The elbow pie of AI

Plus, the Oath of Lasagna

In the new ChatGPT, hot air balloons are expelled through a brass pipe.

Do your sentences have elbows? If so, that’s a problem. I recently finished Elmore Leonard’s Kill Shot — his most Canadian novel; also, according to bracketology, his best — and was gratified to find a Q&A between Leonard and Martin Amis at the end. Gratified partly because on an e-reader you think you’re 80% of the way through and then boom, it ends, and there’s a whole bunch of random filler, and also because this filler was quite good. Specifically this question that’s really a comment:

“In your work, pages and pages go by without me spotting any ‘elbows.’ Even with the great stylists of modern fiction, you know you’re always going to come across phrases like ‘Standing on the landing’ or ‘the cook took a look at the book.’ There’s always some ‘elbow’ sticking out, there’s some rhyme causing the reader to pause and wonder and think, ‘That’s not quite right.’ With you, it’s all planed flat.”

This came to mind as I read “The Omniwriter” in last week’s New York Times Magazine. This piece by Sam Kriss is the one I’ve been waiting all year to read, the one that elegantly defines the AI writing style that has silently taken over the world in the past 18 months with such quirks as:

• The em dashes, an elegant punctuation mark that has unfortunately become an easy tell for GPT’d text.

• The word “delve,” quite common in the Nigerian and Indian English that the Large Language Models have hoovered up and now remarkably overused in scientific papers.

• The fact that British parliamentarians now routinely say “I rise to speak” when previously only American lawmakers used that phrase. And so on.

“Coincidence was destiny broken down into its smallest unit.”
— Geoff Dyer

Two long-dead craftsmen discussing the niche skill of removing elbows from prose; many never-alive intelligences invited to elbow up the entire language. I once received an editor’s note to the effect of “there’s something about that line that jangles for me.” The jangle is now a background hum. Or as AI would phrase it: It’s not just a jangle — it’s a background hum.

“As was noted long ago, we are all innocent children in the tall forest of our clever inventions.”
— Ian McEwan

Dr. Joshua Landy, a dear friend of the ’stack, recently gave me The Greatest Gift of All: A fully functioning Get Wit Quickenator, in the form of a custom-built AI-powered website that does exactly *waves hands around* this. I’ve parked it over at GetWitQuicker.com and invite you to take it for a test drive. The knobs and switches are wonderful, allowing you to specify Standard or Extra Sloppy and pepper the product with quotations selected from a database of 458K+. And it is, unnaturally, nonsense. It reminds me of this:

“Most of those who make collections of verse or epigram are like men eating cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all.”
— Nicolas Chamfort

The bot making Get Wit Quicker is choosing randomly at first, then overfitting the result, creating a cherry pie filled with oysters and elbows.

“There is parody, when you make fun of people who are smarter than you; satire, when you make fun of people who are richer than you; and burlesque, when you make fun of both while taking your clothes off.”
— PJ O’Rourke

In more delicious news, Dr. Landy also reminded me of a wonderfully human fact: The Hippocratic Oath, that pledge with a Greek name and noble aims taken by new doctors, sounds like ancient wisdom. In fact, the words were only put down on paper by Dr. Louis Lasagna in 1964. It thus deserves to be called the Oath of Lasagna, and graduating medical students should solemnly place one hand on a stack of layered pasta as they recite it. And when they wipe their hands on their crisp new white coats, they’ll be united in the knowledge that it’s not blood but tomato sauce. Happy New Year!

“Where food is concerned, the past is a four-star country.”
— Keith McNally

---

“Life looked straight in the eye was insupportable, as everyone knew by instinct. The great trick, contrary to the consensus of philosophy, is to avoid looking it straight in the eye. Everything askance and it all shines on.”
— Thomas McGuane

Well, that right there was what you get when you vote for a Grab Bag. I was aiming for an items column but sometimes the layers congeal into Garfield’s favourite food.

And since you enjoy questions, please take The Inaugural Two-Minute Get Wit Quick Reader Survey! It only takes 90 seconds and will help steer this thing into 2026 and beyond!

Get Wit Quick No. 351 really grabbed the bag. This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. If there were a way for me to tap your heart, I would. But since I can’t, you’re welcome to tap the❤️ below.