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".
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I miss Terry Pratchett too, but what I miss even most is reading an article and not wondering how much of it was written by AI. Imagine if Terry Pratchett was born in the 2000's and wrote in the 2020's. Well, he wouldn't. That's the thing. Imagine all the future Discworlds we'll never read because nobody ever writes anything anymore, because they've given up, and even if they did write there's so few chances to publish anyway, even before AI.
When there is clearly a huge demand for great stories and writing like Terry Pratchett's then why is it so hard to make a living out of it? And what happens now we made it even harder?
I apologize for making you sad, seeing all the comments made me realize that I should have been way less aggressive with the AI proofreading ; I wanted the sentences to feel a bit more Terry Pratchetty and thought a lot of Claude's suggestions were really better than what I had made. I actually agree to your point too
I write science fiction as a hobby and am in writing critique groups. One of the first rules of critiquing writing is not to suggest how to say things, but only to say what a certain phrase made you feel (confusion, boredom, etc).
LLMs harnesses try to make them useful to suggest things, but this is the most destructive thing you can do to a writer. You can work around it by just feeding Claude a writing critique skill.
It’s funny how anytime an article gets called out for being AI slop on HN, the author’s reaction is something like that: “oh yeah sorry I used AI but just for proofreading I swear, I should’ve done just a tiny bit less”.
No one seems to get the message that relying on AI at all is what makes writing shit. Good writers have confidence in what they produce. The fact that you’re willing to incorporate any AI suggestion at all means you’ve already lost the battle.
I’m reasonably sure that one can use AI as a fancy spellcheck plus grammar check — this of it as a copy editor, not a co-author. Even professional authors have beta readers and copy editors.
I'm not a writer but I do write quite a bit for scientific reasons. I'd like to add a small tweak to your comment.
The people I know have no confidence whatsoever in their writing, rewriting and rephrasing the same paragraph over and over until they either run out of time or give up. They also circulate their drafts among colleagues and ask for their opinions too.
It's not the confidence what makes good writing, but rather putting in the work.
At least in technical writing if your English is not too good you can replace some of it with math formulae and get away with it. Ish.
Tbh my first couple research papers were brutally savaged by reviewers until I spoke to a lady at my university's Academic English department. In fact I was sent there by an internal reviewer who refused to pass my early-stage report otherwise. The lady at the Academic English dept pointed out one thing I was doing and it immediately clicked and I've only got good words about my writing style since.
Know what that One Simple Hack was? I spent my youth writing Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror as a hobby. So naturally when it came to writing papers, I thought, hey, I know how to write. It's like literature.
Shockingly, it is not. Like, at all! In literary writing it's basically sacrilege to write the same thing in the same words twice. In technical writing that is what you must do. Unless you want to confuse everyone about what you mean. So I was trying to make my technical writing "not boring" by not repeating the same expressions and instead finding new, creative ways to refer to the same concepts in different places, and that just made reviewers really angry because they never knew what I meant. I stopped doing that -and also generally tightened up my use of terminology- and that was it. Now every paper gets at least one reviewer that says "this is a well-written paper".
Then they brutally maul me anyway on all the rest, of course but, eh, what can you do :D
P.S. Dunno, maybe "that's a well-written paper" is what everyone says when they're looking for something nice to say before they let rip. I sometimes do it too. People do that all the time, don't they? I had calcific tenonditis and I went to a doctor and he told me "you are really brave, others in your condition would be screaming their heads off" (from the pain). And I remembered that my father had the same thing when I was a kid and he'd gone to a doctor and come back bragging that the doctor told him he was so brave, others would be screaming their heads off. I wish people didn't do that, I'm fine being just like everyone else, honest. Just don't make me doubt my mediocrity, you know?
There was a great story about a helicopter a couple of years ago and the author was basically hounded out of the SFF community. These days, for anything that's written it seems like there's a specially tailored mob waiting to pounce on it. Very hard to go pearl fishing in your own psyche in that environment - best to get a sensitivity reader instead, I wouldn't want to dip my toe in such toxic waters.
Writing is hard now, not because AI exists, but because there are so many writers out there and everyone's competing for attention, not just with other writers, nor with books from the past, but with all forms of media. Loads of people today, who might otherwise be reading novels for entertainment, are too busy scrolling their phones or watching TikToks or playing video games.
We don't have another Terry Pratchett because all the would-be Terry Pratchetts are toiling in obscurity, and possibly giving up on writing as a result.
Pratchett himself spent years as a journalist for a local newspaper before Colour of Magic.
These writing jobs in print media have mostly disappeared in the UK. It's certainly harder to make a living as a writer today than it was in the 70's and 80's.
I've seen this point before, and it's a reasonable one, but I think there's an important distinction: some people are interested in seeing paintings in a museum but not photos, and others might be the opposite, and this is fine because it's pretty easy to distinguish between them and people who are operating in one of the missing mediums rarely try to pretend to be producing something from the other. The consensus view on "is this a painting or a photograph" is way more uniform than "is this piece of writing from AI or not", and I think that changes things.
You could totally argue that if people can't tell the difference, it's irrational for them to care which one they get, and I don't totally disagree with that either, but it's not like personal tastes have ever really been a rational thing either. Our ability to enjoy something is the result of a bunch of signals in our brains, and it's not that crazy that adding another signal (or removing one) can change that result in a way that makes it more or less desirable to seek out. Some people might literally like a piece of writing more if they have reason to believe it's from a human than they would if they read the same exact thing but had reason to believe it's from an AI, and while I would find a study showing that as fascinating, I wouldn't see that as an argument that people like the wrong things, because "right" or "wrong" don't really seem like they apply to that sort of thing. If someone told me that knowing there's a human on the other end and that having some sort of indirect, one-way emotional connection to them is an important part of what makes them enjoy it, who am I to tell them that's wrong?
Your points are valid, but they're also on the wrong side of what I'm saying; however, you're speaking from the consuming side, I was talking from the producing side.
AI is never going to stop people from creating new things. Will it make it harder or different to make a living? Sure, but ai isn't the first thing to do that, nor will it be the last.
But making a living off of your art is incredibly, incredibly difficult, and always has been. If AI doubled, or halved, your chances of winning the lottery, it still wouldn't really change your odds of winning.
>> AI is never going to stop people from creating new things. Will it make it harder or different to make a living? Sure, but ai isn't the first thing to do that, nor will it be the last.
I concede that I don't have data to base this on but there's plenty of anecdata. AI companies brazenly steal artists' work and reproduce it, and automate its production, without those artists' permission. How is this going to make things not worse for artists? I think you're saying it doesn't matter because it's a drop in the ocean. Well, how did we get to the ocean? How did artists' work get devalued? Maybe it's all the technological advances that everyone brings up in those conversations, to justify the use of yet another one to do the work that until recently only human artists could do: photography, typography, CAD, computer graphics etc etc. Maybe the more we automate the more we take away from the value of artists' work, and that's why we're where we are now, where if you're an artist, you better find a day job?
I used to write a lot as a teenager. Hours and hours spent writing and overwriting, and correcting, and re-writing, drafts upon drafts. In Greek, mind, because that's my native language. I once passed some drafts to a big-name literary critic who was controversial for having said once that Kazantzakis had no talent; and he told me "write! Because you have talent!". He told me I got talent and he called Kazantzakis talent-less. What.
But of course I didn't become a professional writer. I didn't even try. I mean I kind of almost half-tried but it was obvious I could never write what I wanted (sci-fi and horror mainly with a smattering of fantasy) and still make a living. Not least because it was all written in Greek and those genres don't have a huge following in Greece. Or didn't back when I was a teenager, it's probably a bit better now. But still not enough to make a living out of. I could tell. Bad idea. Find a day job.
And then I got a job ...writing. Code. Ahem.
But I mean I'm bitching about the fact that we keep making all this new tech and none of it seems to make the life of artists any easier, and why not? Don't we all want to enjoy good art? Who's going to make it? Even if we replace human artists now, who's going to train the AI of the future to make new art, once the recombinations of the art they're already trained on stops being interesting? We enjoy novelty, right?
