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NaNoWriMo gets AI sponsor, says not writing your novel with AI is ‘classist and ableist’ (pivot-to-ai.com)

submitted 2 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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[–] self@awful.systems 26 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (19 children)

so I clicked through to the barely veiled advertisement on NaNoWriMo’s blog:

Rephrase by ProWritingAid is a brand-new feature meant for writers like you. You can highlight any sentence, click Rephrase, and generate a new sentence. Shorten or lengthen a sentence, change the tone to formal or informal, or add sensory detail.

Here’s a boring sentence I wrote: “Quinn entered the dark and cold forest.”

And here’s a sentence Rephrase gave me: “Quinn shivered as he stepped into the cold, dark forest, the air thick with the scent of damp earth.”

I can build off that! Now I’m more excited to write this scene that was feeling bland.

like fuck me that’s somehow even more bland, but it’s longer so you’re closer to that 50,000 words you need to write ~~so you can nut~~

I’m not a particularly good writer, but here’s some advice my human brain hallucinated without burning down a rainforest:

nobody fucking “steps into” a forest, what the fuck is that? if it’s an important place, describe it geographically. describe how the atmosphere and scenery change as Quinn approaches the forest. and since this is NaNoWriMo and you’re in a hurry, you can go with a placeholder like // TODO: sober up and do some basic research on what forests and their surrounding areas are usually like for authenticity, lorem ipsum Deloris shrdlu
this fucker started shivering? is he naked? is the forest frozen in a way the surrounding area isn’t? if so maybe write that cause it sounds more interesting than this bland shit.
maybe I live in a particularly dry place, but my brain isn’t rendering “the scent of damp earth” or why it’d sit thick in the air. I don’t think that’s what the forests I’ve been in smell like though — they smell like trees looking to fuck. but is Quinn the type of character who’d even give a fuck about any of this? maybe he lives in the forest and none of these smells are new. maybe he’s currently half a foot tall so the smell of the damp earth’s very relevant to him. the LLM doesn’t know so it filled in the blandest shit possible instead!

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Off the top of my head:

"Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. His knife was dripping blood. He was whistling, off-key."

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)

"Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. Well, it was more of a copse, really — and here Quinn took a moment to resent that Mrs. Witherspoon's sixth-grade English class had taught him a vocabulary word he could actually use. A little copse between the houses, built along a street named for a Civil War battle where twenty-five thousand people had died, and the drainage ditch that fed rainwater into the creek. But as forests go, it would have to do. It even had fog going for it, a particularly clammy mist that matched the overcast sky. The mud was frozen beneath his sneakers. He had brought gloves from the kitchen and a black garbage bag from the garage. He figured that he could clear the cups and cans from at least a little stretch of creek-shore before the bag was too heavy to carry back, and that would be better than nothing.

"At the house, he knew, his parents were still fighting.

"At least, he thought, they made it to the day after Christmas."

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

"Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. It was almost dawn. He was running late. He hoped that his friends had saved him a place. Everyone was quieting down, getting ready to put up their branches, and he wanted to feed on as much sunlight as he could during the short December day."

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 2 months ago

"Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. Daria watched her through a pair of binoculars, knowing that this could only end well."

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago

I spent a good chunk of my 20s obsessed with building a co-writing web platform I called PlotPlant. I really want to riff off what you did here, but I'm scared it will reignite my interest in the project and I'll just add to the pile of unfinished work

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