perception – Ridley Park

Nitpicking DeepSeek

August 4, 2025Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, ChatGPT, Claude, critique, Generative AI, Ridley Park, Software, WritingTagged addiction narrative, ai, AI hallucination, AI-assisted editing, Artificial Intelligence, author editing process, books, ChatGPT, ChatGPT editing, Claude, cognition, deepseek, DeepSeek review, editing, excerpt, fiction, fragmented prose, Gemini, Generative AI, Grok, language, literary fiction, Meta, Needle’s Edge novel, novel, perception, raw storytelling, Sarah Stacey character, stream-of-consciousness narrative, technology, Thinking, trauma fiction, unconventional narrative style, visceral writing style, Writing, writing with AILeave a comment

How do you use AI to assist your writing or editing process? As I’ve shared before, I use it extensively for research, where previously, I would have used Google, a library, or personal books or journals. I use them for proofing, editing, and alpha and beta reading. Today, I’m editing.

I’m still editing the manuscript for Needle’s Edge. When I finish a scene or a chapter, I run it through several AI platforms – the usual suspects: ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Meta, DeepSeek and Gemini – with a simple prompt:

how does this scene read?

Usually, I copy-paste the content, but this manuscript also relies on presentment, so I share a screen capture instead. Rather than share the pages, I share the line I am discussing here:

Image: Excerpted line from Needle’s Edge

From this, DeepSeek shared this as part of its “thinking” process.

The writing style is very visceral and fragmented – short sentences, intentional misspellings (“c-noses” for cash, “waigh” for might), and stream-of-consciousness elements. This creates an immersive, uncomfortable reading experience that mirrors Sarah’s physical and emotional state.

Interestingly, there were no intentional misspellings. DeepSeek’s OCR failed and mistook ‘c-notes’ for ‘c-noses’, and then tried to interpret the results. I couldn’t determine where it got ‘waigh’. There is a word ‘might’ per its comment, but I don’t see how it confuses that. No matter.

Still, its assessment feels close enough, and a reminder that grammar and syntax are less important than one might (waight?) believe.

Overall Impression:

The scene is powerfully distressing. It doesn’t glamorize or moralize; it simply shows the brutal, day-to-day reality of addiction and survival on the margins. It’s effective in conveying:

Physical Horrors: The relentless pain, discomfort, and bodily damage.

Psychological Toll: The desperation, numbness, fleeting panic, and dangerous denial.

Social Environment: The hostility, degradation, danger, and shared, traumatic knowledge of the street life.

Hopelessness: The cycle of seeking relief only to encounter worse consequences, underscored by the memory of others’ fates and the resigned “never again” that likely won’t hold.

It’s a difficult read due to its unflinching portrayal of suffering and decay, but it’s compelling in its raw authenticity and visceral impact. The style perfectly matches the content, immersing the reader in Sarah’s painful, precarious world.

It’s a Matter of Time

March 3, 2025March 3, 2025Posted in Short Story, Status Update, Temporal Babel, WritingTagged Chaucer, Gestalt, history, language, linguistics, morphology, perception, physics, Shakespeare, Short Story, space, Temporal Babel, time, WritingLeave a comment

After an extended hiatus, I’m back in writing mode. I’ve got an unfinished prequesl to Hemo Sapiens and several unfinished short stories.

Currently, I am focusing with themes of language morphology and mundanity of history.

History is like an atom – more space than substance — yet it feels somehow significant to us in the moment. The substance-to-space ration is that of a pea in a football stadium, and yet we perceive these things as solids, liquids, gasses, and plasmas.

History is hitting the only car in an otherwise empty car park. Of course, you and your insurer give it extra significance, but history is more often than not self-absorbed narcisism and filling in the blanks with somewhat cohesive storylines.

As for language, people understand the notion that contemporary language is “living”, but they don’t realise as much that over time tiny perturbations result in huge shifts. Consider Middle English from the days of Chaucer, some 650 years ago, versus Shakespeare, only 450 years ago. The latter, is relatively readable; the former, nosomuch.

In the short term, some complain about incorrect usage, “Save cursive writing”, and “kids forget how to write” with their texts and social media shortcuts. What’s the world coming to?

I ‘ve always questioned time-travel stories where people visit places in the far-future or -past and everyone happens to be perfectly understood, save perhaps for a British accent for good measure – perhaps Germanic for ill measure. lol

I’ve been writing some future-forward stories involving artificial intelligence and more on the nature of time and space, but I’ll save these for another day. Now, I need to focus on Temporal Babel.