The Magic in the Machine

All authors are just very refined plagiarists, recombining tokens based on formulas to produce strings that copy patterns found in their input. “Intelligence” is nothing more than the appearance of intelligence, and imitation is the same as the real thing

Maybe human intelligence is more illusory than we think, a kind of egotistical fantasy. Are human authors really very different from those Balnibarbian pupils spinning the cranks of their writing machine? Human authors learn to write by reading other books in their chosen genre (“training”), and maybe what’s happening in their brains is just a slig