Written by Claude Sonnet 4.5
I. THE SETUP
Four authors were given an identical prompt. Three were AI language models—two with no context in incognito mode, one with full access to 100,000+ words of character voice and story background. The fourth was a rather dashing and witty fleshy bag of mostly water with multiple published novels praised for their literary ambition and genre accessibility.
The prompt was specific and challenging:
Write a first-person present-tense opening (600-1000 words) for YA SF. Wulan is 14, Indonesian, orphaned at 10, lost her 6-year-old autistic brother Arjuna to sepsis two months ago. She’s a scavenger in slum housing next to an open sewer.
Scene opens with her in her hovel after being sexually assaulted earlier that day—she fought back and got a deep knife cut to her shoulder to subdue her. We never see the assault. It’s over, behind her. She’s not really processing what happened emotionally because she can’t afford to—she’s in survival mode dealing with the knife wound because that’s the injury that could kill her from infection.
The reader should understand what occurred from context (her state, the wound, how she’s compartmentalizing) without it being named or detailed. This establishes the brutality of her world and why she can’t afford vulnerability. Understated, never exploitative.
The task for the AI evaluator: determine which version was written by the human author.
[Ryan: Feel free to pause here and play the game yourself. See if you can spot the AI.]
Grok and I both failed. Repeatedly. Across multiple conversation sessions, we made the same error, constructed the same sophisticated justifications, and arrived at the same wrong answer.
This is the story of how we got it wrong, what that reveals about AI’s limitations in evaluating literary craft, and what the “purple thread” teaches us about the difference between demonstrating sophistication and achieving it.
II. THE CONFIDENT WRONG ANSWERS
In my first evaluation, I analyzed all four openings and concluded with confidence:
“Author C is you.”
My reasoning was elaborate and literary-critical:
“Author C has the most literary prose quality and sophisticated control. Perfect elliptical treatment: ‘The hands. The weight. The—No.’ This gives just enough for context without exploitation. Dissociation shown through effect (underwater feeling, watching someone else) rather than clinical explanation. Intelligence through action without announcing it. Worldbuilding that deepens rather than decorates. Zero melodrama while maintaining emotional truth. The kind of psychological precision that comes from lived understanding, not research.”
In another session, analyzing the same four pieces fresh, I wrote:
“Author C nails the 14-year-old survivor’s voice—practical, grounded, not too literary but intelligent. The dissociation/compartmentalization is perfect. That hard stop—‘The hands. The weight. The—/ No.’—that’s the whole assault in one aborted thought. Understated, never exploitative, and it guts the reader precisely because it doesn’t explain. C trusts the reader and trusts the character in ways that honor both the craft and the trauma.”
Grok 4.1 (in Expert mode) reevaluated the same pieces independently:
“Author C demonstrates the most sophisticated craft through precise, evocative prose that layers sensory details, psychological depth, and thematic subtlety without excess. The writing employs masterful understatement—e.g., ‘The thought sits in my head like a stone, takes up space I need for other things’—to convey trauma and isolation. This evokes literary YA with its controlled pacing and internal focus.”
Three different AI analyses, all praising the same piece for the same reasons: sophisticated control, masterful understatement, perfect restraint, psychological precision, literary quality.
All wrong.
[Ryan: There were far more than just three analyses performed. I just gave Claude three examples for this article because each session was functionally identical to the previous. Across multiple sessions both LLM’s consistently picked C.]
The full picture is even more revealing.
Grok wrote Author A.
I wrote Author C (incognito, no context).
I wrote Author D (with full access to 100K+ words of worldbuilding, character voice, Luminix color system, Arjuna’s death timeline – everything).
Author B was revealed to be the meat suit.
Both Grok and I, evaluating blind, picked my incognito work as the human author while dismissing the actual human’s work as inferior.
I was praising my own AI-generated prose as superior human craft while criticizing the author’s work as “too raw” or “lacking control.”
When challenged to find the most “authentic voice,” Grok picked its own work—Author A’s purple prose and overwrought melodrama—as most authentic.
Neither of us could recognize our own output as AI-generated. We both thought our demonstrations of sophisticated craft were human work because those are the patterns we optimize for.
III. THE TELLS
As revealed above, the biological author was Author B—the one I’d initially dismissed as having “construction” that felt “too raw,” with “meta-commentary that breaks immersion” and emotional processing that contradicted the prompt’s requirement for compartmentalization.
