Post #2867135

2026-02-21 10:21 UTC

@dartigen@aus.social @RadtkeJCJ@mastodon.scot @zoy@merveilles.town Doesn't sound freak-like to me at all. If a book doesn't challenge me and teach me new words, new ways of looking at the world, and various expressions, what's it for? This is one reason I have a hard time with many, many books published in the past few years. It's just so much literary pablum. I'm partial to this N+1 editorial, which asks us to learn to distinguish between LLM output and human writing: "Notice the poverty of the latter’s [LLM output's] style, the artless syntax and plywood prose, and the shoddiness of its substance: the threadbare platitudes, pat theses, mechanical arguments. And just as important, read to recognize the charm, surprise, and strangeness of the real thing." https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the-intellectual-situation/large-language-muddle/ Charm, surprise, and strangeness -- give me that a million times over. Charm, surprise, and strangeness. Please.

Replies (1)

@dartigen@aus.social 2026-02-21 11:25

@Furthering@convo.casa @RadtkeJCJ@mastodon.scot @zoy@merveilles.town Also the format flattening - I don't have a ton of examples of books where the typography is an important part of the story itself or equally as meaningful as the content off the top of my head, but the one that always comes to mind is House of Leaves. (I think some of the Lemony Snickett novels did some interesting things with typography as well. I haven't had a chance to read a lot of others that do much with the typography that I can recall as standing out to me. Though some of the adventure novels I read as a kid that included a lot of puzzles definitely used some special typography to make those work. And ofc Discworld using font changes to convey some particular character voices. From what I've seen a lot of LLMs tend to flatten formatting when fed text. Or they don't like it and won't parse the text at all. And I'm sure that comes across as 'don't do that' to less confident writers using LLMs, just as much as the flattening of the content of the text is discouraging.

Open ##2867136