{"id":1135,"date":"2008-10-03T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-10-03T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2008\/10\/03\/short-answer-no\/"},"modified":"2008-10-03T11:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-10-03T18:00:00","slug":"short-answer-no","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2008\/10\/03\/short-answer-no\/","title":{"rendered":"Short Answer: NO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Washington Post<\/span> columnist Gene Weingarten’s September 21st piece, titled “Illiterature: Can a computer judge fiction?”<\/a>, includes 385 words of custom-built slush<\/a>. An excerpt:<\/p>\n

JASMINE AND LAURENCE<\/span><\/p>\n

By Gene Weingarten<\/span><\/p>\n

The two lovers writhed as one, entwined and moist, like a spool of twine that had been dropped in the toilet.<\/p>\n

“Oh, Laurence,” Jasmine moaned, her breath the color of warm air.<\/p>\n

Jasmine had a very complex character arc. Actually, it wasn’t an arc so much as a parabola that could be expressed in Cartesian coordinates as an asymptote with polynomial coefficients, viz., y2 = 4ax, x2 = 4ay. In short, Jasmine was really hard to fathom, the way it’s hard to fathom why you sometimes have to type “www” to access a Web site, but usually you don’t. Also, she had very perky breasts…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ow. Ow. My brain hurts.<\/p>\n

The point of this exercise was to test a software product–advertised on craigslist<\/a>, natch–which promises to “electronically analyze the quality and commercial viability of a work of fiction and prompt changes that will make it better.” The software, of course, proclaimed that the above text showed “emotional depth,” “motivational punch,” and “resonance.”<\/p>\n

Riiight.<\/a><\/p>\n

I don’t even trust the grammar and spell checkers in Microsoft Word. I have absolutely no confidence that editorial judgment, a much more complex undertaking, can be automated. Unless, of course, we’re talking post-singularity<\/a>, and then all bets are off.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, I’ll stick with good ol’ human<\/span> critiques of my work. Because when I get published, they’re<\/span> going to be the ones buying my books.<\/p>\n

~CKL<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten’s September 21st piece, titled “Illiterature: Can a computer judge fiction?”, includes 385 words of custom-built slush. An excerpt: JASMINE AND LAURENCE By Gene Weingarten The two lovers writhed as one, entwined and moist, like a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[32,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sci-tech","category-writing"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}