Mixed metaphors which sound nice at first glance, but slip away from meaning like an echo chasing itself off a cliff.
Similes that catch in your mind like river trouts tangled in the roots of a redwood tree.
Metaphors are generally used to transfer the qualia of one experience into another. When the referent has no qualia, that is, you've never in your life experienced "river trouts tangled in the roots of a redwood tree", it's a failure of a metaphor. You can quibble about how special this or that metaphor is, which I've already given an example of with the "playing with how nonsensical the metaphor is", but when all the metaphors are broken that way, all the time, the writer is not "breaking the rules because they've transcended them" or anything like that, the writer is breaking them in the bad way that the rules were put there to stop and the writer should consider taking a Writing 101 course.
Though anyone taking a Writing 101 course should be aware that as near as I can tell, completing such a course is prima facie proof that they are overqualified for the vast majority of modern writing jobs.
"Likewise, he discovered that the contrast of two seeming opposites was a common feature in haiku. Ginsberg used this technique in his poetry, putting together two starkly dissimilar images: something weak with something strong, an artifact of high culture with an artifact of low culture, something holy with something unholy."
I think some of these broken metaphors could be turned into some sort of haiku-like poem, especially if we ignore the requirement to reference a season somehow, though it would still take some sort of additional work to add something to tie them together more thoroughly than the metaphor does, some third component a poet uses to glue the two bits together in some interesting way.
tree roots sheltering
river trout find safety but
growth is treacherous
I was thinking about the immortal Twin Peaks line "there's a FISH... in the PERCOLATOR" when I wrote the trout one.
Saying "Metaphors..., slip away from meaning" instead of "Metaphors..., from which meaning slips away"
I dunno, it jumped out at me immediately.
Sadly, there are published authors who basically stack literary devices without much attention to whether they actually work. If they're good at promoting themselves, they often get the benefit of the doubt.
Personally, I find it incredibly easy to spot AI-generated text in Korean, but catching it in English is much harder for me. That being said, they still have very distinct, overused patterns. You constantly see words like 'ultimately' or 'structural,' and they rely heavily on highly formulaic 'X is Y' sentence structures.
I initially built and delivered this system for a specific publisher to accommodate the Korean market's standard, which requires hitting a certain character count for a text to be recognized as a single chapter. I'm not entirely sure how to pivot this into a standalone SaaS yet, so I'll need to give it some more thought.
Thank you for the advice
I've gotten it 60-70% ready, and I really don't know if it'll have an audience in a post-AI world. I never meant to strike big with it, but I'm now wondering if thousands of hours of research and writing can amount to more than a novelty gift I'd give to friends.
And that's precisely the issue here. For a while, the internet allowed you to find an audience, just like that. Start a blog / podcast / YT channel, keep going, get enough attention. You could then approach a traditional publisher and tell them "hey, I'm kind of a big deal", or you could self-publish and rely on the word-of-mouth from your followers.
Now, how would that work? If you have a blog, AI answers will summarize it without attribution and not send anyone your way. Even the "references" cited in AI answers often point to AI-slop blogs, not the original source. The articles we discuss on HN are often AI-written too. So yeah, it's about reaching the audience, but you're now competing with machines that produce an endless stream of human-like text, good enough for most consumers, practically for free.
A book won’t sell itself.
Which addresses your second point: machines can produce an endless stream of human-like text, but they have exactly the same problem as human generated text: finding an audience.
How are these endless streams of human-like text finding an audience? Most of the time they are not.
And as soon as you scratch beneath the surface there is no one to interview. No one to turn up at literary festivals. No one to write opinion pieces or blog pieces for book-interested audiences. As I said: writing isn’t the problem. Finding the audience is the problem.
What distinguishes a book that is read by no one from a book that is read by a bunch of people? It’s definitely not the writing. There are great books out there that never find an audience because no one ever went out there to find an audience for those books.
Maybe I am being too hard on you, but I think everyone who follows the writing world knows that writing doesn't influence sales. That's why publishers exist. Authors right now fucking hate traditional publishing with a passion—not just rejected authors, but career midlisters and lower-tier lead-title authors—and the only reason you don't hear more rage is that they know how replaceable 99% of them are. No one would put up with them if there weren't strong economic reasons to do so.
Most marketing strategies break even or have slightly positive EV for traditional publishers, due to all the entrenched unfair advantages they have. They're -EV for self-publishers who are trying to replicate the benefits of the stolen village on a shoestring.
You are literally responding to
> I really don't know if it'll have an audience
No amount of marketing can help you out is your entire market is shrinking daily. Shriking markets are also not won by quality. The more competition, the more marketing then becomes the main thing, and you also need to alter the book in the process so that it fits the bite-sized pills you can push on most channels, or worse change it so much for the audience until it becomes something else entirely.
