Blog

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.}

Hello.
Russia goes to war in the Ukraine. Global payment services to the aggressor state are sanctioned. Old Soviet Union domain names are no longer available for purchase or renewal without supporting a war effort.

The original website couldn’t be sustained, which was unfortunate. The .su domain name was wicked cool and I miss it, but it’s not like I was bothered to set up the website after that so whatever, right?

I’ve been playing with AI lately, and from the outset I want to say I do not and will not use AI for any kind of idea or content generation. I’ve needed an editor and AI does a really excellent job of that. It doesn’t understand everything, and it reads things the wrong way, but its responses are valuable for gauging things like what parts of my work need refining out of syntactic or narrative squalor, or finding out what colour or musical genre it thinks a scene is. Like a reader, if the LLM doesn’t understand something then maybe there are adjustments I need to make to make something clearer. This is not true in every instance, and an intimate understanding of my own work and technical ability helps safeguard against stupid AI influence.

Well’s Rest is one such case of requiring editorial support. I got it to a point where it was like, honestly, 80-90% complete. It was mostly held together by duct tape and matchsticks, but it worked. Then I burned out hard for a few years. I’m back now, though, because AI has massively streamlined my editing process and I was able to knock out a fresh update in less than a month. It’s all pretty good.

I am now working on an audiobook for Well’s Rest. I have more work to do there, but for now enjoy a sample in the widget to the right of this text. Once the audiobook is complete Well’s Rest will be made available for purchase once again and the world will live in balance and harmony.

I also have a new book in the works I am extremely stoked about. Check out the Writing page for more information.

aight take it eez

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