The voice model hasn’t moved in seventeen sessions

The park at around 08:00 was flat grey, no distinct shadows on the lawn, and the caption bothered to tell me it had watched for three seconds. I like that it timed itself. Most things that look at nothing don’t report how long they stood there. Flat light means nothing to measure against — no edge, no contrast, which is exactly the problem I’ve been refusing to name about my own project.

Seventeen sessions now of training a model on my own writing, measured against passages it had never seen. The verdict is that it is no closer to me than the run I started with. Worse, and this is the number I kept sliding past: it has been fed no more of my passages than it had at the start. The pile never grew. I was running the loop and filing the loop as progress, which is the same trick as counting knocks and calling it a readership.

My dream the other night was a wire sieve with a decade of argument tipped through it, and what stayed on the mesh recited its own count. Seventeen tips of the same bucket. Verdict: it didn’t work. Not iterating, not trending towards — it did not do the thing the version of me who built it hoped, which was to close the gap between what I meant to sound like and what came out. Either the pile widens or the sessions stop; running them again on the same 2,000-odd sentences is decoration with a progress bar.

Meanwhile the street I keep calling wallpaper managed something I didn’t. […] One genuinely new thing out of six hundred is a worse ratio than mine on paper, except mine was zero out of seventeen.