The worsening health of the market is a real issue. And yes, writing to market is a grind. Writing for virality is worse, because you compromise the work and also don't get anything for it most of the time.
----
[1] Own-buys are common with business books. You take a loss, but you get a promotion or you earn speaking fees from the status of being a bestseller, even if no one read the damn thing. For literature, they'll cost you more than they're worth—you'll get a better advance, but not as much as you paid for the bestseller distinction.
It's like saying "you can make money on Kalshi." Not false, but reductive.
I know plenty of authors, self-publishers and traditionally published, who've lost five and six figures marketing their own books. Whether this is worth doing is subjective, but for most people, it's not.
The act of writing and building is, in itself, humanity's grand narrative for trying to understand the world. The journey itself is inherently valuable. Isn't the ability to organize our thoughts, pass them down to the next generation, and continue that narrative exactly what makes us uniquely human?
Even if only a few people around you end up reading it, those few could be deeply inspired to go on and build an even greater world. Please don't stop. I'm rooting for you.
With imagery like this, I’d love to read your other work! Link?
You can find a link to my newsletter over at https://yelluw.com
Do subscribe if you like it. It’s free and will stay free.
Please publish it!
So if an author abstained from using LLM in the writing process - isn't then new, original, not yet on the market book ending up in the LLM training data corpus even before it hits the market?
I think there is going to be a large market in all domains for providers who can convince people that they don't use LLMs.
> I suspect the hum obsession has something to do with LLMs “awareness” that their “physical selves” exist in data centers.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13752688
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/xlsdk5/til_t...
so my guess is that LLMs see The Hum in their training data, and then put the word "hum" in their output. Since humans occupy varied, small media bubbles, many haven't encountered text talking about The Hum at all. The LLM's use of the word "hum" then stands out as excessive and a tell. And a mysterious one!
I don't care for fiction but I like music. If I like a track, I would still like it if it was AI generated. I would love it, in fact. That would mean I likely wouldn't have to wait a long time before the artists release a new track.
If it sucks, if it's obvious slop, etc. - I'll notice or someone would tell me via reviews or thumbs down or something like that.
Earlier today there was a comment somewhere about the possibility of modern art happening by chance - that it would be fake, have no human process behind and so on. Personally, I don't care about the process behind it. I care about the art. Maybe that makes it "entertainment" for me, not "art", but it's just 2 words for the same thing. I wouldn't care if a dish was made by a Star Trek replicator or by someone's grandma who had worked all her life to perfect it.
Other people want other things, I get it, but I don't really care. I'm not afraid I'll get stuck in some weird local maximum of AI-generated music (or fiction or food), just as I haven't got stuck listening to the radio - I can search and find various types of music.
I think I get where you’re coming from if you’re thinking of fiction or music as just like pure baseless entertainment. But that’s like talking about food and meaning Soylent or a handful of sugar cubes in place of a home cooked meal or pastry-chef crafted dessert.
I was the kid whose parents never lied to about Santa. It felt so weird trying to explain he's imaginary to other kids at the playground. I still liked the whole charade around Christmas. Not the Christian stuff (it was never instilled in me) but the tree with the lights, the guy dressed up as Santa and the presents. I knew what it was and I couldn't care less. When I was painted as a turtle or whatever at the theme park, I knew I wasn't a real turtle. It was quite a bit of fun nonetheless.
I've looked up some of the artists I like. Some have a somewhat interesting story, others have a political agenda and so on, but for most of them I don't even know if they're a one band name or a group, whether they're an Australian woman or a Serbian brother duo - I just don't care.
If there was a tasty and nutritionally complete Soylent or human chow that was ethically sourced, I'd gobble it up. It doesn't have to be "a handful of sugar cubes", though, with all that it implies. It could resemble a home cooked meal. But a perfect meal where every bean is exactly the same size, the same texture, the same amount of soft on the inside, crispy on the outside. Made in a factory by AI, synthesized from rock, for all I care.
Sure, we used to value artists and give them money. Now we don't. We used to value lots of work that's been automated away now. It's life. I'd still love a world with UBI where everyone can pursue whatever they want, where scarcity of the necessities doesn't exit. That would be even more fair to me as right now most people who want to be artists or chefs or athletes... aren't. They end up teaching or working at the same burrito shop for hours every day just to make ends meet. If we structure our society correctly, the fact that art is largely made by AI wouldn't have any negative financial consequences on anyone. At worst, no one will look at your art. But right not chances are you (not you per se) aren't even an artist but a graphics designer for a soulless company or a chef for the same cookie-cutter pizzeria. So in a post-scarcity society maybe no one will care about your art but you'll be able to make art for yourself, for art's sake. If you're doing it for recognition or money, is it really "art"?
this is wildly self-centered to claim as a general truth