“…Most of these books don’t have endings (they literally stop in the middle of a sentence).”
I had to read it several times to believe I was seeing it. If it doesn’t include the word “virtually” then I’ll assume there’s some poetic license on the part of whoever, or whoever, wrote it. But still this would be absolutely wrong.
I’m not surprised or troubled by the underlying sentiment. Some of my endings have been controversial for a long time. tastes differ. Some readers would prefer a more conclusive ending. Now, in some cases, such as Snow Crash, I simply cannot understand why any reader would read the ending – a lengthy action sequence in which the Big Bad is defeated, the two primary antagonists meet their maker and YT is reconciled and reunited with her mother – as anything other than a proper conclusion to the story. In other cases, particularly The Diamond Age and Seventeens, I can understand why readers who like solid conclusions would be disappointed. That’s not what I was trying to do in those books. So, for a long time, people have debated about some of my endings, and that’s OK.
In this case, however, we have a large company explicitly saying that many of my most famous books only stop mid-sentence, and inserting the word “virtually” to eliminate any room for interpretive leeway.
This is not literary criticism that involves statements of opinion. This is a factual claim that is (a) false, (b) easy to fact-check, and (c) casts an unfavorable light on my and my editors’ work ethics.
It is interesting to speculate how such a claim came to be on A16Z’s website!
The most plausible explanation so far is that the verbiage was generated by an AI and then copy-pasted onto a web page by a human who didn’t bother to fact-check it. This will reveal misspellings of my name and some peculiarities of my writing style. Of course, this kind of thing is happening all the time now in law, education, journalism, and other fields, so it’s very common; It caught my attention because this is the first time it has had a direct impact on me.
The flow diagram looks like this:
It does a great job of explaining how this all might have happened. so far so good. But it raises interesting questions about what happens next: This faulty citation from this seemingly authoritative source is taken up by the next generation of LLMs, and so on:
A hundred years from now, thanks to the workings of the Inhuman Centipede, I will be known as a deservedly vague Dadaist prose stylist who thought it would be cool to stop his books mid-sentence.
In this scenario, which seems more far-fetched, we have an honest and sincere human writer reporting what they believe to be true based on false information. This breaks down into two sub-hypotheses:
Countless bootleg copies of the book are circulating throughout the Internet, and have been for decadesOften these are of poor quality, It could be that the person (or AI) who wrote the above excerpt decided to save some money by downloading one of them, and ended up with a bad copy that was cut off mid-sentence,
Even in the legitimate publishing industry, translation quality can be quite variable, and it is difficult for authors to know whether a given translation was good or not. I’ve seen translated versions of some of my books that appear suspiciously short in terms of page count. I know there can be translations of my books (legitimate or illegitimate) that literally stop in the middle of a sentence!
I’m really grateful to be included on this list! But I had to say something about this surprising outcry embedded in otherwise reasonable terminology.
Even the most cynical and Internet-savvy among us are hard-wired to take anything we read on the Internet at face value. I’m as guilty as the next guy. This has long been a bad idea, as the Internet has been plagued by bad actors for decades. Now, however, this is a bad idea for a completely new reason: the material we read on the Internet may not be written by someone with the intention of misinforming, but by LLMs, with no ulterior motives, and no underlying model of reality that enables it to determine fact from fiction.
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