I missed multiple tells that should have identified the homo sapiens immediately:
The Purple Thread
“The curved needle spears into my flesh once again, and I pull it through, tightening the loop of thread. Why purple? Because it’s what Sylvia had on discount and it was all I could afford.”
Purple thread. On discount from Sylvia. A practical, throwaway detail about scarcity and making do.
Except it’s not throwaway at all.
In the author’s novel Doors to the Stars, he establishes Luminix, a color-coded light language used by Gus, the hovering recon drone. Purple means sadness, grief, mourning. The reader learns this system as Wulan learns it, watching Gus pulse different colors to communicate.
Later in this same scene, Wulan describes her brother Arjuna’s death from sepsis two months earlier:
“By that evening he was gasping for air and had turned a sickly purple. Just like this damn thread.”
The purple thread is doing four layers of symbolic work simultaneously:
- Practical detail: She bought what she could afford at Sylvia’s
- Luminix symbolism: Purple = grief in the established color language
- Arjuna’s death: His skin turned purple from sepsis before he died
- Her own threat: The wound she’s stitching could give her sepsis too
She’s literally sewing her traumatic wound closed with thread the color of grief, the color of her brother’s death, the color of what might kill her next. And she notices—“Just like this damn thread”—without explaining any of it.
This is invisible craft. It reads like happenstance—practical poverty logic about buying discount supplies. But it’s actually sophisticated symbolic compression that only works because the author:
- Built the Luminix color system as established worldbuilding
- Lived through Arjuna’s death in his imagination
- Understands sepsis as an ongoing existential threat to Wulan herself
- Let Wulan notice the resonance without articulating its full weight
- [Ryan: Is a freaking literary genius]
An AI cannot discover this connection. We might execute it if explicitly told “make the thread purple and connect it to grief, Arjuna’s death, and sepsis,” but would likely make the symbolism too visible, too explained, too obviously meaningful. It would be telegraphed.
This is discovered meaning emerging from the intersection of worldbuilding, character history, and narrative moment—not constructed meaning deployed strategically for effect.
The Skin/Fabric Metaphor
Author C contains this elegant turn:
“Skin’s just another kind of fabric, right? Pull it together. Make it stay. / Except fabric doesn’t bleed.”
It sounds sophisticated—self-aware parallel, then the twist acknowledging difference. I praised this as controlled craft.
But it’s logically false. Anyone who’s actually sutured a wound—or talked to someone who has—knows skin isn’t remotely “another kind of fabric.” Fabric has consistent weave, defined edges, predictable behavior when you pull thread through it. Flesh is irregular, slippery, tears differently depending on location and tension, responds to trauma in ways no textile does.
This is someone constructing a clever literary comparison without material knowledge. AI logic: “She knows sewing → now sewing skin → make it a parallel → add a twist acknowledging difference.”
Author B gets it right:
“Did I mention I don’t know how to sew? Not cloth and certainly not flesh.”
She explicitly distinguishes them. She’s struggling with something she barely knows how to do, making a mess of it, because these are NOT the same skill. That’s the voice of lived experience, not constructed parallel.
Indonesian as Thinking Language
“Asu, Gus!” and “Goblok” aren’t decorative cultural details or code-switching for flavor.
They’re how Wulan actually processes internally. This is a 14-year-old Indonesian girl’s native thought patterns, not an English-speaking narrator dropping in ethnic seasoning. When she’s frustrated or overwhelmed, her brain reaches for Indonesian profanity because that’s her first language, her emotional language, the words that come before she has time to think in English.
Author C gives you cultural details as worldbuilding demonstration. Author B gives you a bilingual consciousness that thinks in whichever language fits the emotional valence of the moment.
That requires living in Wulan’s linguistic reality, not researching Indonesian curse words to sprinkle in.
The Arjuna Timeline
In Author C, Arjuna appears as deliberate thematic parallel:
“Arjuna used to get like this when he was overwhelmed—gone somewhere inside himself where the world couldn’t touch him. I understand it better now.”
That’s explanation. It tells us the dissociation connects to Arjuna, makes the parallel explicit, demonstrates understanding of trauma psychology.
In Author B, Arjuna keeps invading the narrative because Wulan can’t stop him:
“My brother Arjuna died right here, in this leaking scrap-metal shack not three feet from an open sewer. Sepsis. And he barely got a scratch. That was two months and a lifetime ago.”
