[vintagedave]

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.

[bombcar]

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.

[kuerbel]

I don't know about male teenagers but teen girls read copious amounts of a genre called romantasy.

[Lalabadie]

Pratchett himself would be very ill-defined if you limited yourself to naming a genre.

[bombcar]

Pratchett appeared to enjoy writing cross-genre, and “tricking” people into reading things they’d not normally read.

[rogual]

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.

[vintagedave]

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.

[neogodless]

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.

[mpalmer]

"a kind of paper that already looks guilty"

[onraglanroad]

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.

[npinsker]

That’s not looking “guilty” though. Paper cannot be guilty, only humans.

[scubbo]

There are plenty of valid criticisms of the article, but this isn't one of them. I'd be embarrassed to call myself a fan of Pratchett while failing to recognize dramatic anthropomorphization (indeed, Pratchett was where teenaged-me first learned the word)

[vintagedave]

Of course it can. That's writing.

[eplatzek]

I fully disagree. This felt human.

[st3phvee]

The author admitted to using AI.

[isoprophlex]

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.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> 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."

[ForceBru]

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.

[simonw]

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...

[ChrisMarshallNY]

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

[rogual]

Are the comments really saying that? That the person isn't allowed to think it's beautiful?

[ForceBru]

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.

[rogual]

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.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> 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.

[ForceBru]

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.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

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.