{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Nostalgebraist's Hydrogen Jukeboxes","description":" In conclusion, the only good theory of taste is Nostalgebraist\u2019s. He wrote a post called Hydrogen Jukeboxes, analyzing the literary output of an AI called R1. This AI tried hard to write good fiction, which was part of the problem. It crammed its stories with what Nostalgebraist called (stealing a term from Ginsberg) the \u201ceyeball kick\u201d - a flashy stylistic move that immediately catches the reader\u2019s attention and \u201cwows\u201d them. Here are examples - some from R1, others from an experimental OpenAI model trained specifically for fiction-writing: \u201cThere is a prompt like a spell: write a story about AI and grief, and the rest of this is scaffolding\u2014protagonists cut from whole cloth, emotions dyed and draped over sentences.\u201d \u201cWhen the jar of Sam\u2019s laughter shattered, Eli found the sound pooled on the floorboards like liquid amber, thick and slow. It had been their best summer, that laughter\u2014ripe with fireflies and porch wine\u2014now seeping into the cracks, fermenting.\u201d \u201cAnd so I built a Mila and a Kai and a field of marigolds that never existed. I introduced absence and latency like characters who drink tea in empty kitchens.\u201d \u201cThe morning her shadow began unspooling from her feet, Clara found it coiled beneath the kitchen table like a serpent made of smoke.\u201d Nostalgebraist and another writer, Coagulopath, catalogue some of the most common AI eyeball kicks, each occurring across multiple LLM models: \u201cAn overwhelming reliance on cliche. Everything is a shadow, an echo, a whisper, a void, a heartbeat, a pulse, a river, a flower\u2014you see it spinning its Rolodex of 20-30 generic images and selecting one at random.\u201d \u201cConjunctions combining one thing that is abstract and\/or incorporeal with another thing that is concrete and\/or sensory.\u201d \u201cRepetitive writing. Once you've seen about ten R1 samples you can recognize its style on sight. The way it italicises the last word of a sentence. Its endless "not thing x, but thing y" parallelisms\u2026the way how, if you don't like a story, it's almost pointless reprompting it: you just get the same stuff again, smeared around your plate a bit.\u201d   https:\/\/www.astralcodexten.com\/p\/nostalgebraists-hydrogen-jukeboxes ","author_name":"Astral Codex Ten Podcast","author_url":"http:\/\/sscpodcast.libsyn.com\/website","html":"