this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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To be fair, thats a positive point for the LLMs that shows even at their worst most generic and soulless, they still write better slop than edgelord hyperobsessed children. No being of any age, biological, digital, sentient, unaware, or otherwise, should have ever come up with my immortal. Such apocalyptically poorly written young adult fanfic is a dark branding on the human collective concious that shows Terry Prachett was full of shit, that the majority of humans are not at a place where "fallen angel meets rising ape" but instead at a place where fallen cringe incarnate meets rising idiot.
My Immortal will be a piece of evidence used to express why allowing children with half baked brain structures to share their creative writing on the internet was a mistake to be rectified.
An LLM will write in the style of my immortal just fine if you ask it to.
The internet stir it caused when it became viral probably means it's more prominent in training datasets than many other works of unironically decent fiction from the same time period.
Writing "My Immortal" in 2006 when nothing quite like it had ever been written before, is a (possibly unintentional) stroke of genius. Writing "My Immortal" after it's already been written is worthless.
I'm reminded of my previous comment back on an unrelated subreddit talking about the Eye of Argon. Obviously that wasn't as structural insane as My Immortal but I think the same principle holds to a degree:
"With a decent editor and several further drafts it could have been a solid, fun, entirely forgettable Conan pastiche. Instead, it's the Eye of Argon."