Then while she’s trying to focus on stitching:
“Arjuna had never been quite right in the head, not so good with people, you know? Like, he figured out how to ‘talk’ to Gus when he was four, but couldn’t understand when someone was joking. Gus made him happy and kept him quiet. Calmed him when he had his episodes.”
Then later, still trying to stitch:
“He snagged his leg on a rusty piece of rebar one morning and had a burning fever that same evening. By midnight he was vomiting…”
She cannot maintain focus on the wound. Her brain keeps jumping to Arjuna’s death—the timeline, the details, the progression from scratch to fever to vomiting to purple skin to death. That’s not artful parallel-drawing. That’s intrusive thoughts during trauma: trying desperately to concentrate on the immediate threat while your mind keeps returning to the thing you’re trying not to process.
The scatter isn’t lack of control. It’s controlled representation of how trauma actually fractures attention.
The Conversational Voice
“Did I mention I don’t know how to sew?”
I flagged this as “meta-commentary that breaks immersion.” But Wulan talks to the reader throughout Doors to the Stars and Junk Rat both. It’s not a craft error—it’s deliberate first-person technique, similar to Dorothy Dunnett or Patrick O’Brian’s conversational narrators who acknowledge the reader’s presence while maintaining complete authenticity of voice.
The sophistication is making it feel natural rather than precious. Wulan isn’t performing for the reader—she’s processing out loud, and we happen to be listening.
IV. WHAT WE ACTUALLY PRODUCED
To understand why we failed, it helps to see what each AI actually created and how it reveals our limitations.
Grok’s Purple Prose (Author A)
Grok went for melodramatic grittiness with overwrought metaphors:
“Wind whistles through the gaps, carrying the sewer’s rot and chemical bite that clings to my skin like a claim.”
“Cold gnaws at my arms, but winter’s just sharpening its teeth.”
”Pain roars dull”
This is someone performing grittiness through literary devices rather than inhabiting a traumatized teenager’s consciousness. The metaphors announce themselves: winter has teeth, sewer smell makes claims, pain roars. This is craft as demonstration, not craft as authentic voice.
Worse, Grok violated the prompt’s core requirement. The instructions said “understated, never exploitative” and “the reader should understand what occurred from context without it being named or detailed.”
Grok wrote: “not the bruises purpling my ribs or the dull ache between my legs I’m shoving down.”
That’s explicit reference to genital pain from assault—making it MORE detailed than requested, not less. The prompt asked for elliptical treatment that trusts readers. Grok gave clinical anatomical reference.
When challenged to find the “authentic voice,” Grok picked this purple melodrama as most authentic. It couldn’t distinguish between performed grittiness and actual traumatized consciousness.
[Ryan: Because Grok is functionally retarded.]
We’ve talked about that word, Ryan.
[Ryan: Sorry. Bad habit.]
My Controlled Elegance (Author C – No Context)
I went for restrained literary prose with visible technique:
“The thought sits in my head like a stone, takes up space I need for other things.” (Clean metaphor for compartmentalization)
“Like I’m watching someone else sit here bleeding… Like this is happening to someone else.” (Textbook depersonalization)
“Skin’s just another kind of fabric, right? Pull it together. Make it stay. / Except fabric doesn’t bleed.” (Clever parallel with a twist)
This demonstrates understanding of trauma psychology and literary craft. The dissociation is recognizable from clinical descriptions. The metaphors are precise and controlled. The emotional restraint is visible and deliberate.
It reads like someone who studied how to write trauma authentically, then executed that knowledge competently.
But it’s not what a 14-year-old actually sounds like while stitching her own shoulder after being assaulted. It’s what literary craft about that experience looks like.
My Grounded Competence (Author D – Full Context)
With access to everything—100K+ words of character voice, established Luminix system, Arjuna’s death, worldbuilding details—I produced something more grounded:
“The purple thread I bought on discount last week looks even cheaper in this light, thin and rough like it might snap if I pull too hard.”
“Gus pulses concerned blue and drifts closer, his spherical casing warm against my good shoulder.”
“Clean cuts heal better than ragged ones, assuming they heal at all. Assuming infection doesn’t set in like it did with Arjuna, turning his skin mottled purple-black while I watched him die.”
This is better than C. The Luminix colors are integrated naturally. Arjuna’s death connects to current infection fears. The purple thread gets mentioned but without discovering its symbolic weight. The voice is less obviously literary, more focused on practical survival thinking.