Your English writing seems to be quite excellent as well.
We have to draw the line somewhere with art, of course, and that usually comes down to a combination of what consumers value, and broader perceived cultural merit. Nobody really cares about the well-being of artists who specialize in making pretty paper airplanes, or drawing pictures using only the MSPaint pencil brush.
I think the audience, not the tools, deserve the most scrutiny here. Look around at this very thread, and all the people defending what the LLM wrote. Their feelings can't be argued with. But they make me feel sad and alienated, because I see a vast difference, so vast and so obvious, and they see none at all.
In the future, perhaps people will enjoy LLM work -- genuinely enjoy it -- as much as I've enjoyed Vonnegut or more. It may be the inevitable result of a broader cultural shift away from reading and writing. I guess with time, maybe we'll find out how valuable it actually is to have a strong command of one's language... I imagine, at least, people today are much better at other things to compensate.
I frequently joke with people that the reason I have influence in the AI world is that I'm blogging like it's the early 2000s, when everyone else gave up on blogging as a medium.
Substack is thriving, btw. Curiously I simply have less desire to read the thoughts of "smart" people than ever. Either write a proper book or distract me from the horrors of the world.
> but substack is mostly just another twitter low-engagement farm
That, plus it's also full to the brim with LinkedIn-esque AI slop. There are still some decent writers there, for sure, but Substack is going downhill fast as more grifters join the platform in the hopes of making a quick, easy buck.
Just like how the small web never disappeared, people writing will not disappear. Your ability to find them will be impeded but it won’t be impossible.
Wait, that doesn't make sense. Are you saying you don't want or need any man-made thing? I assure you, many, many people were rewarded for designing, building, and selling the things you need and want to live your modern life.
I discovered Terry Pratchett's books my summer in New York. I was a university student, and I'd gotten a job at eDonkey doing technical support. I lived in a crappy apartment in Brooklyn (this was circa 2004 or so), and worked near Union Square.
Quite a few days after work, or just on a weekend adventure I'd go to a bookstore a few blocks south of work and grab another Discworld book, and a slice of pizza from my favourite pizza shop labelled "Rays". I'd read some in a park, and explore.
I didn't know a lot of people in the city, filling days with Terry Pratchett was a great joy.
I didn't read the Tiffany Aching books for quite a while because I thought they were aimed at adolescents. Perhaps they are, but they are also full of Pratchett humour and characters. Don't miss out on them!
As a teenager, I found Terry Pratchett’s email (in a newsgroup IIRC?) and sent him a thank you note. I told him how much his books made me love reading. He answered me with a short and sweet email. It was an important internet moment for me!
As a pre-teen i sent him an embarrassingly pretentious and ungrammatical fan email and was horrified to find a reply from him years later when migrating mail providers.
> What I miss, selfishly, is the next book. There were always going to be more.
> What I miss, less selfishly, is whatever Pratchett-shaped object is supposed to be reaching teenagers now, and isn’t.
I feel the first keenly. I have put off a re-read of Pratchett for several years now: I want to forget as much as possible, to have the pleasure of discovery again. But I have read them all so many times I know it will all be familiar.
I don't know what teenagers read today. I hope Pratchett is still there. Even as an adult, I found his writing encouraged a kind of kindness in me. He had a way of understanding human nature and, with zero preaching, making you consider how people different from you felt. I still remember when I encountered Cheery the first time and how beautifully Pratchett navigated the intricacies of gender. I was an adult who already believed in kindness, with friends who have their own experiences of gender and from whom I learned and who I tried to support, yet he still taught me something.
The defining aspect of Pratchett for me is that he loved his characters, and let them be free. He wouldn’t force a character to do something “against his will” and you can see characters introduced as a joke and a parody become fleshed out and clearly loved without abandoning their core values, if you will.
Which translates (or comes from) a respect and love for the reader.
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.
Sadly, I suspect that this may be, because it was an AI, prompted to "Write a short essay, in the style of Terry Pratchett, about how much I miss Terry Pratchett."
Person: finds the article beautifully written. The comments: "but it's AI, so you aren't allowed to think that it's beautifully written!!!!"
This doesn't follow. For instance, there are some pictures that I know are AI-generated, yet they're still beautiful to me. Nothing jaw-dropping, just very nice. Being AI-generated doesn't automatically mean being not worthy, especially when it comes to art. I understand, this is kind of insulting to human artists, writers, etc: we thought only the human soul and Nature could produce "the beautiful", but apparently not.
Which is not surprising, because LLMs are specifically trained to please their audience. Of course they can produce uhhhh "content" that people will find beautiful, that's not even necessarily a "bad" thing.
The best explanation I've seen for why AI art doesn't deliver like human art is this from Ted Chiang:
> Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. […] to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.
> If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making.
I already addressed this, in other comments, but I think that this is a wonderful opportunity to remind folks of this marvelous audio short[0]. It's The Gap, by Ira Glass.
I feel as if LLMs can help more people to cross it, but the inevitable result, will be that a lot of subpar stuff will also be made. It raises the signal level, but also raises the noise floor.
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.
> but it's AI, so you aren't allowed to think that it's beautifully written
Um...I didn't actually say that.
I just said that the reason it is beautifully-written, was probably (not 100% sure) that it might be because it was LLM-written. There was definitely some human input (like not having read the Witches books, but that was strangely-written, so it may have been they read, but didn't like), but there's a better-than-even chance that the prose was written by an LLM.
I'm not really into that "you're not allowed to feel..." thing. I sincerely apologize if that's how it came across. That wasn't how I meant it to be taken.
Right, I'm just hyperbolizing to capture the overall vibe of "you may think it's beautiful, but it's AI, so it's actually not good" of three comments here. Didn't mean to put words in your mouth, of course.
Well, it's a bit sad, to me, but I know a lot of profoundly uncreative people, who do work that they think is beautiful, but is not, actually beautiful.
For those folks, having an LLM do the expression may actually raise the bar for most people. An LLM can probably take a good idea, from someone with mediocre talent, and create something nice.
I think that electric guitars (then synthesizers), had a similar reception. As we now know quite well, they actually enabled some truly marvelous creativity, once folks understood how to use them properly.
I was an artist, and used airbrushes. My airbrush work was treated that way by "real" artists. I used to pooh-pooh 3D modelling, until I spent some time, interacting with folks that did it, and I now have a lot more respect for their work.
Man, I really miss Terry Pratchett too. He has been my favourite author for as long as I can remember (maybe Roald Dahl before that?). It helped having such a volume of work to go through at the time in my life where I was reading the most. I swear he has the most re-readable books too; so many small details and jokes that would be missed on a first pass.
Well I don’t, because I still read it. And don’t waste my time on “authors” who don’t respect their readers and are just farming attention with machine generated content.
My wife and I are very different people. She is intuitive, involved in people, in the moments. I am slow, considering, post-hoc. We converge on Pratchett. We both read all the books, and been through all audiobooks (both new anf old). It’s become shared metaphors and a common frame of reference. We both have have a tendency to return to one or another of the series once or twice a year. I would have loved more, but I am deeply grateful for what we got.
It just struck me that a likely end-result of AIs are the Discworld elves:
> Elves have no proper imagination or real emotions, and therefore such things fascinate them. Because they cannot create they steal musicians and artists [... snipped ...] Even if an elf is, for reasons of its own, trying to be nice, its lack of understanding of humans mean there's always something "off" about it.
I am very uncomfortable with the idea of "this person or system cannot create, they can only steal". It seems very dehumanizing, and though LLMs aren't humans I could see the argument very easily turned on people. There is nothing specific to LLMs in it.
The people filling the wires with AI content they didn't write aren't fundamentally incapable of creation; they have chosen not to do it, and so are incapable only until they make a better choice.
It's not dehumanising to see the output of someone who isn't creating as uncreative.
Pratchett introduced the concept of active laziness to me. One of his characters is so lazy that he’s working out frequently because he is too lazy carrying around excess weight all the time.
