Sorry to restack this again, but the more I think about it the more insane it seems. The use of this Cormac McCarthy sentence as an example is so strange. They reference his aversion to punctuation, which is a commonly known fact about his prose, perhaps the most known fact, the kind of thing you might know offhand without actually having read any of his work, but it makes no sense in this context. In fact, it seems the sort of explanation an LLM would give: a probabilistic attempt to identify causation from correlation (i.e. discussion of McCarthy’s prose is often followed by a reference to his aversion to punctuation, ergo in this instance the most statistically probable explanation of his grammar is the aversion to punctuation — just a guess based on odds with no world-model that could identify actual causation).

As well ask men what they think of stone.

If I’m remembering correctly, this line is from dialogue, not an omniscient narrator, and as such is deliberately stylised to ape speech, and so wouldn’t make sense if it was written with perfect grammar — all the main characters are illiterate maniacs crazed on blood and death; of course they don’t speak properly!

But even more than that, this sentence is not grammatically incorrect because of its lack of punctuation! If anything it’s missing a word (‘Might’ as well ask…), or if you’re being really pedantic, two words (‘You might’ as well ask…) — extra punctuation would do nothing solve this problem, if it was one, which again, it isn’t, because it’s a stylistic choice designed to bring to life a given character in a given age in a given setting, who is in the middle of imparting a piece of philosophy whose purpose is nothing short of an explanation of the existential significance of the human proclivity for violence and war, and as such deserves nothing less than an evocation in the most biblical prose McCarthy can muster.

This, combined with the implicit assumption that AI writing is cleaner and therefore better, makes for such an odd commentary on the current state of human art in the age of ai. McCarthy is clunky now? The best prose stylist America has ever produced is clunky? Are all writers who bend the rules of grammar and punctuation clunky? Are you fucking illiterate? Do you understand what language is? That the rules are made up? That they change over time due to technological, cultural, and economic forces? Are we so devoid of culture that the New York Times, the largest print media company in the world, doesn’t understand what style is? Who needs transcendent explorations on the nature of Being, of our common humanity, of what it’s like to live a finite existence in a seemingly infinite cosmos, when we have the machines to think for us? As well ask men what they think of stone.