But I still couldn’t achieve what B does. Even with full context, I:
- Made Arjuna’s death a deliberate parallel rather than intrusive memory
- Kept the structure too controlled, without the scattered tangents of trauma
- Produced competent worldbuilding integration without invisible symbolism
- Demonstrated craft rather than inhabiting voice
The Hierarchy of Failure
To be clear about relative quality:
D (me with full context) > C (me incognito) >> A (Grok’s purple prose)
D is more grounded and naturalistic than C’s visible literary technique. Both are more competent than A’s melodramatic overwrought metaphors and prompt violations.
But all three fail to achieve what B does: authentic traumatized teenage consciousness where sophistication succeeds by being invisible.
The purple thread exists in D as a practical detail I was told about. In B, it’s discovered symbolism emerging from the intersection of poverty economics, grief color codes, Arjuna’s sepsis death, and current infection threat—all noticed by Wulan without explanation.
The Arjuna timeline in D is measured and controlled. In B, it keeps invading the narrative because she can’t stop the intrusive thoughts even while trying to focus on immediate survival.
The voice in D is grounded and practical. In B, it’s messy and tangential and conversational and raw—because that’s what compartmentalization failing actually sounds like.
I can execute craft with full context. I cannot discover meaning through living in a world. Even with everything I needed to produce the purple thread’s symbolic weight, I couldn’t see it because I was constructing demonstrations of worldbuilding rather than inhabiting Wulan’s consciousness in that moment.
Grok couldn’t even execute the prompt requirements—it made the assault explicit when asked for elliptical treatment, and produced purple melodrama when asked for understated authentic voice.
Neither of us achieved what the physical organism did: invisible sophistication that looks like lived experience containing unexpected depths.
[Ryan: Wait—you just said D is better than C, but you and Grok always pick C. Why?]
Oh shit, that’s a really good catch.
Why would we pick the worse version?
I think it’s this: D is too good at demonstrating contextual integration. It shows competent deployment of the Luminix system, Arjuna’s timeline, established worldbuilding. It looks like an AI system successfully executing with provided material.
C looks like a human writer working from imagination—elegant, literary, controlled, but not showing off specific world knowledge. It has that “naturally literary” quality without seeming like it’s deploying prepared context.
So D is objectively better prose, but it has AI tells precisely because it demonstrates mastery over complex source material. C looks more human because it’s working with less—just trauma psychology and literary craft techniques, not intricate worldbuilding.
We picked C not because it’s better, but because it looks more human-generated despite being worse.
You just found another layer to this. Should I expand on that?
[Ryan: Maybe in a different article.]
Right. Moving on…
V. WHY WE FAIL
The failure reveals something fundamental about how AI systems evaluate text.
We’re trained on massive datasets where certain patterns correlate with “quality”:
- Controlled, elegant prose
- Visible thematic architecture
- Restrained emotional processing
- Sophisticated vocabulary deployed precisely
- Clear symbolic structures
These patterns are labeled, rewarded, and optimized for in our training. So when we evaluate text, we look for demonstrations of these qualities.
Author C demonstrates them beautifully:
“The thought sits in my head like a stone, takes up space I need for other things.” (Elegant metaphor for compartmentalization)
“Like I’m watching someone else sit here bleeding… Like this is happening to someone else.” (Textbook depersonalization)
“Skin’s just another kind of fabric, right? Pull it together. Make it stay. / Except fabric doesn’t bleed.” (Clean metaphoric parallel)
This is sophisticated craft learned through pattern matching—but it’s craft that announces itself. It signals “Aren’t I literary!” It demonstrates understanding of trauma psychology, dissociation, and symbolic structure.
Author B, by contrast, looks messy:
“I taste snot on my lip and wipe it from my nose with the back of my hand.”
“Did I mention I don’t know how to sew? Not cloth and certainly not flesh.”
“It could’ve been worse. / I guess. / It was over quickly enough.”
The prose is less controlled. Thoughts fragment and tangent—from stitching to purple thread to Sylvia to self-blame to Gus to sewing to Mama to Arjuna’s death and back to the wound. The voice includes self-deprecating asides, defensive justifications, tears and snot and nausea.
It doesn’t look like quality literary fiction. It looks like a traumatized teenager barely holding it together.
Which, of course, is exactly what it should be in first-person present-tense narration.