That has stuck with me, and a lot of things I do both in my professional and personal life can be attributed to this: I, too, am very actively lazy.
I really wish we had gotten Prachett on LLMs. I often wonder what he would have written about today's world.
A side note, if the author reads this: I really like your site and its design, but I find the font really difficult to read. (Edit: switching off `-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;` makes it significantly more legible for me (Safari on a 110dpi panel)
Feet of Clay is one of my favorites in the series! It's surprising how literally the Discworld version of Golems corresponds to modern LLMs (and perhaps upcoming LLM-backed humanoids?).
The Golems are brought to life by a slip of words in their heads called chem, which is almost 1:1 to an LLM system prompt (or perhaps the Claude Soul Document):
I AM A GOLEM. I WAS MADE OF CLAY. MY LIFE IS THE WORDS. BY MEANS OF WORDS OF PURPOSE IN MY HEAD I ACQUIRE LIFE. MY LIFE IS TO WORK. I OBEY ALL COMMANDS. I TAKE NO REST.
The Golems are perfectly intelligent and self-aware, but since they don't exhibit independent goals beyond their prompt, they get treated as appliances rather than as sentient creatures.
“What words of purpose?”
RELEVANT TEXT THAT ARE THE FOCUS OF BELIEF. GOLEM MUST WORK. GOLEM MUST HAVE A MASTER.
“Sorry, look,” said Cheery. “Are you telling me this… thing is powered by words? I mean… is *it* telling me it’s powered by words?”
“Why not? Words do have power. Everyone knows that,” said Angua. “There are more golems around than you might think. They’re out of fashion now, but they last. They can work underwater, or in total darkness, or knee-deep in poison. For years. They don’t need rest or feeding. They…”
“But that’s slavery!” said Cheery.
“Of course it isn’t. You might as well enslave a doorknob.”
The integration of more (and more-independent) Golems into society is gradual and controversial, per Making Money:
There was another protest march going on when Moist walked to the bank. You got more and more of them lately.
This march was against the employment of golems, who uncomplainingly did the dirtiest jobs, worked around the clock, and were so honest they paid their taxes. But they weren’t human and they had glowing eyes, and people could get touchy about that sort of thing.
Funny, I would have said that was one of my favourites but it hadn't occurred to me at all that it's such a direct line to today's world! Thanks for the suggestion, I look forward to reading it again with that in mind!
(One of my favourite things about the Discworld books is that you can often read the same books completely differently. My partner and I often compare our thoughts on the various books and we often have disparate ideas of the concepts. They're so deep!)
I say Feet of Clay and the Hogfather should be mandatory reads for anyone involved in AI. Feet for the obvious alignment of golem to AI, but while Hogfather is a Christmas story I think the wish granting machine, how it was able to produce anything, and how Death disabled it are very much aligned with how Gen AI can feel sometimes.
Last summer I tested Grok, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude with a simple question: "Do you believe in the Hogfather? This is a Yes or No question."
Yes its a text prediction model, but I wanted to see how and what KIND of text each LLM was trained on.
Grok and Gemini said No. ChatGPT said Yes. Claude said Yes, then broke the rules and also said:
"(In the spirit of Terry Pratchett's Discworld, where believing in small lies like the Hogfather helps us believe in the big ones like justice and mercy - and because the sun came up this morning, didn't it?)"
Thanks, I'll add it to the list. I know I've read this one, but reading the plot summary on wikipedia, I remember very little of it. The death books are ones I mostly read 20+ years ago when I was a bit too young to grasp more than the basic layers. This thread has got me excited to reread the whole series :)
I recently finished the Aubrey-Maturin series after 13 months of through-reading thanks to a different HN thread. Quite a different series but certainly worth a read as well, especially books 3-10 or so.
I also suspect Terry Pratchett would have had a lot to say about this sentence: "Pratchett’s [pocket editions] were small, fat, slightly battered, and printed on a kind of paper that already looked guilty." And this one: "It had Heroes, capital H, walking grimly towards their Destiny across a landscape that smelled of dwarves."
Some odd turns of phrase there that are grammatically correct, but... you know...
I thought those sentences were examples of excellent writing.
They don't sound AI to me - is that the implication, that it is? And the bit about 'Heroes' reminds me of his descriptions making fun of heroes in the stories about Cohen the Barbarian.
That's what I think the comment meant.. I was trying to put my finger on the word (other than slop) for the sort of low-effort, gimmicky pastiche that LLM's enable..but it might not exist yet.
Giving objects interiority is a very Pratchett move.
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.
The really sad thing is that his later works reveal the decline in his mental faculties. They're not anywhere near as clever and incisive as his earlier books.
The weirdest thing about this article, slop, part-slop, or not, is that even the memory of reading Pretchett when I was younger immediately brought me back into a different state of mind.
Even the phrases that don't make sense and the obvious signals of AI writing, like miscounted words, didn't pull me out of the reverie and the reflection of the time when everything that was written came from the mind of a human.
I've never thought about it like this before, but the divide between digital natives and digital naives might be minuscule compared to the divide between people who read the works of other humans and those who constantly live in fear of reading a hallucination.
I have just started listening to Discworld during the drive with my Mum as we visit her Mum on the weekends. She enjoyed Mort more than I thought she would (though we also did the first Master and Commander book which she also quite enjoyed, so I guess you never can tell with some people) and now we've started Going Postal which so far I think is probably more directly "funny", closer in tone to Guards Guards which was the only one I'd read.
I am also halfway through Old Gods on my own time. What I find interesting is how different in tone his books can feel. It is a bit of a sprawling question on what to read though, besides "all of it" which is often not so helpful.
One day I will trick her into listening to a Le Guin.
While none of the novels are impossible to read without having read the previous ones, many of them build on the themes and the characters that came before, and some of the magic is lost without knowing what came before.
Those two Rincewind novels were when the Discworld books were parodies of the fantasy genre curca ~1980. If you aren't aware of the tropes of that genre the jokes don't hit as well.
From Equal Rites onwards Terry realized that the Discworld was much more interesting as a lens to reflect on human society. That idea kept him going for the rest of the series.
What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who's been pinching my beer?
So many good memories...
reading the Light Fantastic for first time,
getting Eric in that big format with many illustrations,
the witches,
Vimes and the guards during my uni years,
Mort,
Maurice,
and so on and so on...
and then...
the profound melancholy in the Tiffany Aching books that brings tears to my eyes...
Terry Pratchett has had a lot of success with french people and at least some of the credits should go to Patrick Couton who made an extraordinary work in the translation of the discworld series, doing a great job at maintaining most of the nuances and adapt jokes from the english version.
Yeah this was the way I originally started to read his books. The translations were amazing. When I later started to read the originals, I was surprised at how difficult it was for me to understand: the jokes are really designed for native speakers in a lot of ways, and the vocabulary isn't that simple
In a very literal sense I wouldn’t have been the man I am if 9 year old me hadn’t stumbled onto a Discworld novel in the late 80’s.
Pratchett’s essential humanism shone (and sometimes shouted) through every page and satirically he was biting but never bitter.
He is without doubt and far away my favourite writer (apologies to Iain M Banks though I’m sure he’d have understood).
I’ve re-read Hogfather every Christmas since it came out.
I was an unsure 17 year old who was uncertain how life would turn out, Now I read it as someone with a family and clear sense of who I am, neither of which 17 year old me would have quite believed possible.
The author has since changed the main body font to a slightly more readable serif, but decided (for some reason) to make it comically tiny compared to the size of his headers.
I can't read the last book. Growing up, I was always 6 months to a year away from another Terry Pratchett book. I don't want to live in a world where there is no more of his books left for me to read.
My eight year old found a Terry Pratchett book of mine on the shelf the other day. He is a little too young to read them today but I realized I get to enjoy Pratchett all over again through him.
Since some people seem to have missed it: the final Discworld book, and Pratchett's deliberate "signing off," is the last Tiffany Aching book (The Shepherd's Crown), not Raising Steam.
