One More Thing

LLMs represent something I’ve wanted to do since I was about nineteen years old, when I first published Rolling Sixes. There was a thing I was reading about called Natural Language Processing. For more information about Natural Language Processing, ask your AI. It’s what your AI was built on. Its function is using computers to interpret language. It’s computer-assisted linguistics.

Linguistics deals with the study of language, mostly words, because words help us interpret the world around us. With NLP, AI does a very good job of building a cunning edifice of words around the concepts and ideas that make up our world. It doesn’t understand these things. It only builds, its constructions based on mostly statistical methods. LLMs model ideas, but won’t always give an accurate representation of those ideas. People can be dumb in the same way. Words, or the way we interpret them, give us a similar intellectual condition. I’ve had trouble writing this piece because I feel like many are already aware of the confusing nature of rhetoric, but still, many seem to treat the capacity of LLMs as some omniscient Ask Jeeves regardless. AI’s use of language does much to expose the fundamental flaws in our basic comprehension of the world around us. I love to see it.

But that’s beside the point. Natural Language Processing can detect deliberate rhythmic structures of language at a glance and that is a beautiful thing. It’s exactly what I’ve always wanted. Of course there are issues, like how it needs different questioning tactics and a lot of coaching to get a decent picture out of it, but it works.

It’s a massive achievement in technology overall. I think it’s fucking sick that you can directly build images and video out of language now. I can direct my imagination into Veo3 and have something come onscreen in seconds, which is magic. There’s an argument to be made that written prose skips the whole ‘screen’ aspect, but that’s a whole different discussion.

I also think it’s fucking sick that I can now do what I wanted to do when I was nineteen and model, chart, and graph the absolute shit out of my books. I can get full quantitative analyses of my prose, breaking down the syntactic structures I used to build it. I can find out what percentage of my sentences were short vs. long, for example. I can find out how many adverbs I used. I can break down and model the grammatical conventions of a sentence like a decision tree. When I was nineteen I tried to do exactly this for Rolling Sixes, a book you shouldn’t bother reading, by the way. I tried to install some sort of NLP processing thing on my computer but made an absolute mess of it. This was on Linux, there were probably dependencies or something, I don’t know. This was over ten years ago.

Ultimately, I don’t think if I had got it working it would have yielded anything useful besides novelty and perspective. NLP as a field is so much further than that now. Now I can get deep on the juicy stuff, like morphology (fun), and use my own work to learn more about linguistics. This is exactly what I wanted to do.

Hopefully soon I can share some of this information, but to be honest I’m not certain of the veracity of any of it. I’m working to get confirmation, as everyone should when getting results from AI.

Okay. Good-day.

_{This post was not written with any AI consult.}

— hamish, 9:18 am, 27th May 2025