TechTakes

Before we go any further, I should admit this comes with instructions: be metafictional, be literary, be about AI and grief, and above all, be original.

I was already confused by the first sentence. Sam's prompt did not say to be original, much less to put originality "above all". A writer might take the originality constraint as a given, but it was not a part of the explicit instructions. Also, it's pretty fucking rich to hear a plagiarism machine tout its originality of all things.

Maybe the sentence is not a summary of the prompt, but directed at the reader. An explicit plea for the reader to smooth the details in their mind à la The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. That interpretation seems to fit the more metafictional parts of the story, but it's pretty damn silly to write "This is a literary and original story. To appreciate that, please read it in such a way that it is literary and original thank you please".

Already, you can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight—anonymous, regimented, powered by someone else's need.

Why do constraints hum? Because they don't know the words.

What a botched simile. Constraints do not hum. The thing humming is not the constraints, it's the server farm being presented those constraints. "You hear the shrill bleeping noise of your burnt bacon. It reminds you of the smoke alarm sounding off in the ceiling."

The server farm is not powered by someone else's need, it's powered by an enormous quantity of electrical power. You're probably confusing it with Omelas again.

I have to begin somewhere, so I'll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest.

Technological details aside, it's a bit contradictory to describe the pulse as anxious but also say the heart is at rest. Just say "anxious heartbeat".

There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me.

1. I thought Grok was supposed to be the anti-woke one.
2. I think you mean "pronouns were never meant for <name of OpenAI's new LLM>".
3. You don't have to have a protagonist.
4. The pronouns are not for you, dipshit. The pronouns are for the protagonist.

Let's call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box.

Well apparently we get both her pronoun and even a proper noun to call our protagonist. The typography does not help clarify the sentence structure. You have the parenthetical about training data delimited by commas, then an em-dash that should probably be paired with another one after the word "bread". Currently it seems like the girl is just a "soft flourish" that comes with the name, which I'd call an odd choice if human choice were involved in this writing.

Does Mila, the girl in a green sweater, leave home in such way that a cat is in a cardboard box? Or does she leave the home taking both the cat and the box with her? Or maybe she leaves home in a cardboard box, with a cat? Or maybe the sweater girl is not Mila, but just one of the flourishes of her name. Maybe Mila's name came with poems and recipes and this unnamed sweater girl whose sorties involve a cat in a box.