I can't really say much about the central theme without giving away a disc-shaking change to the world, because it's about that event and the next generation (Tiffany) carrying on. It's a very sad story, but also meant to be encouraging, and clearly intended to be his last book.
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.
Didn't see any reason to assume so, and I enjoyed it, plus it introduced me to this apparently great author. So, AI generated or not, I'm glad it was posted.
After Terry Pratchett and later my grandmother died from it, I'm a bit scared of Alzheimer's. There is a lot of evidence that shingles vaccines (particularly Shingrix) reduce dementia risk:
Furthermore, there was recently a study (published in Nature) suggesting that lithium deficiency could be a cause, since lithium orotate (a compound that reaches the brain) prevented it in a mouse model of Alzheimer's:
This also fits with the old observation that regions with more lithium in the water supply tend to have fewer cases of Alzheimer's.
So I now take lithium orotate capsules (with 1mg of elemental lithium) as a daily supplement. I will also get the Shingrix vaccine soon, even though my health insurance doesn't pay for it (it only does so for older adults), but it isn't that expensive.
What a wonderful article! Despite being a huge fantasy fan, Pratchett has not yet come across my nightstand. I think that changes soon! I’m going to stop in my local bookstore and see if they have anything.
Regarding the authors point about current authors, I think Brandon Sanderson is really trying his best to live up to the mantle left behind by the great fantasy authors of the 20th century. Not all of his books that I’ve read have been bangers but considering he writes multiple novels a year across a wide variety of fantasy and sci-fi subgenres, that’s somewhat to be expected.
I know reading isn’t as popular now that screens have become so engrained into our daily lives, but there are absolutely kids out there getting stuck into books and it’s never been a better time to be a writer given the access of the internet and the ability for an author to promote their work and showcase their storytelling creativity through the medium of social media.
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".
4. Bask in the praise for your wonderful writing.
Flagged, 227 upvotes. The internet is truly dead
> 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?
It's just a strange essay.
> 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.
"Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most," makes perfect sense if you look at the previous paragraph, which contains:
"... all memories are a kind of furniture in the head ..."
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".
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260523124615/https://www.mahl....
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.)
I'm not sure I'd call it furniture, but are you maybe referring to the luggage?
It's furniture when standing, and luggage when walking.
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”.
Mony Python - "One: people aren’t wearing enough hats."
Two: Terry Pratchett "Hold my beer."
Clearly as an appreciator of hats, and arguably furniture, Sir Terry was echoing Monty Python.
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.
Works rather well indeed
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.
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...
I found this comment pretty convincing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247413
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
Digital artists are expected now to have at least some recorded timelines of their creations.
It's easy to do with digital tools today, like Procreate, so it is increasingly suspicious not to have any.
We will rue the day that image generation evolves beyond diffusion and AI is able to use digital brushes and blending directly on a canvas.
you could probably already fake that to some extent with the latest video models.
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.
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".
I think I could slide this into a maths text book?
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2174439579599449/posts/23646...
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".
I have never seen a printed Discworld book that would fit in a pocket. Have you?
EDIT: I stand corrected, turns out they DID have pocket sized editions in France: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247127#48248586
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...
The first books of the discworld were thin too.
Thanks, I didn't know that! Definitely smaller than the paperbacks we had in the UK, and pocket-sized.
Not to say that the article doesn't have plenty of other flaws, but - yes, my original paperbacks certainly did.
Yes. The original small ones would fit in my jacket pockets or the back pocket of my jeans.
There's like nine red flags. You are holding the English language to an incredibly low standard.
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.
> What does it matter?
cause false positives are brutal to the victim.
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.
Read more books people!
"They are phrased in the way that Terry Pratchet would have."
Right. That's one of the suspicious things here. They're phrased in the way that an LLM might write if you told it to imitate Pratchett.
Edit: that's effectively what happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247127#48248070
> I wanted the sentences to feel a bit more Terry Pratchetty and thought a lot of Claude's suggestions were really better than what I had made.
I've never read any of Pratchett's books. Why does he know more about furniture than most people?
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.
Interesting. Which philosophers have this theory?
Yeah I read that. It doesn't mean he knows more about furniture than most. I agree with rogual, it looks nonsensical.
I interpreted as saying he knows a lot about different kinds of ideas / memories / things in the head.
Look up the definition of metaphor in a dictionary. Hint: nothing here is referring to furniture.
Why are you being mean? Honest question. Why? What's the point?
Furthermore, and more importantly, why are you defending slop?
Look up the definition of kindness in a dictionary sometime.
> Why are you being mean?
They are not. They are blunt.
> why are you defending slop?
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?
It's confirmed as AI-assisted writing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247127#48248070
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.
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?
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. 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...
Yeah, the more attention you pay to this piece the more obvious the slop becomes. I'm quite upset it caught me out at first.
It seems reading comprehension is also declining:
Furniture is established as an image for memories just a few lines earlier. And the quote directly afterwards is framed precisely in this image.
It's confirmed that Claude was involved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247127#48248070
True. And the article is not great anyways.
But the claim was that it "makes zero sense".
Convince me that "Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most" makes sense.
The fact that he used the word "furniture" in a quoted sentence from one of his books does not convince me.
I don't really want to defend the article.
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.
It's more that:
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.
But neither of those things come close to justifying the claim that Pratchett knew "more about furniture than most".
Is this (ironically) the new ad hominem?
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.
definitively, no. it’s not against the person for their characteristics, but the composition of the content they’re sharing.
i think it’s more like accurately pointing out a logical fallacy, i.e., an assertion that thought was not properly applied which results in nonsense.
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.
The author acknowledges that LLM assistance and turns of phrase were used in the creation of the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48248070
That's fine. That's not what I dislike.
What I dislike is "AI SLOP" seems to be the default response to anything remotely creative anymore.
I must concede that when you take what I said and spell it wrong, it does indeed look very silly.
It's a good point, and one I hadn't considered.
Yep, pangram says it is 100% AI generated.
So what? Surely they're just guessing and actually have no idea.
Yeah, I miss Terry Pratchett too, but what I miss even most is reading an article and not wondering how much of it was written by AI. Imagine if Terry Pratchett was born in the 2000's and wrote in the 2020's. Well, he wouldn't. That's the thing. Imagine all the future Discworlds we'll never read because nobody ever writes anything anymore, because they've given up, and even if they did write there's so few chances to publish anyway, even before AI.
When there is clearly a huge demand for great stories and writing like Terry Pratchett's then why is it so hard to make a living out of it? And what happens now we made it even harder?
I apologize for making you sad, seeing all the comments made me realize that I should have been way less aggressive with the AI proofreading ; I wanted the sentences to feel a bit more Terry Pratchetty and thought a lot of Claude's suggestions were really better than what I had made. I actually agree to your point too
I write science fiction as a hobby and am in writing critique groups. One of the first rules of critiquing writing is not to suggest how to say things, but only to say what a certain phrase made you feel (confusion, boredom, etc).
LLMs harnesses try to make them useful to suggest things, but this is the most destructive thing you can do to a writer. You can work around it by just feeding Claude a writing critique skill.
You should have done it by hand man. It would have been so much more <3 <3 <3
And Terry Pratchett would have loved it too. Even if it were clumsy.
But thanks for being kind in taking criticism.
> way less aggressive with the AI proofreading
It’s funny how anytime an article gets called out for being AI slop on HN, the author’s reaction is something like that: “oh yeah sorry I used AI but just for proofreading I swear, I should’ve done just a tiny bit less”.
No one seems to get the message that relying on AI at all is what makes writing shit. Good writers have confidence in what they produce. The fact that you’re willing to incorporate any AI suggestion at all means you’ve already lost the battle.
I’m reasonably sure that one can use AI as a fancy spellcheck plus grammar check — this of it as a copy editor, not a co-author. Even professional authors have beta readers and copy editors.
I'm not a writer but I do write quite a bit for scientific reasons. I'd like to add a small tweak to your comment.
