LLM Friendly Zone

Some writing experiments and lots of links that connect the past to the future

I published my first book – a collection of essays from my newsletter over the last two years – just before ChatGPT 03 mini and Deepseek R1 came out. I'm happy to have seized on whatever little moments of inspiration and momentum I could find to get it through the finish line because I would have been deflated about the prospect of publishing after playing around with O3 mini and R1 – or at the very least I'd have been compelled to revisit my process for writing these essays.

Around the same time I was thinking about how to proceed with writing, I was introduced to César Aira's writing, thanks to Venkat. Aira writes stories that are a combination of Proust, Borges, and Ballard. They borrow elements from his personal life, often have fantastical elements that have their own internal rules and logic, and nearly all of the stories have a Ballardian momentum to them – beginning innocuously, then tumbling forward with increasing tension and taking the seed of the story to its extremely galaxy brained ending. He eschews traditional storytelling hacks like heroes journey and stakes in his stories. Reading these stories has got me out of the rut of thinking nothing new is possible in writing.

I've been making my way through his short story collection Musical Brain and his novella Fulgentius, about a Roman general who is obsessed with the production of the play he wrote about himself at the age of 12. If you want a short story to start with – The Dog is available to read on The Short Story Project.

Aira gives a glimpse into his process in his essay The New Writing, in which he positions avant-garde movements as an excuse to begin again with an amateur mindset and move art a few steps forward without the burden of professionalization and craft. According to Aira, the avant-garde does this by reinventing the procedure by which art is produced. From the essay:

When a civilisation gets old, there are two alternatives: keep making works of art, or to reinvent art itself. But it is this very process of ageing which gives to a civilisation its stock of inventions, which are already used up. As a result, this second choice becomes more and more difficult and costly and less gratifying. That is, unless we do what the avant-gardes did and take a shortcut by resorting to procedure, something which will always seem a little irresponsible or barbarous.

If art had become the mere production of works, overseen by those who already knew how to, and were able to, produce them, the avant-garde intervened in order to reactivate the process from its roots, and did it by putting processes back on the throne which had been occupied until then by results. This achievement also has other implications: that art can be made by all, that it can be liberated from psychological restrictions, and most of all, that what we think of as the 'work' can be the method by which the work is made, rather than the actual work itself, the work acting as a kind of documentary appendix which serves only as a means of deducing the process from which it arose.

Aira made me aware of my own humble procedures for writing. While by no means avant-garde, a big part of why I've been able to write essays that are a blend of short story and personal writing for two years running is because I accidentally figured out a procedure to come up with ideas and narratives on a weekly basis. The procedure itself is not worth going into, but I am at a point where the procedures need to be revisited and refreshed.

Aira presents composer John Cage as an example of an artist who was focussed on creating new procedures for art. Cage became known for using indeterminacy and chance to compose music. His MUSIC FOR CHANGE was composed using the I CHING and BOOK OF CHANGE as methods.

Cage used three eight by eight tables, adding up to sixty-four squares in each table, which is the exact amount of hexagrams contained in the I Ching. The first table contained the sounds; each square possessed a 'sound event', that is, one or several notes. Only the odd squares had any sounds in them; the even ones were empty, which indicated silence.The second table, which also had sixty-four boxes, determined the durations, which don't happen in any particular metre. Here all sixty-four boxes are filled, because duration governs silence and sound equally. The third grid, in which only one in every four of the squares are used, is for the dynamics, from pianissimo all the way to fortissimo, to be put to use alone or in a combination, in other words, from one notation to another.

Tossing two coins six times decided a hexagram from the I Ching. The number of that hexagram referred to a box in the sound grid. Tossing the coins another six times determined the duration which would be applied to the sound chosen previously, and the third series of tosses determined the dynamics. (There was also another, fourth, grid which decided the density: the amount of layers of sound – between one and eight – which each moment could have was also determined by chance). The extension and the structure of its four parts, as well as the total duration, were also determined by chance.

John Cage became best known for his pieces of music that incorporated silence as a device in music. The most famous example of this is his piece 4'33" in which performers do not play their instruments for the entire duration of the piece. "What might seem like "nothing" is, in fact, a carefully constructed silence that invites the audience to listen to the sounds in their environment—the rustling of the audience, distant noises, even the subtle hum of the venue." - O3 mini.

I was listening to Winter Music by John Cage, a one hour piece that combines Cage's signature methods of indeterminacy and chance with utilizing silence. Listening to it passively while writing emails, I started to become hyperaware of the sounds in my environment. The negative space of reality that I did not pay attention to came into focus much more. An experiment that I'd like to do with AI writing is translating the idea of negative space in music into writing – what if you wrote an essay or story and then prompted an LLM to write the same essay but about the negative space of the same story or essay? I tried an amateur janky experiment to test it. I wrote an essay about canceling my gym membership at a local gym from the 70s and then asked O3 Mini to rewrite it as if someone who had the complete opposite preferences and posture to me was writing it. The result is may be a 6/10. Needs further experimenting.

Adding a bit of randomization into your procedure can lead to surprising effects. Sometimes I use Brian Eno's Oblique Strategy cards to introduce a bit of randomness into my work. The cards are one-line suggestions or courses of action designed by ambient musician Eno and painter Peter Schmidt. I've been experimenting with writing a paragraph or a single sentence, looking at an Oblique Strategy card, implementing the suggestion, and then asking ChatGPT's interpretation of the same suggestion.

Both painting and ambient music are art forms that value procedure. All great painters are inventors of new procedures. John Berger's Portraits, is a book of profiles of painters starting from the 3rd century. While heavy on the personal lives of the artist, you could also see the book as a collection and evolution of procedures.

I also want to explore works of writing where the procedure is front and center, such as Italo Calvino's Castle of Crossed Destinies , about a group of travelers who have mysteriously lost their power of speech and thus must communicate through tarot cards. Who are some other writers that experiment with methods?

Marshall McLuhan saw art as "exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties." If LLMs are an extended faculty then what is the blow that we are anticipating? One of the answers I think is lose of a sense of self. Every time I enjoy utilizing an LLM for research or experiments in writing, I become hyperaware of the convoluted ways in which I've constructed an identity around being "smart" or mere knowledge of certain things - with LLMs that disappear. What other blows to our senses could we anticipate through creation of art and procedures or art?

Linocut by Peter Laszlo Peri, a constructivist