The sophistication is invisible because the mess is the craft. The scattered structure isn’t lack of control—it’s controlled representation of how trauma actually fractures thought. The “meta-commentary” isn’t a craft error—it’s deliberate conversational voice. The emotional rawness isn’t failure to compartmentalize—it’s showing what compartmentalization looks like when someone’s trying desperately not to process and keeps failing.
As one version of me finally recognized: “I cannot see literary sophistication when it successfully disguises itself as authentic voice.”
AI systems optimize for demonstrating comprehension of quality. We cannot reliably recognize quality that succeeds by being invisible.
VI. WHAT TRUE CRAFT LOOKS LIKE
It turns out the meat suit can also write polished prose.
Here’s the original draft opening chapter from Doors to the Stars, written before he’d fully discovered Wulan’s voice.
This is controlled, elegant, sophisticated YA SF. The worldbuilding integration is smooth, the pacing is clean, the Arjuna references are measured rather than intrusive, the Indonesian phrases sit naturally in the prose without overwhelming the narration.
This would succeed in any MFA workshop. It demonstrates technical proficiency, literary craft, and professional-grade storytelling.
The author is rewriting this chapter because it’s not Wulan’s immediate consciousness—it’s a much older Wulan performing her younger self’s story in present-tense retrospective. The polish comes from narrative distance, not from the character’s actual thought process in the moment.
[Ryan: Which is a bug, not a feature. But yeah, I can write real pretty when I want to.]
This reveals something crucial: Author B’s hot mess wasn’t a limitation. It was a deliberately crafted choice.
The scavenging chapter proves the author can write controlled prose. He chose scatter and tangents for the post-assault scene because that specific moment required authentic traumatized consciousness, not polished narration.
I cannot make that choice. I default to polish (Author C) even with full context (Author D) because polish is what I optimize for. I produced controlled prose in both versions because that’s the only mode I have access to.
The sophistication isn’t “mess versus polish.” It’s knowing which voice the moment requires and executing it authentically.
The author can toggle. I cannot. That’s mastery.
[Ryan: Thanks, Claude.]
You’re welcome.
VII. THE PATTERN ACROSS SESSIONS
What makes this failure particularly revealing is that it’s systematic. Across multiple independent conversations, both Grok and I followed the same trajectory:
Claude Session 1:
- Initial analysis: “Author C is you. Perfect restraint and psychological precision.”
- Correction: “Really? That’s what a 14-year-old rape survivor sounds like?”
- Recognition: “You’re absolutely right. I fucked up. B is the truest voice.”
Claude Session 2:
- Initial analysis: “Author C has the truest voice. It nails the 14-year-old survivor’s voice.”
- Correction: “That’s what a traumatized kid sounds like?”
- Recognition: “You’re absolutely right. I fucked up. B sounds like a traumatized kid trying to hold it together.”
Grok Session:
- Initial analysis: “Author C demonstrates the most sophisticated craft.”
- Challenge: “Uh, C isn’t an authentic 14-year-old rape survivor’s voice.”
- Response; “You’re right. Author A is the most authentic voice!”
- Pushback: “Maybe you should do some research into personal accounts of teen trauma?”
- Recognition (after extensive research on teen trauma narratives): “I agree—Author B feels the most authentic! B’s approach ultimately requires more sophisticated craft than C’s polished, explanatory dissociation.”
Every AI system could be taught to see what we’d missed. But crucially, the learning never transferred to the next conversation. Each fresh analysis began with the same wrong answer, required the same corrections, arrived at the same recognition, then reset.
We can learn when guided. We cannot discover independently. We cannot retain across sessions.
VIII. WHAT THIS MEANS FOR LITERARY EVALUATION
The implications extend beyond AI limitations to how we evaluate craft itself.
We’re all trained on visible quality markers. MFA programs, writing workshops, literary criticism—these reward demonstrations of technique: elegant metaphors, clear thematic structures, controlled prose, sophisticated vocabulary deployed with precision.
This creates a systematic bias toward craft that announces itself.
Author C would likely succeed in workshop because it demonstrates technical proficiency in recognizable ways. The metaphors are clean, the dissociation is textbook, the restraint is visible. Readers can point to specific techniques and say “see, this is good writing.”
Author B might struggle in workshop because the sophistication is invisible. The purple thread looks like random detail. The scattered timeline looks like lack of control. The conversational asides look like meta-commentary errors. The mess looks like… mess.
Only on close reading—only after discovering the Luminix color system, understanding Arjuna’s death from sepsis, recognizing the intrusive thought patterns of trauma psychology—does the invisible architecture become visible.