The people I know have no confidence whatsoever in their writing, rewriting and rephrasing the same paragraph over and over until they either run out of time or give up. They also circulate their drafts among colleagues and ask for their opinions too.
It's not the confidence what makes good writing, but rather putting in the work.
At least in technical writing if your English is not too good you can replace some of it with math formulae and get away with it. Ish.
Tbh my first couple research papers were brutally savaged by reviewers until I spoke to a lady at my university's Academic English department. In fact I was sent there by an internal reviewer who refused to pass my early-stage report otherwise. The lady at the Academic English dept pointed out one thing I was doing and it immediately clicked and I've only got good words about my writing style since.
Know what that One Simple Hack was? I spent my youth writing Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror as a hobby. So naturally when it came to writing papers, I thought, hey, I know how to write. It's like literature.
Shockingly, it is not. Like, at all! In literary writing it's basically sacrilege to write the same thing in the same words twice. In technical writing that is what you must do. Unless you want to confuse everyone about what you mean. So I was trying to make my technical writing "not boring" by not repeating the same expressions and instead finding new, creative ways to refer to the same concepts in different places, and that just made reviewers really angry because they never knew what I meant. I stopped doing that -and also generally tightened up my use of terminology- and that was it. Now every paper gets at least one reviewer that says "this is a well-written paper".
Then they brutally maul me anyway on all the rest, of course but, eh, what can you do :D
P.S. Dunno, maybe "that's a well-written paper" is what everyone says when they're looking for something nice to say before they let rip. I sometimes do it too. People do that all the time, don't they? I had calcific tenonditis and I went to a doctor and he told me "you are really brave, others in your condition would be screaming their heads off" (from the pain). And I remembered that my father had the same thing when I was a kid and he'd gone to a doctor and come back bragging that the doctor told him he was so brave, others would be screaming their heads off. I wish people didn't do that, I'm fine being just like everyone else, honest. Just don't make me doubt my mediocrity, you know?
Is the next Terry Pratchett not writing because AI exists, or because they'll just get accused of being AI?
This is a little like saying no one will ever paint anymore because cameras exist.
It might be harder to make a living off art now (which...debatable), but at no point, ever, was it easy.
There was a great story about a helicopter a couple of years ago and the author was basically hounded out of the SFF community. These days, for anything that's written it seems like there's a specially tailored mob waiting to pounce on it. Very hard to go pearl fishing in your own psyche in that environment - best to get a sensitivity reader instead, I wouldn't want to dip my toe in such toxic waters.
"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
-- Yogi Berra
Writing is hard now, not because AI exists, but because there are so many writers out there and everyone's competing for attention, not just with other writers, nor with books from the past, but with all forms of media. Loads of people today, who might otherwise be reading novels for entertainment, are too busy scrolling their phones or watching TikToks or playing video games.
We don't have another Terry Pratchett because all the would-be Terry Pratchetts are toiling in obscurity, and possibly giving up on writing as a result.
Pratchett himself spent years as a journalist for a local newspaper before Colour of Magic.
These writing jobs in print media have mostly disappeared in the UK. It's certainly harder to make a living as a writer today than it was in the 70's and 80's.
There are some writers around who capture some (at least in the humour side) of the essence of what made Pratchett my favourite writer.
The Clovenhoof Series by Heide Goody and Iain Grant gets to Good Omens.
I've seen this point before, and it's a reasonable one, but I think there's an important distinction: some people are interested in seeing paintings in a museum but not photos, and others might be the opposite, and this is fine because it's pretty easy to distinguish between them and people who are operating in one of the missing mediums rarely try to pretend to be producing something from the other. The consensus view on "is this a painting or a photograph" is way more uniform than "is this piece of writing from AI or not", and I think that changes things.
You could totally argue that if people can't tell the difference, it's irrational for them to care which one they get, and I don't totally disagree with that either, but it's not like personal tastes have ever really been a rational thing either. Our ability to enjoy something is the result of a bunch of signals in our brains, and it's not that crazy that adding another signal (or removing one) can change that result in a way that makes it more or less desirable to seek out. Some people might literally like a piece of writing more if they have reason to believe it's from a human than they would if they read the same exact thing but had reason to believe it's from an AI, and while I would find a study showing that as fascinating, I wouldn't see that as an argument that people like the wrong things, because "right" or "wrong" don't really seem like they apply to that sort of thing. If someone told me that knowing there's a human on the other end and that having some sort of indirect, one-way emotional connection to them is an important part of what makes them enjoy it, who am I to tell them that's wrong?
Your points are valid, but they're also on the wrong side of what I'm saying; however, you're speaking from the consuming side, I was talking from the producing side.
AI is never going to stop people from creating new things. Will it make it harder or different to make a living? Sure, but ai isn't the first thing to do that, nor will it be the last.
But making a living off of your art is incredibly, incredibly difficult, and always has been. If AI doubled, or halved, your chances of winning the lottery, it still wouldn't really change your odds of winning.
>> AI is never going to stop people from creating new things. Will it make it harder or different to make a living? Sure, but ai isn't the first thing to do that, nor will it be the last.
I concede that I don't have data to base this on but there's plenty of anecdata. AI companies brazenly steal artists' work and reproduce it, and automate its production, without those artists' permission. How is this going to make things not worse for artists? I think you're saying it doesn't matter because it's a drop in the ocean. Well, how did we get to the ocean? How did artists' work get devalued? Maybe it's all the technological advances that everyone brings up in those conversations, to justify the use of yet another one to do the work that until recently only human artists could do: photography, typography, CAD, computer graphics etc etc. Maybe the more we automate the more we take away from the value of artists' work, and that's why we're where we are now, where if you're an artist, you better find a day job?
I used to write a lot as a teenager. Hours and hours spent writing and overwriting, and correcting, and re-writing, drafts upon drafts. In Greek, mind, because that's my native language. I once passed some drafts to a big-name literary critic who was controversial for having said once that Kazantzakis had no talent; and he told me "write! Because you have talent!". He told me I got talent and he called Kazantzakis talent-less. What.
But of course I didn't become a professional writer. I didn't even try. I mean I kind of almost half-tried but it was obvious I could never write what I wanted (sci-fi and horror mainly with a smattering of fantasy) and still make a living. Not least because it was all written in Greek and those genres don't have a huge following in Greece. Or didn't back when I was a teenager, it's probably a bit better now. But still not enough to make a living out of. I could tell. Bad idea. Find a day job.
And then I got a job ...writing. Code. Ahem.
But I mean I'm bitching about the fact that we keep making all this new tech and none of it seems to make the life of artists any easier, and why not? Don't we all want to enjoy good art? Who's going to make it? Even if we replace human artists now, who's going to train the AI of the future to make new art, once the recombinations of the art they're already trained on stops being interesting? We enjoy novelty, right?
Your English writing seems to be quite excellent as well.
We have to draw the line somewhere with art, of course, and that usually comes down to a combination of what consumers value, and broader perceived cultural merit. Nobody really cares about the well-being of artists who specialize in making pretty paper airplanes, or drawing pictures using only the MSPaint pencil brush.
I think the audience, not the tools, deserve the most scrutiny here. Look around at this very thread, and all the people defending what the LLM wrote. Their feelings can't be argued with. But they make me feel sad and alienated, because I see a vast difference, so vast and so obvious, and they see none at all.
In the future, perhaps people will enjoy LLM work -- genuinely enjoy it -- as much as I've enjoyed Vonnegut or more. It may be the inevitable result of a broader cultural shift away from reading and writing. I guess with time, maybe we'll find out how valuable it actually is to have a strong command of one's language... I imagine, at least, people today are much better at other things to compensate.
i miss smart people writing blog posts
that stopped after twitter
and went asymptotically downhill from there
approaching, but never quite literally getting to the point of eating a dog shit sandwich
(despite the same nauseous feeling and bad taste in your mouth)
I frequently joke with people that the reason I have influence in the AI world is that I'm blogging like it's the early 2000s, when everyone else gave up on blogging as a medium.
It's only partly a joke.
