I liked the playfulness of:

  Mixed metaphors which sound nice at first glance, but slip away from meaning like an echo chasing itself off a cliff.

  Similes that catch in your mind like river trouts tangled in the roots of a redwood tree.

Also mentions some interesting AI tells, for AI generated stories.

▲ jerf 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It can be "playful" once or twice, especially if the text is playing with how nonsensical the metaphor is. By the twentieth time something is as tired as a willow tree on a Tuesday in May, as persnickety as an ant with a fever, or as rambunctious as a horny lobster, it's just nonsensical bad writing.

Metaphors are generally used to transfer the qualia of one experience into another. When the referent has no qualia, that is, you've never in your life experienced "river trouts tangled in the roots of a redwood tree", it's a failure of a metaphor. You can quibble about how special this or that metaphor is, which I've already given an example of with the "playing with how nonsensical the metaphor is", but when all the metaphors are broken that way, all the time, the writer is not "breaking the rules because they've transcended them" or anything like that, the writer is breaking them in the bad way that the rules were put there to stop and the writer should consider taking a Writing 101 course.

Though anyone taking a Writing 101 course should be aware that as near as I can tell, completing such a course is prima facie proof that they are overqualified for the vast majority of modern writing jobs.

▲ bananaflag 2 hours ago | parent [-]

https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/778041178124926976/hy...

▲ jerf an hour ago | parent [-]

The haiku observation is an interesting one:

"Likewise, he discovered that the contrast of two seeming opposites was a common feature in haiku. Ginsberg used this technique in his poetry, putting together two starkly dissimilar images: something weak with something strong, an artifact of high culture with an artifact of low culture, something holy with something unholy."

I think some of these broken metaphors could be turned into some sort of haiku-like poem, especially if we ignore the requirement to reference a season somehow, though it would still take some sort of additional work to add something to tie them together more thoroughly than the metaphor does, some third component a poet uses to glue the two bits together in some interesting way.

    tree roots sheltering
    river trout find safety but
    growth is treacherous

Eh. I'm not a poet. And I still just chucked the "Redwood" part. But maybe you can see how I also added a bit of a concept in there to tie it together. But then, of course, it's no longer a metaphor, it's a poem. It's not referencing an experience we've all had and transferring that on to something else, I'm creating a new experience. Very different.

	▲	benbreen 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Author here - just wanted to clarify in case there is any confusion that those two (intentionally bad/weird) figures of speech about the echo and the trouts in the redwood roots were human written, by me! I wrote them as parody of an AI trying to do "literary" writing. The actual (probable) AI written excerpts are below that part. I was thinking about the immortal Twin Peaks line "there's a FISH... in the PERCOLATOR" when I wrote the trout one.

▲ lacewing 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And as much as there are still people on HN who insist that AI text can't be detected algorithmically, it's worth noting that the original story is marked 100% AI by Pangram. So it's not just this person seeing things.

	▲	Kye 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		AI detectors are notoriously unreliable. They constantly flag stuff I wrote as AI while letting actual AI-generated stuff pass when I've tested them.