![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
I Write Like . . . a *ing con job
Aha.
Remember the "I Write Like" meme, which looked like so much fun until we found out that no matter what crap you entered, it told you that you wrote like Somebody Awesome?
Spam, spam, spam, spam . . . it's a baited hook for vanity publishers.
I had mentioned to at least one person that I wondered what would happen if you actually entered the text of the authors themselves; the folks on Making Light went one better than that here, and then Revealed All in this later post.
On the other hand, I no longer feel ridiculous for having played with the thing -- not when such luminaries as Neil Gaiman did too.
July 2010
Remember the "I Write Like" meme, which looked like so much fun until we found out that no matter what crap you entered, it told you that you wrote like Somebody Awesome?
Spam, spam, spam, spam . . . it's a baited hook for vanity publishers.
I had mentioned to at least one person that I wondered what would happen if you actually entered the text of the authors themselves; the folks on Making Light went one better than that here, and then Revealed All in this later post.
On the other hand, I no longer feel ridiculous for having played with the thing -- not when such luminaries as Neil Gaiman did too.
July 2010
no subject
no subject
I especially got a kick out of Bruce Cohen's discovery that "Watermelon, watermelon, watermelon, watermelon, watermelon" came out to Mark Twain. The gizmo must've been thinking of his line that, "We know it was not a southern watermelon that Eve took; we know it because she repented."
Alas that the vanity publishers are also unlikely to repent.
no subject
The other flap that's going on about it is the fact that the vast majority of the available results are white males... although what gets me about the flap is that the folks flapping are making more of the racism and sexism than they are the fact that this is very subtle spam... when the focus of a page is trying to make a buck off unsuspecting wannabes the idea that the page authors would actually put effort into getting things right is (correctly, according to the thread I read) laughable.
no subject
no subject
Teresa Neilsen Hayden did a nice summing up of the annoyance element, even setting aside the spam question:
"Writing an application that could analyze prose style would be a real achievement. Writing one that compares vocabulary (and probably a few other characteristics like sentence length) is trivially easy. I’m not saying I could do it right this moment; I’m just saying it’s not hard.
Foo. Wanted cool; got balonium."
When the meme was in full sweep, I saw a lot of people inclined to take it seriously, and that bothered me also. I was seeing good people having their guards pulled down by the earnest flattery. I've had too many friends fall victim to con artists to feel relaxed or comfortable when something like that happens.
I also remember a Gay Pride some years back. The frothing fundamentalists always show up waving God-hates-you signs; it's part of what you expect. But this year, for the first year, the signs were high quality, professionally printed. That made me worry -- I didn't like seeing them applying more money, time, effort and competence to that activity.
So give me cheerful memes with transparent motives, driven by sloppy websites, and I'll play with them and not wonder if they're trying to steal anything more than a few minutes of my time. This pissed me off.
no subject
On another note: I was right, word choice and sentence length were the triggers it cued off! (I knew it couldn't be paying any attention to punctuation after I tried Tolkien and got Lovecraft; Tolkien's use of colons is quite distinctive.)
I don't really see why people get miffy that it always gives you some famous author or other, no matter what you put in; it's a computer program. It had to give one of the answers available to it, and "You don't write like any famous author" obviously wasn't an option - not least because if it were included it would be so very common! ;-)
Oh well. It did make me sit down and think about the changes I can see in my own writing style since I got into fandom, and realize that I've been imitating other writers more than I want to. For that, at least, I thank it. :-)
no subject
Miffy is a good reaction to have to con artists; you have got to have some defensive armour, and miffy works. I don't like being lied to.
no subject
The thing is, my knee-jerk reaction to miffy people is "hey, calm down and look at the other side of things!" That's because 99% of the miffiness I encounter is in politics - usually in situations where I'm familiar with the other side's arguments. Not that it helps, but then nothing helps in politics. o_O
So... I still don't understand why people were taking an Internet meme seriously enough that one ought to get mad about it not doing what it says on the tin, but I apologize if I said anything to make you crankier than you were already. *sends hugs*
Now I am going to go look at some pretty pictures. ;-)
no subject
My partner took the time to read through the very long discussion threads on Making Light, which featured the Russian hacker who created the meme getting busted wide open for the fraudulent aspects of his behaviour. He got huffy at being outed and tried to deny that he was doing anything more than having fun -- unfortunately for him, he had already posted to several hacker forums about the app he'd just finished developing, and his plans to make money off it. He ended up having his own greed screeds being quoted back at him in a very widely read public forum.
Con artists, including vanity presses, do a huge amount of damage. If you don't mind my saying this -- I know that your own life experience hasn't been terribly broad as yet, and it worried me to see you (and others) apparently shrugging it off.
I'll happily accept the hugs and return them freely in kind. No scam attached.
no subject
'If you don't mind my saying this -- I know that your own life experience hasn't been terribly broad as yet'
*grins* I don't mind. It's perfectly true. And it's always nice to know that I have friends watching out for me! ;-)
no subject
no subject
What ended up bugging me most of all was that I couldn't figure out why the meme was out there. It wasn't for fun -- it lacked the tongue-in-cheek element. Once I found out that it was for money, it made sense. I'm still disgusted, but at least I'm no longer flummoxed.
And apparently, if you feed it complete gibberish, you get James Joyce. :D
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
Also, the only female writers available in the auto-roster are (apparently) J. K. Rowling, Stephanie Meyer, and Margaret Atwood. We were theorising that the triggers for getting Meyer must be the word 'vampire' and (possibly) 'sparkle'.
What made me cringe was being told (intermittently) that I write like Dan Brown. Ugh.
no subject
no subject
I actually got Stephen King most of the time, so I suspect he was the default for standard sentence length and no special trigger words. I'm almost tempted to run another set of tests -- try re-entering more or less the same text, but change a few words each time, such as 'elf' and 'vampire' and 'wizard' and 'sparkle'.
I think Lothi got Ian Fleming on her Man From Uncle fics, so that's probably the result of spycraft trigger words. And I got Douglas Adams for Up a Long Ladder, which was probably triggered by the odd bit of specifically British vocabulary. Even though it's set in Ireland.
Ooo, I wonder what author's name you get if you enter porn.
No. *smacks wrist* I am not going to spend any more time mucking around with it . . .
no subject