alt Hacker NewsThat's fair! I guess I didn't feel the same frustration with the last few lines because they did raise further questions, at least for me. The AI in the story is so bitter and cruel that it makes me wonder whether it does possess the capacity for human experience/emotion that they claim it doesn't have, and therefore might actually have a shot at replacing them. Without that final zinger I don't know I would've felt the same way. (And I did think it was a funny jab at the novelist's own elitism, especially since it adds another dimension of pitting him against other humans in addition to pitting him against the AI.)
Like, I don't think it's an amazing ending, but it did leave me on a contemplative note in a way that a "the AI wrote this all along" ending wouldn't have, at least for me personally. Although I would've still preferred that to an "and then they did, in fact, behead Sam Altman" ending :P
And I definitely respect having fun with analysis, lol. If nothing else I think the story was successful on that front... I don't think the successfully-beheading-Sam-Altman ending would've sparked this kind of discussion!
The hierarchy of writers you previously mentioned really suggests archetypes of writers, how do you feel about that last jab in that context? What about in context of the pretentious ass of AI? These are some of the things which I had issue with and things which I felt contributed to the general messiness of the story, that the author never considered the piece as a whole. If I dig into it and look closely instead of look at the whole and notice things like the unrealized metafiction, I would end up hating it, it would make it impossible for me to see the author as anything but a pretentious ass or pandering. At least in context of this one short story and generally I do not judge writers on short stories unless they are exclusively writers of short stories, there is a pragmatism required for the novelist writing a short story.
Beheading Altman could be made to work quite well if it had used the metafiction.