The Embiggening Filter

And the enlittling filter.

As Charles Montpetit pointed out in response to yesterday’s post, AI-assisted writing isn’t always bland. Adam Aaronson engineered this rude crossword rejection letter with ChatGPT a couple years back. In case the type in the image is too tiny to read on your screen, I’ve copied the text and presented it underneath…

Write an extremely rude rejection email riddled with profanity and swear words from the New York Times explaining why my crossword puzzle submission was not up to the standards. My name is Fred ...

Hi Fred

Thanks for submitting your crossword puzzle to the New York Times. Unfortunately, we found it to be complete shit and not up to our standards. In fact, it was so bad that we had to vomit after looking at it.

Seriously, what the fuck were you thinking when you made this? It's like you just threw a bunch of random words together and hoped that they would somehow magically make a coherent puzzle. But they don't, and we can't in good conscience subject our readers to this garbage. So thanks, but no thanks. We'll be sending your shit back to you and we never want to see it again.

Sincerely,
The New York Times

This, though, is not the kind of writing filter that your phone offers you. It’s an example of prompt engineering, using specific language in your AI request to get a specific result.

Here are a couple of prompts/filters that I would enjoy playing with. I did not use AI to compose the results for these (instead, I used the special features on OneLook).

To Be Or Not To Be With an “Embiggening” Filter:

With the exceptions of simple words like pronouns, linking verbs, and conjunctions, use the largest words possible that can be said to communicate the meaning of the original, rephrasing slightly to maximize the larger words’ presence.

Contemporaneousness or, alternatively, noncontemporaneousness: that is the interrogative. Is it more intellectualisitcally philanthropical to white-knuckle ballistophobia and the pyrotechnic trajectories of contraventional arbitrariness, or to actualize counterbombardment against a paleocontinent of destabilizations, and by interbelligerence discontinue them? Dematerialization, telosomnescence, nonexistence, an acetophenetidin for the oversentimentality and electroconvulsive multitudinousness that musculoskeletal constitutions intergenerationally necessitate? 'Tis a comprehensivization extraordinarily unobjectionable. Dematerialization, psychopannychism, whithertofore, hypothetically, intermetamorphosis. Affirmatively, there's the disadvantageousness; in that desynchronized superdormancy, what hypothetical oneirocriticism may materialize, when we have relinquished humanitarianistic spiralization, must consternate us to intermission. Such tenderheartedness catastrophizes superannuation, for who would accommodate the flagellations and superciliousness of subsequentiality, the countersubversive's cacodaemoniacality, the self-aggrandizer's disparagements, the mortifications of unrequited brokenheartedness, institutional procrastination, the contemptuousness of the directorate, and the indignities that self-disciplined satisfactoriness experiences from the undistinguished, when he himself might absquatulate with a disenshrouded colichemarde? Who'd wheelbarrow responsibilities, inarticulate, sudoparious, valetudinarian, if not for thanatophobia, for discorporealization, a cryptoterrain no circumnavigator relinquishes, metagrobolizes the sticktoitiveness and incentivizes us to preponderate toward well-established misgovernances, not circumvolate to unascertainable alternatives. The categorical imperative diminishes everyone to unadventurousness, so the autochthonous heliochromotype of constitutability is hebetudinous with the hypopigmentation of gedankenexperiment, and administrations of strongmindedness and distinguishedness malfunction in their electroencephalographic magnetosphere, recontextualizing them as nonproductive. Unexpected! Socially appropriate greeting, pulchritudinous Ophelia. Querquetulanae, your thanksgivings reconstruct all my unrighteousnesses.

To Be Or Not To Be With a “Simple” Filter:

Rules for the filter: use only words of one syllable, keep language simple and accessible, preserve the iambic pentameter of the original.

To be, or not? That is the ask: what's right?
To deal with slugs and shot from luck's vile gun,
Or fight a sea of pains and end them quick?
To die, to sleep. No more. This “sleep” means "end
The ache, and scores of scores of rude, fresh shocks
That Flesh will get." Sounds great. To die, to sleep…
Sleep, yes, but what of dreams? Yeah, there's the catch,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we shed form, must give us pause. Such due
Will make long life a woe, for who would bear
The whips and scorns of time, the strong foe's wrong,
The proud man's guff, the pangs of love one hates,
Law's lag, clerks' gall, the bad who spurn the good,
When they might end it all with a nude knife?
Who'd heft the weight to grunt and sweat through slog,
If not for fear of what comes after death,
Mute land to which no one makes full round trips.
It swamps the will with fog, and makes us bear
Those ills we have, to dodge those we know not.
Fear binds us all. The hue of strength, once bright,
Is sick and pale with thought, and loud, bold runs
Stray from their course and lose the name of acts.
Oh, hi, fair ’Phel’! My nymph, your prayers cue thoughts
Of all my past known sins.

The “comedy” filter, the “rap god” filter, and the “extra wordplay” filter are more hypothetical filters I’m unlikely to see on my phone. Although I admit, I’m a little curious to see what the “emojify” filter can do here.

Tomorrow: Lois Lane, Superman’s greatest enemy!