Notes on the artificial style of writing

In which the artificial style of writing encounters the iron hand of fashion AI makes writing more bland, as reported by NBC News. This will accelerate the rate at which readers demand new forms of writing that AI can’t yet (or ever) achieve. There’s been plenty of talk about how AI caters to the economic requirement for efficiency (aka reduced labour costs), but there’s another very obvious economic requirement too: novelty. AI handles novelty of combination very well. Just try asking it for a story about a unicycling giraffe who learns quantum mechanics and escapes from a zoo in the Alpha Centuri star system — it won’t refuse you. That kind of combinatorial novelty it handles with aplomb. At no point will it tell you this is a bad idea. On the contrary, “You might consider how the unicycle itself acts as a metaphor for the observer effect,” says Google’s Gemini as it eggs me on. But it doesn’t produce novelty of expression. Despite the arguable novelty of this scenario, the…