I 100% agree on consistency, but I actually suspect LLMs would be pretty decent at translating linguistic concepts. Their grasp of contextual language is always surprisingly good, as seen in how well they rewrite tone to very specific parameters.
I don’t use ChatGPT loads, but I do use it a little, often alongside a method of project that can’t hallucinate. The other week I was talking in one chat about the vocal tone of the novel Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, that has this laconic, worn down dialogue with old testament feeling prose. In another chat, I was prompting ‘sage advice’ for a matcha scone recipe I wanted to make where I was marbling strawberry directly into the dough. I got which chat I was responding in wrong and accidentally had it give me a the scone recipe in Cormac McCarthy’s writing style.
MARBLED SCONES
He measured two cups of flour into a bowl and cut in the baking powder with the side of his hand. Salt followed. It hung in the flour like stone dust. He stirred it with a fork and the dry mix turned over itself and fell still. He cut the butter into cubes and dropped them in and pressed them through with his fingers until the flour took the texture of packed soil. He added a spoon of matcha. The green of river weed. The taste of old things left out in the rain.
He poured in buttermilk and cream. A little at a time. He stirred it slow with a blunt knife and the dough pulled together like it didn’t want to be one thing.
In another bowl he took a handful of flour and mixed it with strawberry powder. A drop of red dye like blood in water. He stirred in cream until it held. He pressed the green dough flat on the counter and laid the red over it and folded. Folded again. The colors turned but did not blend. Like veins of ore in a dark stone.
He shaped the dough into a slab and cut thick rounds with a glass. Each one imperfect. Some leaning. Some split. He set them on a tray lined with paper. The oven was already hot. He did not preheat it. It was always hot. Four twenty five. He watched the scones rise through the glass. They broke along the seams. Green and red and gold. They looked like they’d been dug up.
He split one open while it was still warm. He spread pistachio butter across the inside. It melted into the crumb. Then clotted cream. Then jam. The weight of it brought the top half down slow.
He took it outside and sat in the dirt to eat. There was no sound but the breeze. The sky was wide and empty. The scone was good. The scone was all right.
Now this is actually super easy to critique as a recipe, because it fucking sucks. In adaptation, it’s lost a lot of critical instruction. This is effectively a translation that must adhere to narrow and specific tone to achieve a meaning that cannot be translated without grasping a meaning to language that exists beyond the words.
Obviously this is English to English, but a big difference is that there is far more Japanese out there than Cormac McCarthy.
That being said, nothing cements what you’re saying about consistency more than how badly butchered the underlying instructions to this recipe are.
I could tell from mthe outset that this was going to be sexist, probably the fact it took the stance of “men do x” over “men also do x”, but I didn’t anticipate the final line being outright misogyny.
There is less pre-modern art by women because women were either censored or indoctrinated into roles where they couldn’t create, which is the primary sin of the patriarchy.
There is a myth of men knowing love because the myth of the powerful, rational man doesn’t accommodate for this, and what perpetuates that myth? That’s right, the patriarchy again.
It’s heartbreaking to see someone see through the patriarchal myth of masculinity and arrive at the conclusion that men are objectively better at creation and love than women