>>EdNote: LLMs are a specific kind of AI trained on massive amounts of text data to generate and understand natural language. All LLMs are AI, but not all AI are LLMs. Or, to put it another way, all cocker spaniels are dogs, but not all dogs are cocker spaniels.<<
Anyways, I shared my writers notebook post in order to set up a couple follow-ups to show the degree to which LLMs have advanced. First, I fed my notebook extracts into Grok, an LLM created by xAI, and asked Grok to create a story using all these fragments. The result was something of a mashup that included everything but didn't flow as well as I might have liked. Next, after a few suggestions, the story was tightened and more satisfying. Here is the result, with a few minor edits.
The Song of the Matrix
He walked with a mind whose feet teetered under the weight of a thousand rickety tensions. Each step seemed borrowed from gravity, each thought a fragile splinter.
At dusk, he entered The Power Café. The place pretended at elegance—“The Magic of Northern Italy” promised on the chalkboard—but inside, the mood was thin. A slogan peeling from the wall declared: A waist is a terrible thing to mind. Below it, graffiti taunted: Why are Texans so Austintatious?
He sat alone. Around him, voices hummed with the same desperate cadence. One man declared, “If I’m so successful, why am I so lonely?” Another joked about maxing out his Monkey card. They laughed, but the laughter was brittle, stereotypes from pre-fabricated lexicons. The great battle for significance, he thought, is really just a battle against irrelevance.
On the table, he opened his notebook. He scrawled a title: The Four Atomic Sons of Madame Fauvre. Below it, a half-formed product idea: Freestyle Frost Flicker—something to clean the ice from windows. Then a single word: Opinionitis.
He lingered over it. The disease of the age, he mused: the inability to hear without judging, to think without condemning. He recalled the formula of Dr. de Bono—Positive, Interesting, Negative. If only people could suspend their judgments long enough to notice the interesting. A mature mind learns to wait, he thought.
Someone quoted David Ogilvie nearby—The greatest sin in advertising is to be boring. Another added, “The second greatest sin is not agreeing with Ogilvie.” They chuckled. He didn’t. He thought instead of creativity and courage, of content and form, of how a man who needs nothing can afford to risk everything.
His blood, it seemed, had turned to wine long ago, and it sang through his veins with nowhere to pour itself. He remembered Jimmy Johnson’s words to his team after the Super Bowl: This feeling of love that you share right now you will have the rest of your lives. He envied that permanence.
Instead, he carried the melancholy of all things done. Aldrin’s phrase had haunted him ever since the astronaut returned from the moon. The footprints we left were not ours but for all mankind. Yet his own footprints felt erased, unclaimed.
The thought of her surfaced. She had lived by inner rules so strict they bound her tighter than chains. In the end, she had chosen permanence over pain. Suicide, they said, was a permanent solution to a temporary problem. But who was he to call her problems temporary?
He closed his notebook. Leaving the café and stepped into the night. The street lamps flickered, frost blooming on their glass. For a moment, he whispered a prayer, almost a vow: How to get blessed—be a blessing.
And then he walked on, the song of the Matrix still playing, a melody heard only by those willing to listen without judgment.
No comments:
Post a Comment