The Grand Line

I'm somewhat amazed this got upvoted to the frontpage... I guess the title got upvoted because it's really terrible writing, either LLM generated or someome trying their hardest to sound "deep".

There are so many technical and stylistic issues with this, I would say it's either someone learning to write and trying too hard, or again, using an LLM.

1) Why is the whole thing written in the second person perspective? Is it disguised autobiography? It seems to be a cheap way of trying to claim intimacy with the reader, "here look, this was your experience". It ends up sounding like someone narrating your life at you while actually (secretly) talking about themselves.

2) While mostly written in the second person, there are several jarring switches back into first person. Unsure if this is a mistake or was intentional, either way, it just sounds bad.

3) The tenses are bouncing all over the place in this writing. We have present tense: "You take the train", past tense: "You took it", future tense for a kind of prophetic vibe: "A decade from now, you will not know", and finally a sort of timeless present proverbial tense: "The text is the same. The reader is not. This is what the contemplative traditions mean when they talk about the spiral — the return to the same point, but at a different elevation."

The effect of all the tense switching and weirdness just makes it hard for the reader to feel grounded in any of the scenes.

4) Rhetorical negation. The writer loves this pattern of describing things by what they are not. Examples: "It was not silly. It was not even reverent. It was just a thing." "Not with a call. Not with a vision. Not with a voice in the night." "Not a metaphor for one. Not like a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage."

It can be a nice effect if you use it once... not repeatedly in a short piece, it makes you think the writer is constantly arguing with an imagined critic. "It's not this, it's this!"

5) Performative plainness, e.g. "You walked. You ate. You slept." "You stood for a minute. You looked at the statue." There's a lot of these kinds of fragments, and they feel strange because they're written in an active voice by describing a "character" who never makes any choices, i.e. entirely passive. It's like the author is trying to ape Hemingway's style in these moments but missing the characters and the story which go along with this spartan active voice.

Taken altogether, it feels like the author is trying to sound profound but with enormous effort and trying to use every trick in the writer's toolbox, which ends up sounding confusing, and creating distance between the author and the reader, and the "gap" is obvious, the engineering is visible. It's like the writer is saying "You were not trying to be moved." and the reader feeling that the author has tried desperately hard writing 3000 words to try and move you.

Interesting, I just did this on some stuff I have personally handwritten, but the writing is about LLMs, and it says 25% AI generated, but because I used terms that are "x% likely AI" generated.

This is not a very useful test; it basically means a person has to "ban" terms like "user experience" and "tireless" etc. because these are "Nx more likely to appear in generated content".

I think we are discussing the wrong problem here. I have no solution to offer, but I think the problem is not so much generated content, but the surroundings in which it can thrive and become the content you see everywhere.

If we hadn't removed the gatekeepers everywhere (and I know there are problems with them, too), then all that technology would not be able to do much harm.

It might also have to do with incentives. The incentives in our economy are not to help and advance society, the invisible hand nonwithstanding.

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> That is one hell of a confession for someone who's trying to write fiction.

Indeed. A significant part of gaining skills in creative writing is learning to 'read as a writer'. How to examine classic texts to understand how to develop scenes, characters, narrative styles, etc.