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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19483 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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you choose your words on account of the syllable sounds and count and plosive arrangements in addition to their semantic content

I am convinced there is a huge difference in reading interests between those who hear what they read as an inner voice and those who don’t.

In my native tongue, the sounds and rhythms of what I read mean almost nothing to me. I look at it, and the knowledge it encodes appears in my brain. That means I read very quickly and have very little interest in artful writing or poetry, but a great deal of interest in plot and character.

In my second language, for whatever reason I can’t do this. I read much more slowly and care much more about how things are written.

I strongly suspect this is responsible for much of the gap between ‘literary’ forms and appreciations of writing and ‘genre’ standards of writing.

Do you hear these sounds when you read, or later on analysis of the text?

I switch back and forth depending on context. If I'm wanting to extract info and nothing else, I'll skim with minimal subvocalization. Generally I'll partly subvocalize but at a fast, syncopated clip. When I encounter good writing, I give myself the time to taste if fully. When I read over my own writing, I'm very attentive to rhythm.

Even if we're discounting rhythm in AI prose, though, there are many other reasons it's bad. There's a lack of structure at any level, other than randomly inserted lists and stuff, and it's fraught with all sorts of repetitions and other inefficiencies. It blurs meanings, inserts arbitrary detail, hallucinates, forgets stuff, etc. Much of this is difficult to be seen at a paragraph level. It's the kind of thing that builds on itself, until you're left with a tottering spire of slop.

I think one of the main things that makes AI output unreadable for some but not others is how attentive to detail they are. If they don't really care about the overall quality of prose, or say an artwork or anything else, and they don't want to examine it minutely for how the form feeds into substance, for its minute intricacies, then they won't see what AI output is missing.

Even if we're discounting rhythm in AI prose, though, there are many other reasons it's bad. There's a lack of structure at any level, other than randomly inserted lists and stuff, and it's fraught with all sorts of repetitions and other inefficiencies. It blurs meanings, inserts arbitrary detail, hallucinates, forgets stuff, etc. Much of this is difficult to be seen at a paragraph level. It's the kind of thing that builds on itself, until you're left with a tottering spire of slop.

I don't actually disagree with this. I enjoy using it for roleplay and I think it does novel-writing fine, but I had to push my CEO quite hard to stop using it for business communications and info summaries because the structure is always wrong somehow. That is, the structure is appropriate for this kind of communication but not for the actual info being communicated. It's hard to describe what I mean but 'arbitrary detail' describes it well. It's like the student essays I used to mark where you aren't sure if it's incomprehensible because you're tired or because the student can't write.

I'm guessing you have an entirely different view of novels than me, but as aesthetic works I can't see how extreme care in the details isn't essential to the form. Like, if you're just skimming through The Drowned World by Ballard and not subvocalizing the prose or catching all the nuances and fine, structural meanings, then I don't see how you're getting anything like a full appreciation of the story, or even really a partial appreciation. But you think AI can write to that caliber?

And even more confusing is that you think AI can do fine at art but fails at business communique, which, though still demanding, is nevertheless much cruder and more template-driven?

Maybe your second language is stuck in 'the virgin internal voice', and only your native tongue escapes to 'the chad cerebration'.

I like to think both have their place, and it is advantageous to be able to swap between them. Internal monologue writes better prose regardless, whether that is highbrow literary or lowbrow pulp. It reads better too, in my opinion. It's slower, but you get to chew on all the linguistic quirks of a writer's language, as if you were having a conversation with them.

Maybe your second language is stuck in 'the virgin internal voice', and only your native tongue escapes to 'the chad cerebration'.

Oh god, my eyes. I cerebrated your meme and now I can't uncerebrate it...

What's the context of it?

I like to think both have their place, and it is advantageous to be able to swap between them.

I take your point. I actually can't swap in my second language (and really want to find out why) and in my first language I've never really dared try because reading and remembering fast is an ability I value and worry about losing.

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