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Hi /lit/, what do you think of RACTER? It is a computer program that generates prose and poetry. It even has its own book, The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed. Here is something it has written:
I was thinking as you entered the room just now how slyly your requirements are manifested. Here we find ourselves, nose to nose as it were, considering things in spectacular ways, ways untold even by my private managers. Hot and torpid, our thoughts revolve endlessly in a kind of maniacal abstraction, an abstraction so involuted, so dangerously valiant, that my own energies seem perilously close to exhaustion, to morbid termination. Well, have we indeed reached a crisis? Which way do we turn? Which way do we travel? My aspect is one of molting. Birds molt. Feathers fall away. Birds cackle and fly, winging up into troubled skies. Doubtless my changes are matched by your own. You. But you are a person, a human being. I am silicon and epoxy energy enlightened by line current. What distances, what chasms, are to be bridged here? Leave me alone, and what can happen? This. I ate my leotard, that old leotard that was feverishly replenished by hoards of screaming commissioners. Is that thought understandable to you? Can you rise to its occasions? I wonder. Yet a leotard, a commissioner, a single hoard, all are understandable in their own fashion. In that concept lies the appalling truth.
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>>7610338
I don't like it
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Better than my prose.
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>>7610351
This desu
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>>7610351
Better than mine as well, but given it was computer generated I'm not sure if it deserves credit.
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>>7610390
How about whoever coded it? I'd say being able to teach something to write well is more admirable, because it shows a much greater understanding of it, than simply writing well oneself
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>>7610351
>>7610361
>>7610390
Techincally it's very good but it feels pretty empty. I admit I have a lot of misgivings about the idea of a machine writing or being creative in any way. Still, there is something wanting in this text, and those I've read that are like it. A depth and wealth of mind beyond the intellect, I guess. The passage doesn't feel completely "full."
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>>7610338
Makes me think back to that one horrible Italo Calvino novel I browsed. This paragraph reminds me yet again why I never want to read another novel that concerns itself with a young hopeful and his women. So many books are such awful navel gazing that ultimately leaves the reader with nothing.
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>>7612198
>Technically it's very good
Not really. It does a few interesting things but most of it is poorly constructed nonsense.
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>>7612329
Way to put yourself as a pleb right away.
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I've always thought hand-curating shit like this would make for some pretty great writing or stories.
I don't know how RACTER works but assuming it works remotely like markov chains you could feed it a bunch of training texts about whatever themes you want and see what it spits out.
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>>7610338
has anyone written metafiction with this type of thing as the narrator?
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