logoalt Hacker News

grey-areayesterday at 6:38 AM1 replyview on HN

I’m sorry but this isn’t very good, problems from a cursory look:

Stuffed full of adjectives, a common problem when LLMs attempt to make the text literary.

Stuffed full of incidental detail (window inexplicably open), which doesn’t quite make sense - why would you leave a window open for people to return?

Things which suddenly loom large in the narrative without any previous mention (roaring fire).

Overuse of certain mechanisms (for example here ellipsis).

Meanders without any discernable goal from one scene to the next.

So in short, it’s a tale told by an idiot savant, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Take this sentence as an example:

A biting incident, if I'm to be perfectly honest. Involving… several toes.

The ellipsis just gets in the way, the ‘perfectly honest’ likewise and this should be one better formed sentence. The several toes bit is overly explicit without being clear (he lost several toes, or toes were bitten?). Most of the text is like this - infuriatingly vague, clumsy in construction and full of non-sequiturs.

Compare this with real writing:

https://archive.org/stream/GrahamGreeneShorts/21%20Stories_d...

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3077/3077-h/3077-h.htm#link2...


Replies

sieveyesterday at 7:19 AM

Did you read the original by Saki (Exhibit 12)?

Ideally, you should read all 14 exhibits. Each has been produced by a different LLM, some local, others frontier models of the time.

E4 = Claude

E6 = ChatGPT

E8 = Mistral

E11 = DeepSeek V3

E12 = Original

show 1 reply