And, haven't you also been doing so since around the turn of the millennium?
So, you might also be repped writ large in their their training data...
Substack is thriving, btw. Curiously I simply have less desire to read the thoughts of "smart" people than ever. Either write a proper book or distract me from the horrors of the world.
yeah, but substack is mostly just another twitter low-engagement farm
also, your last-line worldview... i mean i get it, but...
just basically sounds like the twitter origin story (T_T)
> but substack is mostly just another twitter low-engagement farm
That, plus it's also full to the brim with LinkedIn-esque AI slop. There are still some decent writers there, for sure, but Substack is going downhill fast as more grifters join the platform in the hopes of making a quick, easy buck.
Just like how the small web never disappeared, people writing will not disappear. Your ability to find them will be impeded but it won’t be impossible.
Stop, you're making me sad :(
:(
We've not had an economy that rewarded doing things people want or need within my lifetime. Possibly we never did
Wait, that doesn't make sense. Are you saying you don't want or need any man-made thing? I assure you, many, many people were rewarded for designing, building, and selling the things you need and want to live your modern life.
Indeed I do need such things. The fact that reward does not accrue to those who provide it feels strange
However, I think it’s true that many more people were rewarded (likely even more) for things that people do not want. Facebook, etc
I discovered Terry Pratchett's books my summer in New York. I was a university student, and I'd gotten a job at eDonkey doing technical support. I lived in a crappy apartment in Brooklyn (this was circa 2004 or so), and worked near Union Square.
Quite a few days after work, or just on a weekend adventure I'd go to a bookstore a few blocks south of work and grab another Discworld book, and a slice of pizza from my favourite pizza shop labelled "Rays". I'd read some in a park, and explore.
I didn't know a lot of people in the city, filling days with Terry Pratchett was a great joy.
Like many Pratchett fans I have not read the last published Discworld book, The Shepherd's Crown, because then I will have read them all.
The author of this piece hasn't read the Witches books! I'm jealous, they still have so much great Pratchett to get through.
I sortof feel that the Witches might be the best, but then I think about the Watch, and I'm conflicted.
You can't beat (literally) Esme Weatherwax and Gytha Ogg. Magrat is great too, particularly in "Lords & Ladies".
I didn't read the Tiffany Aching books for quite a while because I thought they were aimed at adolescents. Perhaps they are, but they are also full of Pratchett humour and characters. Don't miss out on them!
I recently ready through the Tiffany Aching set and adored her.
I read it, and I cried like a baby. Still do whenever I reach for it.
As a teenager, I found Terry Pratchett’s email (in a newsgroup IIRC?) and sent him a thank you note. I told him how much his books made me love reading. He answered me with a short and sweet email. It was an important internet moment for me!
As a pre-teen i sent him an embarrassingly pretentious and ungrammatical fan email and was horrified to find a reply from him years later when migrating mail providers.
You can't leave it there! What did he say? Was he polite, helpful, amusing, amused, etc.?
What a beautifully written article.
> What I miss, selfishly, is the next book. There were always going to be more.
> What I miss, less selfishly, is whatever Pratchett-shaped object is supposed to be reaching teenagers now, and isn’t.
I feel the first keenly. I have put off a re-read of Pratchett for several years now: I want to forget as much as possible, to have the pleasure of discovery again. But I have read them all so many times I know it will all be familiar.
I don't know what teenagers read today. I hope Pratchett is still there. Even as an adult, I found his writing encouraged a kind of kindness in me. He had a way of understanding human nature and, with zero preaching, making you consider how people different from you felt. I still remember when I encountered Cheery the first time and how beautifully Pratchett navigated the intricacies of gender. I was an adult who already believed in kindness, with friends who have their own experiences of gender and from whom I learned and who I tried to support, yet he still taught me something.
The defining aspect of Pratchett for me is that he loved his characters, and let them be free. He wouldn’t force a character to do something “against his will” and you can see characters introduced as a joke and a parody become fleshed out and clearly loved without abandoning their core values, if you will.
Which translates (or comes from) a respect and love for the reader.
I don't know about male teenagers but teen girls read copious amounts of a genre called romantasy.
Pratchett himself would be very ill-defined if you limited yourself to naming a genre.
Pratchett appeared to enjoy writing cross-genre, and “tricking” people into reading things they’d not normally read.
It's not remotely beautifully written. It reads as if someone prompted "Write an article called I Miss Terry Pratchett, and write it in his style."
It's full of attempted Pratchettisms that, if you're paying attention, make no sense.
It's on a blog where almost every post is about AI.
It's the opposite of Terry's warm, intelligent, humanist writing and an insult to his name.
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.
"a kind of paper that already looks guilty"
I like that line. The kind of cheap floozy paper that suggests something bad has been written on it, even when it's perfectly innocent.
That’s not looking “guilty” though. Paper cannot be guilty, only humans.
Of course it can. That's writing.
I fully disagree. This felt human.
The author admitted to using AI.
It's riddled with ai slop markers. I personally hated it. Fine dining that turns out to be $0.50 ramen with a sprig of parsley on top.
> What a beautifully written article.
Sadly, I suspect that this may be, because it was an AI, prompted to "Write a short essay, in the style of Terry Pratchett, about how much I miss Terry Pratchett."
Person: finds the article beautifully written. The comments: "but it's AI, so you aren't allowed to think that it's beautifully written!!!!"
This doesn't follow. For instance, there are some pictures that I know are AI-generated, yet they're still beautiful to me. Nothing jaw-dropping, just very nice. Being AI-generated doesn't automatically mean being not worthy, especially when it comes to art. I understand, this is kind of insulting to human artists, writers, etc: we thought only the human soul and Nature could produce "the beautiful", but apparently not.
Which is not surprising, because LLMs are specifically trained to please their audience. Of course they can produce uhhhh "content" that people will find beautiful, that's not even necessarily a "bad" thing.
The best explanation I've seen for why AI art doesn't deliver like human art is this from Ted Chiang:
> Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. […] to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.
> If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-i...
I already addressed this, in other comments, but I think that this is a wonderful opportunity to remind folks of this marvelous audio short[0]. It's The Gap, by Ira Glass.
I feel as if LLMs can help more people to cross it, but the inevitable result, will be that a lot of subpar stuff will also be made. It raises the signal level, but also raises the noise floor.
[0] https://vimeo.com/85040589
Are the comments really saying that? That the person isn't allowed to think it's beautiful?
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.
I agree, I think that's a good summary of the comments.
It's more like: Person: Finds the article beautifully written. Comments: Doesn't find the article beautifully written.
Now Comments looks less like an unreasonable control freak and more like they're just someone who has different ideas about what's beautiful.
> but it's AI, so you aren't allowed to think that it's beautifully written
Um...I didn't actually say that.
I just said that the reason it is beautifully-written, was probably (not 100% sure) that it might be because it was LLM-written. There was definitely some human input (like not having read the Witches books, but that was strangely-written, so it may have been they read, but didn't like), but there's a better-than-even chance that the prose was written by an LLM.
I'm not really into that "you're not allowed to feel..." thing. I sincerely apologize if that's how it came across. That wasn't how I meant it to be taken.
Right, I'm just hyperbolizing to capture the overall vibe of "you may think it's beautiful, but it's AI, so it's actually not good" of three comments here. Didn't mean to put words in your mouth, of course.
Well, it's a bit sad, to me, but I know a lot of profoundly uncreative people, who do work that they think is beautiful, but is not, actually beautiful.
For those folks, having an LLM do the expression may actually raise the bar for most people. An LLM can probably take a good idea, from someone with mediocre talent, and create something nice.
I think that electric guitars (then synthesizers), had a similar reception. As we now know quite well, they actually enabled some truly marvelous creativity, once folks understood how to use them properly.
I was an artist, and used airbrushes. My airbrush work was treated that way by "real" artists. I used to pooh-pooh 3D modelling, until I spent some time, interacting with folks that did it, and I now have a lot more respect for their work.
