. A complete cosmology. Most physics departments would settle for that.
It's eight words, and the thing about physics departments makes no sense.
> The Author, refusing to let the Narrator off the hook.
Again, cute sentence, unless you're paying attention and you realize it doesn't mean anything.
I just sort of subconsciously glossed over these, thinking they were very clever jokes I was too dense to get. Upon re- reading — yeah, it’s quite bizarre. It’s nailed the cadence, but completely butchered the content.
The bit that sounds the most AI out of all of this is “A complete cosmology. Most physics departments would settle for that.” It sounds absolutely like something Claude would output. “Most physics departments”? Why would any physics department be so taken by these eight (or nine) words that they’d choose to stop doing physics? If some were, though, why not all of them? Are there contrarian physics departments that wouldn’t want to adopt the very trendy eight-to-nine word Grand Unified Theory of Everything that’s all the rage nowadays? Argh.
The funny thing is, Pratchett would have a field day with this. I can imagine it now, one of his golems starts writing these bizarre things and becomes a literary sensation in Ankh-Morpork, and there's like one actual writer, William de Worde or someone, who's just like, but it doesn't mean anything! But nobody is listening to him.
... then they find out that the golem is actually just outsourcing all the "work" to a small army of pissed off, underpaid, chain-smoking imps. The punchline being that GolemAI is "actually imps."
Interestingly each of those sentences also tripped me up but I let it go as it read good enough.
This comment is pushing me to think critically about those weird sentences rather than just accepting it. Thanks for this comment.
This is like that short story with the various llm troubleshooting jobs in some solarpunky future. I loved it but the fact it was AI gives me a form of sadness. This is likely the same now.
Fellow former British schoolkid here. One part that really sticks in my memory about "IT" class was when they were preparing us for an exam that asked "which of these are functions of an image editor" and we had to memorize that, I think "fill tool" was, "pen tool" wasn't, "adjust brightness" was, and so on, without reason or reference to reality. There was just a list and you had to know it.
I imagine these people were delighted when a Big Computer Company offered to step in and design a curriculum for them.
What I'd love to see is videos of nontechnical folks using language models to create software.
When I use them myself, I just see them crushing it and think, this thing is now doing my job for basically $0, I am no longer economically relevant. But I've spent a lifetime learning to program, so it's possible I only get good results because of the way I think to prompt it.
I really can't get the outside view so I can't decide whether AI is going to make me homeless or not. I think we need the videos.
If you need comfort just read the story of the week where a “technical” founder gave the LLM full access to their production environment and it wipes everything.
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