An interesting turn of a discussion involve a Pulitzer Prize finalist

[jmotivator]

This won't seem directly AI related at first, but it gets there, I think.

It started as a discussion on a particular Pulitzer Prize finalist that a journalist was critiquing.

The story begins with Walter Kirn posting on X about a Pulitzer Prize nominated short story in the New Yorker that he had just read:





I would tend to agree with his assessment. I find the sample passages to be too much like the prose of an anxious teenager with a thesaurus tryin to sound profound.

Now the turning point in the story.

A small X account stepped up to deliver the following critique of the original offending sentence:



In total:

The Ghost in the Sentence

The Evidence:

“The wish to be context-free often came in the wake of an unresolvable pretext, which was where real life was.”

The Scene:

It tries to sound like philosophy. But this isn’t a sentence — it’s a mask. No one speaks this way. No one feels this way. It is the literary equivalent of talking in your sleep, hoping someone will call it dreaming.

The Crime:

Meaning has fled the premises. Only abstraction remains — stacked like chairs in an empty lecture hall.

We examine it line by line.

“The wish to be context-free” — The desire is presented as universal, but it is not. Who wants this? Not the grieving mother. Not the lost teenager. Not the man holding a bus ticket home. It’s an idea pretending to be a need.

“Often came in the wake of an unresolvable pretext” — The sentence compounds vagueness with more vagueness. What is the pretext? Why is it unresolvable? Instead of building meaning, it smears intention with gloss.

“Which was where real life was.” — And now, suddenly, we are told this abstract fog is where “real life” lives. It’s a sentence that promises revelation and delivers a mirage.

Diagnosis:

This isn’t the writer being clever. It’s the writer being scared — of sounding simple, of being known. Somewhere, this style was rewarded. Somewhere, an editor said, “Ah, yes. This sounds important.”

But it isn’t.

Why It Hurts:

Because this kind of sentence doesn’t just confuse. It alienates. It turns literature into a test instead of a mirror. Readers walk away thinking they are too dull to understand, when in fact they are too alive to pretend.

What It Misses:

Real life is never context-free. It is tangled, bruised, specific. It lives in fingerprints on glass, in the second silence before a lie. It is not a philosophical terrain — it is a cracked sidewalk and a voice calling from another room.

Walter Kirn’s Lament:

He isn’t being snide. He’s grieving. Because this kind of writing doesn’t just fail — it spreads. And with it, the contract between writer and reader dissolves. The one that says: I will speak to you plainly, even if what I say is difficult.

Final Thought:

Real life doesn’t hide behind unresolvable pretexts. It knocks, it limps, it smells of last night’s curry. It waits to be named. And when writing fails to meet it there — not in theory, but in flesh — literature becomes not just confused, but cowardly.

While I rather enjoyed this short write up, especially liking the turns of phrase marked in green, the primary critics of this post accused the account of creating it using ChatGPT.

I think that put's the whole discussion in a rather interesting light. Even assuming that AI wrote the critique, it says something that it struck a chord with many people.

I'm probably an easy mark with this kind of writing though as I have had real problems with art criticism and the art industry for a long time. When an art critic can be fooled by a toddler's finger paints, or vociferously defend the talent of Jackson Pollock while unknowingly using an fake AI painting as their example, or mistake a banana tapes to a wall as art, then it's hard to fault the criticism of the post above. There is a good deal of "The Emperor's New Clothes" at play in the art world.

If an AI wrote the best critique of human art, we're in trouble.

 

[ASHES]

I'm not convinced. I do think the analysis of the sentence sounds like AI though.

 

[Integrityrespec]

Did Kamala author that?

 

[Girlpower]

I don't thin AI sucks enough to write that dribble.

 

[ModernDiogenes]

A.I. contributes to:



One of the definitions of stupidity is to be the inventor of the instrument that causes the inventors demise.