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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   24610 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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Ulysses is almost the worst possible comparison to use here, as I suspect the mental process that produced it is not dissimilar to an LLM with its temperature set too high. Sure, some people claim it's a masterwork of literature, but whether this reflects some true ineffable artistic vision or not, I doubt I could tell the difference between one of its pages and some random junk spit out by an LLM that's past its context window.

More relevant to me is that LLMs are not going to produce the next Dungeon Crawler Carl anytime soon. And that's a shame!

Perhaps not DCC, but they're doing pretty well.

A LitRPG author I know says that LLM-written works have gone from making up 10% of the genre half a year ago to 35% now, mentioning "Overpowered Level 1 Mage" and "All Jobs and Classes!" as two works making the authors lots of money (six figures for the latter).

LLMs have also taken over writing successful blurbs. If you read a lot, you'll see these even for human-generated works. Apparently the LLM ones sell better. I don't know whether a dedicated marketing person could write a better one, but it's a complaint I see often from authors that their own blurbs do worse.

Good to hear! So people and tools are getting better at building the scaffolding that lets LLMs maintain a coherent plot, I assume? I'm an uncultured loser who reads plenty of random LitRPGs, so I'm probably in the target audience. Contra @Amadan, I'd say it's still very much an open question just how large of a capability gap there is between writing middle-of-the-road LitRPG slop and reaching the pinnacle of "pop-culture trash" like DCC. Maybe it's just a few model releases away, maybe it'll take a decade. We'll see!

There are a few different things going on with Ulysses that contribute to why it's achieved such an exalted status.

On a "macro", conceptual level: you can think of it as an illustration of Clement Greenberg's thesis of the "flatness of the canvas", just applied to literature rather than painting. One of the dominant philosophical themes in early 20th century art was the "self-consciousness" of the art object: the work of art taking its own formal construction as its subject matter and embracing its nature as an object of artifice, rather than presenting itself as a transparent representation of an external subject matter (in the way that e.g. classical representational painting aims to be a transparent window to a scene depicting physical objects in 3D space). Abstract painting forced the viewer to consciously acknowledge the fact that they were looking at paint on a flat canvas. Ulysses does something similar with words, it embraces the "textuality of the text": treating words as a pliable and fluid medium that don't necessarily have to be constrained by the traditional logic of representation. It plays with this concept in a bunch of different ways without just falling apart into a string of random words. But it also pushed stream-of-consciousness writing to its limits and foregrounded the internal psychological states of its characters in a way that no novel had ever really done before. And it's also replete with explicit and not-so-explicit references to the Western literary canon, like a puzzle to be decoded. Basically it's operating on all these different levels at once and still managing to weave it all into a coherent whole.

On a "micro", technical level: it's kind of just obviously a work of intense and surpassing beauty, Joyce was unmatched as a prose stylist:

—Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: Great was my admiration in listening to the remarks addressed to the youth of Ireland a moment since by my learned friend. It seemed to me that I had been transported into a country far away from this country, into an age remote from this age, that I stood in ancient Egypt and that I was listening to the speech of some highpriest of that land addressed to the youthful Moses.
His listeners held their cigarettes poised to hear, their smokes ascending in frail stalks that flowered with his speech. [...]
—Why will you Jews not accept our culture, our religion and our language? You are a tribe of nomad herdsmen: we are a mighty people. You have no cities nor no wealth: our cities are hives of humanity and our galleys, trireme and quadrireme, laden with all manner of merchandise furrow the waters of the known globe. You have but emerged from primitive conditions: we have a literature, a priesthood, an agelong history and a polity.
Nile.
Child, man, effigy.
By the Nilebank the babemaries kneel, cradle of bulrushes: a man supple in combat: stonehorned, stonebearded, heart of stone.
—You pray to a local and obscure idol: our temples, majestic and mysterious, are the abodes of Isis and Osiris, of Horus and Ammon Ra. Yours serfdom, awe and humbleness: ours thunder and the seas. Israel is weak and few are her children: Egypt is an host and terrible are her arms. Vagrants and daylabourers are you called: the world trembles at our name.
A dumb belch of hunger cleft his speech. He lifted his voice above it boldly:
—But, ladies and gentlemen, had the youthful Moses listened to and accepted that view of life, had he bowed his head and bowed his will and bowed his spirit before that arrogant admonition he would never have brought the chosen people out of their house of bondage, nor followed the pillar of the cloud by day. He would never have spoken with the Eternal amid lightnings on Sinai’s mountaintop nor ever have come down with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw.
He ceased and looked at them, enjoying a silence.

Disagree there. I like Dungeon Crawler Carl for what it is–very entertaining pop culture trash, which I say lovingly. It is reminiscent of the old pulps (love me some Howard and Lovecraft, but elegant wordsmiths or deep miners of the human condition, they were not). But DCC is exactly the kind of story an LLM can or soon will be able to churn out– some metaplot and a bunch of recurring characters distinct enough to kind of care when they die, plowing through absurd bullshit choose-your-own-adventure scenarios and RNG-table boss battles rife with gross-out humor. There is no genius there except in the marketing and not much originality. I'd say Dinniman is a moderately better writer than the vast majority of writers on RoyalRoad or any LLM, but most of the former could already be replaced by the latter.

Can't comment on Ulysses as I haven't read it, but what else I have read of James Joyce was not particularly to my taste but clearly the product of a human mind that is not (yet) replicable by an LLM.

But DCC is exactly the kind of story an LLM can or soon will be able to churn out

I've got to disagree. Have you read any more recent stuff on RoyalRoad? For whatever reason, AI writing has exploded on there in the past couple months, and it's very easy to tell which authors are using it (even when they say they aren't). And not in a good way. I wish I could just get an LLM to pump out pulp to my specifications, but if anything I think the newest models have regressed on prose, and they were never even mediocre.

The problem -- and it's been the problem since R1 -- is repetitive structure and cliche. Most of these aren't awful, per se, the issue is that instead of getting one per thousand words -- already enough to get on my nerves -- the model will stuff three of them into a paragraph. Into every paragraph. It's unreadable.

Most of the authors on RoyalRoad aren't very good, that's for sure, but they know that and their prose is appropriately simple and unambitious as a result; it doesn't call attention to itself. LLM writing is probably better on a technical level, but it's nowhere near as good as it (seems to) think it is, so it refuses to get out of its own way.

(This might be a prompting or process issue? I can't be certain other authors with better techniques aren't just slipping under my radar. If someone thinks they have an example of actually good AI writing, I'm willing to give it a shot and change my mind if I agree. Like I said, I really wish this worked.)

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