Three Images: Novel Introductions
Do Not View This Post If You Plan to Complete the Handrail Survey in “Readability and the Novel.” After You Complete the Survey View This Post If You Like
Each introductory paragraph was provided to the Visual Tool available in a package ChatGPT4 app. The results are offered for your inspection. No additional background information was provided. The prompt was “Create an image to illustrate the meaning of each paragraph.” These introductory paragraphs formed the basis for the survey published in the post “Readability and the Novel.”
The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner)
intro paragraph
“Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.”
Klara and the Sun (Ishiguro)
intro paragraph
“When we were new, Rosa and I were mid-store, on the magazines table side, and could see through more than half of the window. So we were able to watch the outside—the office workers hurrying by, the taxis, the runners, the tourists. Beggar Man and his dog, the lower part of the RPO Building. Once we were more settled, Manager allowed us to walk up to the front until we were right behind the window display, and then we could see how tall the RPO Building was. And if we were there at just the right time, we would see the Sun on his journey, crossing between the building tops from our side over to the RPO Building side.”
Notes from the Underground (Dostoyevsky)
intro paragraph
“I’m a sick man…I’m a spiteful man. I’m an unattractive man. I think there’s something wrong with my liver. But I understand damn all about my illness and can’t say for certain which part of me is affected. I’m not receiving treatment for it and never have, though I do respect medicine and doctors. What’s more, I’m still extremely superstitious—well, sufficiently to respect medicine. (I’m educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious.) That’s probably something you can’t bring yourself to understand. Well, I understand it. Of course, in this case I can’t explain exactly to you whom I’m trying to harm by my spite. I realize perfectly well that I cannot ‘besmirch’ the doctors by not consulting them. I know better than anyone that by all this I’m harming no one but myself. All the same, if I refuse treatment it’s out of spite. So, if my liver hurts, let it hurt even more!”
Awesome!!!
Ha! Probably would be hard to make. Hey Terry, would you consider doing a guest post sometime? I thinking something along the lines “what a reading specialist is learning about reading through interacting with these bots.” Confirming existing theory. Opening up new territory. A sketch of what we should be studying next. I was having a conversation with a ML person recently about how humanities folks actually have a lot to bring to the conversation about how these machines work with language— at least on the epiphenomenal level. It is my sense that our rarified vocabularies will be of great assistance as ML folks try to describe and evaluate what these black boxes are doing. I many cases, they don’t even know the words already exist for the things they are trying to describe usually in either tech terms or in the language of continental philosophy. of course a better title would manifest along the way