I Write Like . . . a *ing con job

[lolmac]

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

Comments

[lothithil.livejournal.com]

Ah! Reading this does help to wash the unpleasant taste of spam from my palate. :)

[alternatealto.livejournal.com]

Well, this is what I get for not reading "Making Light" for a week or so. I stop lurking briefly, and they do all kinds of interesting stuff behind my back.

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.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

My take on it was it took the Nielsen-Hayden crowd to actually *find the hook*; it was rather well buried in the bait. You had to seriously know your publishing industry to get it.

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.

[pepper-field.livejournal.com]

Eh. I can't say I'm that bothered - most of the 'What X Are You' memes I see around LJ are not-so-subtly linked to dating sites. At least this one doesn't ask for your email and then spam you forever afterwards (or, like one a while ago, replace the image later with something obscene). It was obviously nonsense, but then they all are.

[curuchamion.livejournal.com]

Huh, that's interesting... I don't recall seeing the publisher's ad on the results page when I did it - but then, I habitually blank out ads anyway.

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. :-)

[kirsty841.livejournal.com]

Lol, I really shouldn't be so gullable, especially on t'internets. I should know better than that.

wanderingsmith started playing around with it and the results were suspicious...

[http://users.livejournal.com/idlewild_/]

Thank god. It kept telling me I write like David Foster Wallace. I mean, I know I have a problem with run on sentences and non-linear narrative but I'm trying to come to an accommodation, or at least a relationship, some kind of healthy relationship, with the period.