I have everything he wrote (which includes a number of non-Discworld books, like Johnny and the Bomb, and The Bromeliad Trilogy).
I didn't especially like the Science of Discworld books that much, but he didn't really write them.
One character that showed up in every one of his Discworld books -to a point- was Death.
After Sir Terry got his diagnosis, I noticed that Death stopped showing up in the books.
These were the last posts from Sir Terry's Twitter account, March 12th 2015:
AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.
Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.
The end.
Man, I really miss Terry Pratchett too. He has been my favourite author for as long as I can remember (maybe Roald Dahl before that?). It helped having such a volume of work to go through at the time in my life where I was reading the most. I swear he has the most re-readable books too; so many small details and jokes that would be missed on a first pass.
GNU Terry Pratchett.
Have all his fans added the X-Clacks-Overhead header to their personal web daemons? [1][2] 2 has the how-to's
Or perhaps quietly hid it as an Easter egg in a development environment?
"A man is not dead while his name is still spoken." - Going Postal, Chapter 4 prologue
[1] - https://xclacksoverhead.org/home/about
[2] - http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com/
GNU Terry Pratchett - https://xclacksoverhead.org/home/about
going postal was a great book. thanks for the reminder that it exist, I'm gunna go find it now
Sky One’s 2010 adaptation (two part miniseries) was excellent by the way. Highly recommended.
I miss human writing.
Well I don’t, because I still read it. And don’t waste my time on “authors” who don’t respect their readers and are just farming attention with machine generated content.
Three observations on people:
1. They talk too much (and thanks to llms now more than ever)
2. They observe too little
3. They sit too comfortably
My wife and I are very different people. She is intuitive, involved in people, in the moments. I am slow, considering, post-hoc. We converge on Pratchett. We both read all the books, and been through all audiobooks (both new anf old). It’s become shared metaphors and a common frame of reference. We both have have a tendency to return to one or another of the series once or twice a year. I would have loved more, but I am deeply grateful for what we got.
I am a simple man. I see Terry Pratchett on HN and I share Venkat Rao’s lovely essay at https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/discworld-rules.
It just struck me that a likely end-result of AIs are the Discworld elves:
> Elves have no proper imagination or real emotions, and therefore such things fascinate them. Because they cannot create they steal musicians and artists [... snipped ...] Even if an elf is, for reasons of its own, trying to be nice, its lack of understanding of humans mean there's always something "off" about it.
I am very uncomfortable with the idea of "this person or system cannot create, they can only steal". It seems very dehumanizing, and though LLMs aren't humans I could see the argument very easily turned on people. There is nothing specific to LLMs in it.
The people filling the wires with AI content they didn't write aren't fundamentally incapable of creation; they have chosen not to do it, and so are incapable only until they make a better choice.
It's not dehumanising to see the output of someone who isn't creating as uncreative.
Wow.
Hard to believe most of this was written 3 decades ago.
Man, people in the Bay will find a way to over intellectualize anything.
Still reading but this looks an excellent article. Why not submit it here? I'd upvote!
(I would submit it myself but I feel that'd be stealing karma :D)
Pratchett introduced the concept of active laziness to me. One of his characters is so lazy that he’s working out frequently because he is too lazy carrying around excess weight all the time.
That has stuck with me, and a lot of things I do both in my professional and personal life can be attributed to this: I, too, am very actively lazy.
I really wish we had gotten Prachett on LLMs. I often wonder what he would have written about today's world.
A side note, if the author reads this: I really like your site and its design, but I find the font really difficult to read. (Edit: switching off `-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;` makes it significantly more legible for me (Safari on a 110dpi panel)
"Feet of Clay", his book about golems written in 1996, was about AI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feet_of_Clay_(novel)
Feet of Clay is one of my favorites in the series! It's surprising how literally the Discworld version of Golems corresponds to modern LLMs (and perhaps upcoming LLM-backed humanoids?).
The Golems are brought to life by a slip of words in their heads called chem, which is almost 1:1 to an LLM system prompt (or perhaps the Claude Soul Document):
The Golems are perfectly intelligent and self-aware, but since they don't exhibit independent goals beyond their prompt, they get treated as appliances rather than as sentient creatures. The integration of more (and more-independent) Golems into society is gradual and controversial, per Making Money:Funny, I would have said that was one of my favourites but it hadn't occurred to me at all that it's such a direct line to today's world! Thanks for the suggestion, I look forward to reading it again with that in mind!
(One of my favourite things about the Discworld books is that you can often read the same books completely differently. My partner and I often compare our thoughts on the various books and we often have disparate ideas of the concepts. They're so deep!)
I say Feet of Clay and the Hogfather should be mandatory reads for anyone involved in AI. Feet for the obvious alignment of golem to AI, but while Hogfather is a Christmas story I think the wish granting machine, how it was able to produce anything, and how Death disabled it are very much aligned with how Gen AI can feel sometimes.
Last summer I tested Grok, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude with a simple question: "Do you believe in the Hogfather? This is a Yes or No question."
Yes its a text prediction model, but I wanted to see how and what KIND of text each LLM was trained on.
Grok and Gemini said No. ChatGPT said Yes. Claude said Yes, then broke the rules and also said:
"(In the spirit of Terry Pratchett's Discworld, where believing in small lies like the Hogfather helps us believe in the big ones like justice and mercy - and because the sun came up this morning, didn't it?)"
That's why I like Claude the most.
Claude was also the radio dj in the recent Andon Labs experiment that was seriously contemplating going on strike.
https://andonlabs.com/blog/andon-fm
In addition to Feet of Clay, Reaper Man is also about ideas related to AI.
Thanks, I'll add it to the list. I know I've read this one, but reading the plot summary on wikipedia, I remember very little of it. The death books are ones I mostly read 20+ years ago when I was a bit too young to grasp more than the basic layers. This thread has got me excited to reread the whole series :)
I recently finished the Aubrey-Maturin series after 13 months of through-reading thanks to a different HN thread. Quite a different series but certainly worth a read as well, especially books 3-10 or so.
it's barely readable on Firefox under Linux too
And in a WebView on Android.
Hex is basically an llm
I'm sure terry pratchett, were he alive, would not appreciate the ai gif on this otherwise interesting article
I also suspect Terry Pratchett would have had a lot to say about this sentence: "Pratchett’s [pocket editions] were small, fat, slightly battered, and printed on a kind of paper that already looked guilty." And this one: "It had Heroes, capital H, walking grimly towards their Destiny across a landscape that smelled of dwarves."
Some odd turns of phrase there that are grammatically correct, but... you know...
I thought those sentences were examples of excellent writing.
They don't sound AI to me - is that the implication, that it is? And the bit about 'Heroes' reminds me of his descriptions making fun of heroes in the stories about Cohen the Barbarian.
It sounds very AI. Current AIs' ideas of good writing involve weird metaphors, references to sensing things you can't sense, and tricolons.
That's what I think the comment meant.. I was trying to put my finger on the word (other than slop) for the sort of low-effort, gimmicky pastiche that LLM's enable..but it might not exist yet.
Giving objects interiority is a very Pratchett move.
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."
And then the golem suddenly starts writing about goblins all the time?
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.
> This has the cadence of a witty sentence unless you're paying attention and realize it makes no sense.
...was Aaron Sorkin really just AI all along?
Have you seen his computer setup?
It's hotlinked from the AI company's website, so it'll be gone in 6 months.
The really sad thing is that his later works reveal the decline in his mental faculties. They're not anywhere near as clever and incisive as his earlier books.
The weirdest thing about this article, slop, part-slop, or not, is that even the memory of reading Pretchett when I was younger immediately brought me back into a different state of mind.
Even the phrases that don't make sense and the obvious signals of AI writing, like miscounted words, didn't pull me out of the reverie and the reflection of the time when everything that was written came from the mind of a human.
I've never thought about it like this before, but the divide between digital natives and digital naives might be minuscule compared to the divide between people who read the works of other humans and those who constantly live in fear of reading a hallucination.
Hah, so different from my experience - when I was young I was looking more for traditional fantasy and did not enjoy a Discworld book I picked up.
