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Coagulopath's avatar

Good piece.

I haven't taught creative writing classes like you have, but LLMs have fascinated me since GPT2. Text without a writer feels very Borgesian: a thing that shouldn't happen. My mind almost can't accept it—it still half-heartedly insists that these words were written by a little man somewhere.

Aesthetically, I broadly agree. Deepseek R1 is the best model I have ever used for creative writing. It has:

1) a clean, readable style

2) the occasional good idea (I liked "the way she pressed a palm to her ribs, as if holding herself together"—bestsellery but effective)

3) an overwhelmingly reliance on cliche. Everything is a shadow, an echo, a whisper, a void, a heartbeat, a pulse, a river, a flower—you see it spinning its Rolodex of 20-30 generic images and selecting one at random.

4) it's careless with words. They seem meaningless: chosen mainly because they're pretty. Yes, it's hard to shovel dirt over an echo. But also, an echo occurs AFTER the event that causes it, not six months before. And how do they know the shadow is watching? Does it have eyes? None of it makes sense. The model trips over its own dick at least six times in two 'grafs.

5) an eyeball-flatteningly fast pace—it moves WAY too fast. Every line of dialog advances the plot. Every description is functional. Nothing is allowed to exist, or to breathe. It's just rush-rush-rush to the finish, like the LLM has a bus to catch. Ironically, this makes the stories incredibly boring. Nothing on the page has any weight or heft. (A quote attributed to Gustav Mahler: "If you think you are boring your audience, go slower, not faster." R1 should listen.)

6) no variety of tone or texture. The way the story begins is the way it ends. Every character sounds the same—either they have the overwritten "funny" tone of a Marvel sidekick, implausibly wisecracking and quipping like professional comedians, or they're blank ciphers saying stuff to advance the plot.

7) repetitive writing. Once you've seen about ten R1 samples you can recognize its style on sight. The way it italicises the last word of a sentence. Its endless "not thing x, but thing y" parallelisms (I'm surprised there are none in your samples, normally it churns out 1-3 per paragraph). The way how, if you don't like a story, it's almost pointless reprompting it: you just get the same stuff again, smeared around your plate a bit.

...and R1 is THE BEST THERE IS! At least I can finish its stories. GPT3.5/GPT4's output is hellish torture to read: it makes me wish I could unevolve eyes and obtain gills or a cloaca or some other less painful organ. And nearly every LLM is trained on synthetic ChatGPT data, so get ready to have a mischievous twinkle in your eye and feel sense of foreboding shiver down your spine as you venture through the Whispering Woods with Elara and friends. Over and over.

I have a suspicion that OpenAI's new model is simply a re-implementation of R1's post-training formula. Deepseek published their methodology: it wouldn't be that hard to rip off (and even scale up, using OA's resources.) Interestingly, when I put sama's prompt into R1, it output nearly the same story—an LLM writing about an LLM writing...

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Benoit's avatar

I personally did like it. And found this Wells' Murderbot Diaries & recent OpenAI short story combo review (https://lauraefron.substack.com/p/late-night-thoughts-on-alternate). Interesting to think of the two together

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