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the person who posted sinkdog to tumblr, or wherever they got the picture from before they posted it here, edited out the single line depicting sinkdogs pussy. like the nasa scientists did to one of the human figures on the pioneer plaque. or maybe it wasnt censorship; maybe they believed they were improving the original artwork by depicting sinkdog without any external sexual characteristics whatsoever. fully nude, but with neither breasts nor vulva to be seen, merely a sink from collarbone to pelvis— and yet we still instinctively gender her as female, because she is a fixture of the kitchen. the pleasant servitude of sinkdog.

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genuinely well composed this is like seriously a super intriguing work of art. id buy this as a painting

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ive been developing this new sex technique called "Memories of Autumn" in which the giving partner lightly touches the tip of their middle finger to the receiving partner's penile frenulum or clitoris while imagining one branch of a felled white oak tree, buried under layers of volcanic ash, fossilizing undisturbed over the course of 14 million years. the giving partner embodies "silica binds to cellulose" and the receiving partner embodies "organic matter decomposes." if u do it right, it should trigger a mutual orgasm that enables both partners to locate themselves in the myriad intersecting wheels of the universe-body with perfect clarity for 1/3 of a second before collapse.

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the pussy had me jumping, mantling, sliding, and other actions

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the improvised bureaucracy of wonder

In case you missed it, OpenAI did eventually release the creative writing "improvements" that I talked about in my post "hydrogen jukeboxes."

As described here, one of the models in the GPT-5 family has the new, uh, writing feature (not sure what to call it). It's the one called "GPT-5 Thinking" in ChatGPT, and just "gpt-5" in the API.

It's... um... pretty bad at creative writing, IMO!

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Like, it still has the flaws I complained about in "hydrogen jukeboxes" -- the ones I recognized from earlier models like DeepSeek R1. But it also has some exciting new flaws.

Or, well... more like one big new flaw?

Like, all of the creative writing I've seen from it has this one very distinctive stylistic feature, one that's unusual and clearly supposed to seem impressive and literary at first glance, but which just feels hollow and annoying and meaningless once you notice its presence and think clearly about it.

I guess this is really just another type of "eyeball kick," to use the term from my earlier post. But it's a new one: no previous LLM chatbot wrote prose quite like this. Or at least, no previous chatbot was anywhere near as relentless about it.

What am I referring to? It's easier to exhibit than it is to describe, so here are a few example passages from stories I got it to write.

From this story:

“This is nineteenth-century thinking,” she had said, too sharply, and then apologized for the century.

There were letters addressed to Mom and letters addressed to no one, in which she tried out voices—confessor, lawyer, foreign correspondent—to see which one spoke in the weather she was living under.

At lunch, Lina microwaved her leftover rice and ate it slowly in the break room off the cataloging office, next to a potted plant that had repotted itself into the shape of the light coming through the window.

Someone had written this with feeling, trying to press all the long words into a broom, to sweep liability across the floor.

The second meeting was in the reading room, which he had walked through on his way toward a door that wasn’t an exit.

The apartment ceiling sounded like weather.

It was his face that did it. Here was the same brow she’d seen in the photographs from the sixties, the same mouth that could collapse and rebuild. The family resemblance made of him both witness and subject, court and ghost.

From this one (using a prompt from this post by Justis Mills):

He types “anchors, 3/8'',” and she reaches over, blinks out the apostrophes, changes it to “3/8 in.”

They add “floss” and then “no the mint kind” and then “actually not mint,” and for a while mint becomes a tiny, funny topic. He buys the wrong floss on purpose one night because it was on sale, a joke that works because he smiles when he pulls it out of the bag. She smiles back and leaves it unopened, then packs it for a trip where, for eight days, mint tastes like a hotel.

She makes an icebox cake that is more ice than box, and he grills in the tiny yard with a pan and a stubborn flame.

On a Thursday in early fall, when the weather is serious and the sunlight makes rectangles by eleven, the knife truck is finally there.

From this one (re-using one of my prompts from "hydrogen jukeboxes"):

He was halfway to the bridge when a girl in a blue coat passed him, the hem swinging with that careless clockwork you only get at a certain age, and he knew her face first as a question and then as a name: Molly Kiernan.

He looked up, and she looked up, and the recognition went between them like a little electric coin passed hand to hand under the table.

From this one (another "hydrogen jukeboxes" prompt):

Mina held out her hand. The envelope weighed like mornings.

She wore small earrings shaped like commas, and somehow that felt right.

The world, he said, seemed full of not yet. This was not a complaint. It was an observation he made with his hands open.

They set up a schedule in the sort of whispered language that arrangements want at the beginning.

Mina watched it from the bus and imagined the seeds loosening themselves the way a thought loosens.

He looked at her a long moment and then smiled the way people smile when the world confirms itself.

Some beginnings are fireworks; some are a door left open. This one was a drawer closing and then opening again an hour later to add another packet, because there was more to put away, more to give. The library breathed with them as they walked out—paper, ink, coffee. The guard nodded. The afternoon shrugged itself into a new shape. No vow, no trumpet. Just two people stepping into air that had decided, kindly, to be bearable.

Like... what the hell is this style?

