Comment by pkdpic
1 year ago
One of the first things I did when someone showed me a pre-Chat version of GPT-3 was try to get it to speak in the voice of Borges. I had the same feeling of interesting but inappropriate.
I was really happy to see this pop up and I'm glad someone went through this as a thought experiment but you make a good point that didn't initially occur to me.
I feel like Borges' secular scifi-adjacent mysticism looses a lot of what makes it most meaningful when it's imitated or dissected academically.
That said it does feel like Borges would probably be into the idea of being imitated.
I also tried this as soon as I got access to GPT-4 at Shopify's expense. "You are the celebrated magical realist writer Jorge Luis Borges. Write an essay about Shopify".
What it produced was more of an essay written by a talented undergraduate about Borges, rather than Borges.
I'm sure Borges would've found LLMs fascinating and one can only dream what stories and essays would've been written.