"The Best Essay" by Paul Graham - eviltoast

In which a man disappearing up his own asshole somehow fails to be interesting.

  • self@awful.systemsM
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    10 months ago

    a few posters over there have even called it out as reading like it’s AI generated. it doesn’t entirely have the tone for it, but paully g plagiarizing an essay by having GPT generate it and editing it to sound slightly more like something he’d write almost makes sense — it’d explain why this thing is so fucking long but doesn’t seem to say a damn thing. the problem is, a lot of his pre-gpt writing is exactly like that too.

    • gerikson@awful.systems
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      10 months ago

      It’s fascinating to see how the narrative (at least in tech circles) has gone in the last 6 months or so: from “I typed a prompt and got a college-level essay” to “no way this [rich][powerful][respected] VC could write anything so incoherent, he must have used an LLM”

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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        10 months ago

        or alternately

        This sounds like how I would write when I was on adderall. I mean, what the hell is this statement?

        assholes like this are giving adderall a bad name

      • swlabr@awful.systems
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        10 months ago

        Pretty sure if I asked ChatGPT about essay writing tips or what the best essay ever looked like, it would be more coherent than this rancid melange.