Sturgeon’s Law originated as a defence of science fiction: when some critic objected to people praising the good stuff, by pointing out that 90% of SF was crap, Theodore Sturgeon (who wrote some of the good stuff) responded that 90% of everything is crap. His corollary was that 10% of science fiction was as good as any other form of fiction. My own corollary is that on the internet, 99% of everything is crap, and that may be a low estimate. Or it may be in need of refinement — something like this — that 99% of the texts that have been digitised and consumed by LLMs are worthless. This matters because that 99% crap mixture is what they assemble their sentence collages from.
What you end up with is something like this:
The subject matter of the novel may still seem edgy to the easily shocked, but its style is what feels cutting edge to me: fragmented yet smooth, autofictional though not confessional, somehow both tight and loose, what she calls a textual “collage,” a word she told Gonzales she had picked up from Romare Bearden: “He said, ‘Black artists are collages, because we certainly make something out of nothing.’”
Can any reader spot something remarkable about this passage? Answers in the comments.
It's the beginning and end of a paragraph with the middle section of 50+ words between "tight and loose" and "what she calls" chopped out.
Awful. Reminds me of Stanislav Andreski' The Social Sciences as Sorcery. He lambasted the SS's for writing in alienating jargon in the sixties. It spread toLit Crit and this ,,(almost) meaningless guff is what we get. Plus no jokes