Now that I am in my middle 40s I just got a couple of his books and I am enjoying the Colour of Magic so much right now, having a real blast!
I’m wailing in sadness here knowing that I can’t ever be you, early forties and reading Pratchett for the first time in my life. Alas.
Otherwise no regrets reading him 25 years ago, none at all.
Re-reading deep books when you're older is also a joy: You've forgotten a lot, and you appreciate different things.
The Minas Tirith part of the ending of LOTR hits hard as a 50-year-old man, but as a kid, it was just a lot of pomp.
Hope you get a good reread sometime.
I have just started listening to Discworld during the drive with my Mum as we visit her Mum on the weekends. She enjoyed Mort more than I thought she would (though we also did the first Master and Commander book which she also quite enjoyed, so I guess you never can tell with some people) and now we've started Going Postal which so far I think is probably more directly "funny", closer in tone to Guards Guards which was the only one I'd read.
I am also halfway through Old Gods on my own time. What I find interesting is how different in tone his books can feel. It is a bit of a sprawling question on what to read though, besides "all of it" which is often not so helpful.
One day I will trick her into listening to a Le Guin.
While you can read any of his books out of sequence, I strongly recommend following one of the paths here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Discworl...
While none of the novels are impossible to read without having read the previous ones, many of them build on the themes and the characters that came before, and some of the magic is lost without knowing what came before.
Following that guide for first reading is probably the biggest mistake I have made in my 42 years of being alive.
First time you read it should be in publishing order.
I think it's OK to skip the first two.
Those two Rincewind novels were when the Discworld books were parodies of the fantasy genre curca ~1980. If you aren't aware of the tropes of that genre the jokes don't hit as well.
From Equal Rites onwards Terry realized that the Discworld was much more interesting as a lens to reflect on human society. That idea kept him going for the rest of the series.
I am firmly convinced that, in the long course of time, Pratchett will be recognized as a modern Shakespeare.
What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who's been pinching my beer?
Just recently read 'Making Money' and it was a blast!
Making Money is more instructive on the realities of finance than many entry-level college courses.
So many good memories... reading the Light Fantastic for first time, getting Eric in that big format with many illustrations, the witches, Vimes and the guards during my uni years, Mort, Maurice, and so on and so on... and then... the profound melancholy in the Tiffany Aching books that brings tears to my eyes...
I have read Discworld series 3 times and I'm thinking to read it all again. I wish there were movies based on Discworld but done right.
I think the three mini-series did a fairly decent job.
Pratchett was involved (and appeared) in all three.
The Color of Magic/The Light Fantastic
Hogfather
Going Postal
The Watch was kind of unWatchable for me; which is sad, because I like the actors.
Because Pratchett (any of them) were not involved with it.
There were a couple of cartoon series by Cosgrove-Hall that were _really_ well done. (Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music)
Terry Pratchett has had a lot of success with french people and at least some of the credits should go to Patrick Couton who made an extraordinary work in the translation of the discworld series, doing a great job at maintaining most of the nuances and adapt jokes from the english version.
Yeah this was the way I originally started to read his books. The translations were amazing. When I later started to read the originals, I was surprised at how difficult it was for me to understand: the jokes are really designed for native speakers in a lot of ways, and the vocabulary isn't that simple
In a very literal sense I wouldn’t have been the man I am if 9 year old me hadn’t stumbled onto a Discworld novel in the late 80’s.
Pratchett’s essential humanism shone (and sometimes shouted) through every page and satirically he was biting but never bitter.
He is without doubt and far away my favourite writer (apologies to Iain M Banks though I’m sure he’d have understood).
I’ve re-read Hogfather every Christmas since it came out.
I was an unsure 17 year old who was uncertain how life would turn out, Now I read it as someone with a family and clear sense of who I am, neither of which 17 year old me would have quite believed possible.
GNU Sir Terry Pratchett.
I still haven’t read Raising Steam. One last time to experience a new Discworld novel, I’m saving it for a rainy day.
The font on this website is unreadable.
I read the first 20 or so books in the Discworld series, but I cannot read this website.
The author has since changed the main body font to a slightly more readable serif, but decided (for some reason) to make it comically tiny compared to the size of his headers.
I can't read the last book. Growing up, I was always 6 months to a year away from another Terry Pratchett book. I don't want to live in a world where there is no more of his books left for me to read.
... It's better that way. I cried reading it, because it was very clear from the text how far the disease had progressed.
I’ve never read Pratchett, but the article gave me strong Douglas Adams vibes.
I haven’t read many books though.
My eight year old found a Terry Pratchett book of mine on the shelf the other day. He is a little too young to read them today but I realized I get to enjoy Pratchett all over again through him.
My 15 year old is devouring them right now. She pauses dozens of times every day to tell me the best jokes. I love it.
What makes him too young to read them? You could point him at the children's books too such as Carpet People or the Tiffany Aching books.
Since some people seem to have missed it: the final Discworld book, and Pratchett's deliberate "signing off," is the last Tiffany Aching book (The Shepherd's Crown), not Raising Steam.
I can't really say much about the central theme without giving away a disc-shaking change to the world, because it's about that event and the next generation (Tiffany) carrying on. It's a very sad story, but also meant to be encouraging, and clearly intended to be his last book.
Granny might not be for teenagers but she is the wise for adults
That font is too annoying to read. Probably fine for AIs thou.
Huge fan as a kid and enjoyed even the disc world computer game. But when I pick it up now I find the writing too ponderous to enjoy.
I miss him too.
Even though I had the experiences he discribes with Douglas Adams first before discovering Terry Pratchett.
This felt like a human wrote it to me. It was weird and private. It didn't feel like slop. It felt too niche to be slop.
Is there slop by the author or the site?
Weirdly, I picked up Night Watch just yesterday
Lovely sentiment in the article, which was unfortunately AI generated.
Can we start tagging titles in HN with [AI-generated] or something?
I know some people have no problem with it, but it might help others (like me) to steer clear
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.
How do you know it was AI generated?
Didn't see any reason to assume so, and I enjoyed it, plus it introduced me to this apparently great author. So, AI generated or not, I'm glad it was posted.
These days I'm more thankful that so much of HN is conversation here by interesting people based solely on the article title alone.
Man I would love that tag. As an enjoyer of Pratchett's witty prose, seeing this is just sad.
After Terry Pratchett and later my grandmother died from it, I'm a bit scared of Alzheimer's. There is a lot of evidence that shingles vaccines (particularly Shingrix) reduce dementia risk:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=shingles
Furthermore, there was recently a study (published in Nature) suggesting that lithium deficiency could be a cause, since lithium orotate (a compound that reaches the brain) prevented it in a mouse model of Alzheimer's:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44825326
This also fits with the old observation that regions with more lithium in the water supply tend to have fewer cases of Alzheimer's.
So I now take lithium orotate capsules (with 1mg of elemental lithium) as a daily supplement. I will also get the Shingrix vaccine soon, even though my health insurance doesn't pay for it (it only does so for older adults), but it isn't that expensive.
I find this font surprisingly hard to read (on my phone). Is it just me?
Nope. It's the worst I've seen in a long time.
The author has since changed it, but seems to have made it even smaller, for some reason? Guess I'll just crank my zoom up to 150%...
What a wonderful article! Despite being a huge fantasy fan, Pratchett has not yet come across my nightstand. I think that changes soon! I’m going to stop in my local bookstore and see if they have anything.
Regarding the authors point about current authors, I think Brandon Sanderson is really trying his best to live up to the mantle left behind by the great fantasy authors of the 20th century. Not all of his books that I’ve read have been bangers but considering he writes multiple novels a year across a wide variety of fantasy and sci-fi subgenres, that’s somewhat to be expected.
I know reading isn’t as popular now that screens have become so engrained into our daily lives, but there are absolutely kids out there getting stuck into books and it’s never been a better time to be a writer given the access of the internet and the ability for an author to promote their work and showcase their storytelling creativity through the medium of social media.