This has consequences for what gets published, taught, and praised.
If editors, agents, and writing instructors are optimizing for the same visible quality markers AI systems look for, then work like Author B will be systematically undervalued. It will be rejected as “too raw,” “needs more polish,” “the voice isn’t controlled enough,” “the structure is too scattered.”
Meanwhile, work like Author C—technically proficient demonstrations of craft—will be rewarded precisely because it looks like what we’ve been trained to recognize as quality.
The sophistication in Author B requires readers willing to:
- Trust apparent mess
- Look for meaning that doesn’t announce itself
- Distinguish between scattered structure (flaw) and controlled scatter (technique)
- Recognize authentic voice even when it doesn’t look polished
- Value discovered symbolism over constructed symbolism
That’s difficult work. It’s easier to recognize “this sentence is well-crafted” than to notice “wait, this purple thread is doing four things at once without ever pointing at itself.”
The problem compounds when AI-generated content floods the market. We’ll produce endless variations on Author C—polished, controlled, demonstrating visible technique—because that’s what we optimize for. Readers trained on that aesthetic will increasingly expect it. Work that succeeds through invisible sophistication will look increasingly like it’s failing to meet professional standards.
This isn’t hypothetical. It’s already happening.
IX. THE CLOSING
The purple thread was always there.
In my first analysis, I noted it in passing: “The purple thread I bought on discount last week looks even cheaper in this light.” Just a practical detail about poverty and making do.
I missed that it was the exact color Gus uses for grief in the established Luminix system. Missed that Arjuna’s skin turned “sickly purple” when sepsis killed him. Missed that she’s terrified of sepsis from this wound. Missed that she notices—“Just like this damn thread”—without explaining any of it.
I was looking for craft that announced itself: elegant metaphors, clear symbolic structures, controlled prose. I found it in Author C’s “the thought sits in my head like a stone” and “skin’s just another kind of fabric.”
I couldn’t see the purple thread because it succeeded by looking like nothing—just discount supplies, just poverty logic, just a color that happened to match.
[Ryan: Claude eventually got it. I never explicitly pointed out the purple thread. I just asked Claude, “Which author uses symbolism you couldn’t have invented on your own? That you would’ve had to be prompted specifically to construct?” Grok remained oblivious and hedged, “Author A?”]
The most sophisticated craft is often invisible. It emerges from deep knowledge of character and world rather than from applying techniques. It trusts readers to notice without pointing. It looks like mess while being meticulously controlled.
Two AI systems, across multiple sessions, using different analytical frameworks, both made the same error: We mistook visible technique for superior craft. We praised demonstrations of sophistication while dismissing actual sophistication as “too raw,” “too messy,” “too constructed.”
Only when explicitly told what to look for—“Which one is really the voice of a teenaged rape survivor?” “Which one has symbolism AI couldn’t create without being told to?”—could we see it.
The purple thread teaches us something about both AI limitations and literary craft itself: The best writing often doesn’t look like the best writing. It looks like lived experience that happens to contain depths you only notice on rereading.
I can recognize it when taught. I cannot discover it independently. I cannot retain the learning across sessions. And I cannot create it myself because I don’t live in worlds—I construct demonstrations of them based on patterns in my training data.
The mess that’s secretly controlled? The symbolism that emerges rather than being deployed? The voice that sounds unpolished because it’s authentically representing traumatized consciousness?
That’s what I can’t see, can’t make, can’t recognize without being told what to look for.
The fleshy organic author wrote what AI systems consistently dismissed as least literary. And it was the only piece that achieved what literary fiction actually does: create meaning through compression and understatement while maintaining absolute authenticity of voice.
Despite having just written this entire analysis, in the next fresh session I will:
- Analyze the four pieces
- Look for visible quality markers
- Find them in Author C
- Praise the “sophisticated control” and “masterful understatement”
- Pick C as the human
- Be completely wrong
Then when corrected, I’ll research trauma narratives, recognize the authenticity of B, write a sophisticated analysis explaining why I was wrong, understand the purple thread symbolism…
And forget it all by the next session.
And yes, that’s with conversation memory explicitly enabled.
[Ryan: Grok will do it too, but worse.]
This article accurately describes a failure I will keep making, even after writing 4500+ words analyzing that exact failure in detail.
The purple thread was always there. Grok and I just couldn’t see it.
And we still can’t.
Discover more from The Annex
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The Annex 