{"id":19538,"date":"2022-10-04T09:26:02","date_gmt":"2022-10-04T16:26:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=19538"},"modified":"2022-10-04T09:26:26","modified_gmt":"2022-10-04T16:26:26","slug":"sudowrite-and-the-bathrobe-of-pleasure-without-consequence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2022\/10\/04\/sudowrite-and-the-bathrobe-of-pleasure-without-consequence\/","title":{"rendered":"Sudowrite and the bathrobe of pleasure without consequence"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I just took a look at the demo for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sudowrite.com\/\">Sudowrite<\/a>, an AI-based text-generation tool to help fiction writers. (You can sign up for a free trial; after the trial period, it costs $10\/month.)<\/p>\r\n<p>I find it mildly intriguing, but not something I\u2019m likely to use. But I\u2019m amused by a couple of things in the introductory tutorial\/demo.<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>At one point in the tutorial (I assume that this text was not written by the AI), it says \u201cIt's as if different versions of you in parallel universes were writing the next few paragraphs.\u201d To which my response is: no, it\u2019s as if an AI were writing the next few paragraphs. (\u2026Wait, maybe in an alternate universe I\u2019m an AI?)<\/li>\r\n  <li>You can select some text (such as a noun referring to an object in your story) and click the Describe button, and the AI generates sensory descriptions of whatever it was you selected. As prompted by the tutorial, I selected the phrase \u201cjacquard bathrobe\u201d and clicked Describe. It gave me a few reasonably serviceable descriptions (though a few of them seem to me to be phrased more like something from a text adventure than like prose fiction) for sight and smell and touch, but I was not expecting the one for taste: \u201cThe bathrobe is slightly damp to the touch. It tastes like a herb-infused lotion. It's light and clean, like a glass of crisp water, like a crisp summer day.\u201d<\/li>\r\n  <li>In addition to the sensory-based descriptions, there\u2019s also a section of \u201cmetaphorical\u201d descriptions, which provides this description of the bathrobe: \u201cIt was a terrycloth redolent of cr\u00e8me de menthe and other dark pleasures, luxuries of form, pleasure without consequence. It radiated a soft inner glow, like moonlight on a summer lake.\u201d<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","category-writing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19538"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19538\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19540,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19538\/revisions\/19540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}