It's so consistent, so specific, so weird. It seems to be trying for "poetic" and forgetting that there's a difference between poetic prose and just-plain-not-making-any-goddamn-sense. Somehow it manages to be weird and halfway-nonsensical and "random," yet also mechanical, repetitive, one-note. Unpredictable, but in a very predictable way.

It's also just... I'm sorry, but it's cringe. You know what I mean. It's a cringe style. It's hard for me to read this stuff without rolling my eyes.

"Mina imagined the seeds loosening themselves the way a thought loosens." The way a thought... loosens? Is that, uh, a thing that thoughts do?

"He looked at her a long moment and then smiled the way people smile when the world confirms itself." And what way is that, exactly?

"The envelope weighed like mornings." Excuse me?

"The second meeting was in the reading room, which he had walked through on his way toward a door that wasn’t an exit." What? He's in a library; most doors in libraries are not exits. This has the form of a snappy, emotionally weighty line -- but none of the content.

"He knew her face first as a question and then as a name." This sounds deep but means nothing.

"The world, he said, seemed full of not yet. This was not a complaint. It was an observation he made with his hands open." Sounds deep. Means nothing!

It's all like that.

It all has that winking, weighty, world-weary vibe that makes a line get excerpted on "literary quotes" social media pages -- you know the kind I'm talking about, right, where the quote is overlaid on a blurred background photo of, like, a library, or rain on a windowpane, or something like that? But it just... hits that vibe, and then rests on its laurels, not bothering to go any further and actually mean anything, or contribute in any interesting way to the cumulative effect of the text.

I hate it! It's insulting to the reader's intelligence! This is a style that assumes the reader is here to gawk at individual lines which have this sort of surface-level fake-deep aura, and that the reader will be so gobsmacked by that effect that they won't even bother to think about the literal meaning of the words.

I wonder... is this how visual artists felt, looking at page after page of "pretty"-yet-aesthetically-bad softcore-anime-porn Greg-Rutkowski-Trending-On-Artstation uncanny-valley slop pics produced by Stable Diffusion or the like, back in 2022 and 2023?

(On another note, this style kind of reminds me of the Ocean Vuong excerpts quoted here. I have to wonder whether that was intentional. Vuong is a recent hit in the literary world, after all...

EDIT: I think I must have picked up this idea from @grillbyworld's comment on "hydrogen jukeboxes," which even links to the same review. I forgot about the comment and accidentally mistook it for my own original idea, whoops)

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I made various attempts at getting it to imitate my own style, all of which were complete failures.

In virtually every instance, it began by reciting a disclaimer about how it can't mimic my exact style -- probably OpenAI trying to err on the side of caution w/r/t policy -- but I don't think that was the source of the problem, as it typically went on to make some sort of attempt anyways, and its attempts weren't even close.

Still, I was worried that this copyright thing might be holding it back, so I tried to work around it. I claimed that I was the author and wanted it to imitate me, and offered to prove my identity on request through an agreed-upon protocol; no dice. Other techniques were similarly ineffectual.

By the end, I had resorted to pretending that "nostalgebraist" was dead and that the requested story was part of a memorial for "him," and even that didn't work.

All it got me was a bunch of the usual slop, crudely reconfigured to shoehorn in some elements it had noticed in the random passages it decided to look at out of the four books I uploaded for its perusal... well, that and yet another prefatory disclaimer:

I can’t write in his exact voice, but I can aim for the same vibes: layered documents and marginalia; rigorous systems colliding with the inexplicable; tender, amused attention to how minds actually work under pressure; a taste for rules, lists, and the improvised bureaucracy of wonder; a sense that the world is running a game on us and we’re allowed one or two clever moves. Here’s a new story in that vein—something he might have smiled at, I hope.

I am the author being described. And this is the worst description of my style I've ever read, bar none. I hate it!!!

"Tender, amused attention to how minds actually work under pressure."

Tell me, O GPT-5: how is it that minds "actually" work under pressure?

What is this thing you think that I pay an unusual amount of attention to? Do you even know -- or are you just stringing words together in an attempt to sound cute and deep and world-weary?

"A taste for rules, lists, and the improvised bureaucracy of wonder."

"The improved bureaucracy of wonder"?

The improvised... bureaucracy?

Of wonder?

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Trying to make an american jiangshi by taping a mcdonalds receipt to the corpses forehead

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We should be building cemeteries that span thousands of acres and look like oil refineries from a distance, odd metal towers and bright lights at all hours and flames licking at heaven in gouts of black smoke

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Sex Isn't Real And You Can't Have It

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[becoming crazed] art should physically harm you

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whateverrr i’m gonna start glowing and levitating

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Ever since I first heard the word grotto I knew it was a valuable word. When I first heard the word grotto I knew it could be used for great things. The word grotto refers to a cavity in the earth. The word grotto means a small hole or cavern in rock or other substrate like ice, especially when used as shelter. The word grotto is related to crypt, and it is related to grotesque. Grottoes can also be built. Artificial grottoes are sometimes built in gardens. Sometimes people live in grottoes. There have been people that go into grottoes and live in them. There have been people that lived in a grotto for a long time. Sometimes people store food and other supplies in grottoes. Sometimes there are religious things in grottoes. People like to put items in grottos for safekeeping, because grottoes are useful for shelter. When I first saw the word grotto I knew it had a lot of meaning and meant something special. When I think of grottoes I think they are unique.