So I have been practicing writing fiction the past year or so. It identifies a fiction piece I wrote as Greg Egan[0]. Another paragraph from another piece was identified as China Mieville[1]. The accompanying blog posts explaining the making of the fiction pieces were identified as me.
Both pieces have never been published. Neither have the blog posts.
> This study asked whether Large Language Models (LLMs) understand sentences in the minimal sense of representing “who did what to whom”. In Experiment 1, we found that the overall geometry of LLM distributed activity patterns failed to capture this information: similaritiesbetween sentences reflected whether they shared syntax more than whether they shared thematic role assignments. Human judgments, in contrast, were strongly driven by this aspect of meaning.
> In Experiment 2, we found limited evidence that thematic role information was available even in a subset of hidden units. Whereas activity patterns in subsets of hidden units often allowed for significant classification of whether sentence pairs had shared vs. opposite thematic role assignments, the effect sizes were small; even the best-performing case appeared to lag behind humans, and its representation of thematic roles did not seem robust across syntactic structures.
> However, thematic role information was reliably available in a large number of attention heads, demonstrating LLMs have the capacity to extract thematic role information. In some cases, information present in attention heads descriptively exceeded human performance.
At this point I'm writing mostly for myself. GTM strategies for novels... that's an interesting way to think about things. I've not thought about it just yet. Happy to hear if you have any ideas tho.
I'm working on my scifi novel. I had started writing it when LLMs started taking off - I had been doing AI for two decades and I was well-placed to be in a good position to profit with the rise of LLMs, but I ended up gaining nothing much and I was depressed about it - so I started writing instead. Been picking at it for about a year before befriending an editor who encouraged me to keep writing. He's helped me developmentally edit it to a point I am now ready to work on my second draft.
It's a hard scifi novel with mild existential horror tones that is borne mostly of maths jokes. At one point the main character tries to escape the matrix (reality). But the matrix is defective, so the best way out was to orthogonalize the subspace and reduce the matrix to its eigenbasis instead. Most of the scenes are based on similar maths jokes.
Tentative name is Diagonalization of the Meta (I had previously called it The Metaverse).
I told a variant of the original Little Mermaid story as part of a school outreach program. The kids came to the conclusion that God wasn't a fair being because he didn't give mermaids souls. I walked away satisfied that my little counterprogramming against catholic school indoctrination might have worked. I wasn't invited back (at least for school year 2024).
Most LLMs out there are very American in their writing mannerisms. The article even alludes to this:
> The AI did, however, try to sound like someone. It was folksy and upbeat, talky and pretend-excited
I've not seen an LLM, even when fine tuned that doesn't actually do that (Chinese LLMs excepted). There's something just inherently American about the instruction datasets that these LLMs are instructed with.
I've been running GolangSyd for about 8 years now, and previously Sydney Python for about the same amount of time. I found finding sponsors to be one of the hardest things. One of the last Sydney Pythons in which I gave a talk on machine learning had ~250 people attending (PyConAU at that time had roughly as many people I think). So large that the pizza bill was way more than the host (who was the sponsor as well) had anticipated, so we were no longer welcome at that venue. And said host is a well known billion dollar Aussie company.
Thankfully for GolangSyd, my cohosts have been extremely talented with finding sponsors. This gives us a lot more opportunity to do weirder things like https://gogogogogo.casa .
Running meetups are hard work, full stop. On the other hand, I've gotten to know some people very well and some of my best collabs have been thru these meetups. Running a meetup was a way for me to overcome my own reluctance to socialize.
Both pieces have never been published. Neither have the blog posts.
[0] in https://blog.chewxy.com/2026/04/01/how-i-write/ this is the story titled "there is no constant non-zero derivative in nature". It does not read like Egan at all.
[1] in https://blog.chewxy.com/2026/04/01/how-i-write/ this is the story titled "The Case of the Liquidated Corps". I use a lot of biological metaphors. Once again, nothing like Mieville.
If only I could write like them! These pieces were all rejected by the major scifi mags