Last night I read Laeth's latest installment of aphorisms, ".diminished discords (xvi)" (May 31). I highly recommend it as even more than usually insightful, but for the purposes of this post, what I'm interested in is this:
is there a good reason to be against machine vomited text but for machine vomited images or sounds? doesn't make sense to me.
The reference is to the productions of Fake Intelligence software, but what is relevant here is the precise wording I have bolded.
Today I finished reading Remarkably Bright Creatures. On p. 277, one of the human characters says that he "gives fewer than zero shits about" someone. On the same page, just three paragraphs later, we find this description of an overly long message:
The whole screen is filled with word vomit when he changes his mind and backspaces the characters. It's too much for a text message.
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Note added: This idea of vomited text reminded me of a passage from Spenser's Faerie Queene. I was going to quote it, but my conscience objected. If you're going to read Spenser, you have to read it all, starting at the beginning. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring. The slow, rhythmic, and, yes, boring stanzas create the necessary twilight atmosphere in which weird and wonderful things can happen. Even his most vivid and astonishing lines lose their color in isolation and simply must be experienced in their natural habitat. Quoting a stanza or two of Spenser is like playing a three-second clip of the "best part" of a symphony. So if you want to know what I'm referring to, start at the beginning, and read until you get to it. It's in the first canto.
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