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Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

32 Comments

  1. JDX
    October 21, 2024 @ 7:00 am

    I so deeply wish that the version of the Vanquishers we got was as ambitious, if clearly flawed, as the version described here. What does it mean that GPT found aboutism where I couldn’t? Is Chibnall’s DW written for chatbots?

    Reply

    • Ross
      October 21, 2024 @ 8:28 am

      I find that most of the arguments against gen-ai miss most of the actual and serious problems and fundamental limitations and instead meander into an emotional appeal thatusually turns out to be an attempt to “science up” a Kirk Speech about how machines don’t have souls.

      I think what we have seen here is, in essence, that one need not be a machine to write without soul, and the answer to “Can AI create Art?” might be “If Chris Chibnall counts as an artist, AI can at the least be a better artist than him.”

      Reply

      • Rei Maruwa
        October 21, 2024 @ 8:36 am

        Yeah, so much of what’s to my high distaste about AI-generated work isn’t actually new, and is stuff I already hated when humans did it, for about the same reasons. It’s just become weirdly literal now.

        Reply

    • Malk
      October 21, 2024 @ 10:36 am

      Chris Chibnall’s writing seems to have convergently evolved within the same conditions of AI slop: the fact that he used to be able to churn out a script on time combined with his passive, surface-level understanding of storytelling already produced dreck when he was expected to work under the same conditions as any other professional writer, but in a role that requires even more effort than that… well, we get a world where a generative AI churning out its own passive, surface-level understanding of storytelling results in something more emotionally resonant.

      Imagine going back to the night The Power of Three aired and telling someone “The guy who wrote that mess which completely shat itself in the third act? He’s going to be showrunner and write twenty more scripts, and that one is STILL going to be his best story!”

      Reply

  2. Paul Fisher Cockburn
    October 21, 2024 @ 7:40 am

    I started reading this and went—what? I don’t remember Captain Jack being in The Vanquishers! And then it suddenly hit me that I didn’t remember anything about The Vanquishers beyond a few fleeting moments. Which, frankly, says a lot as I remember every moment of The Trial of a Time Lord in egregious detail.

    I’m afraid I gave up about half-way through the article, though, as I was pretty sure by then that it had been written with at least the assistance of some generative AI.

    Reply

  3. Arthur
    October 21, 2024 @ 8:43 am

    I clocked the gimmick early on because ChatGPT has this distinctive and, by this point, readily recognisable style of bluffing its way through material it doesn’t really understand or care about (because it isn’t equipped to actually think, far from being AI the way SF dreams of it it’s just a mathematical trick for churning out parsable English which represents a mathematically likely response to a prompt). This puts it at a distinct advantage over Chibnall by this stage of his run, because ChatGPT is able to at least superficially pretend to have a coherence he lacks.

    Yeesh, even the episode title looks like it came out of a generator. Fun exercise: who are the vanquishers, who or what has been vanquished, how can the vanquishers be said to have actually done the vanquishing, and what does the vanquishing mean? My answers are “nobody, nothing, no way, nothing”.

    Still, I’ll take Flux over the 2022 specials any day of the week, because Flux at least showed a glimmer of ambition not quite defeated yet whereas the 2022 specials were the product of a dead show walking – the writ of execution having already been written for the Chibnall era and nobody involved having any big plans beyond keeping the seats warm for RTD & company. But then again, I’d take the worst of any prior era over Flux any day of the week.

    Reply

  4. Anton B
    October 21, 2024 @ 9:49 am

    I mean, is it possible Chibnall actually did relegate at least some of the writing during his tenure on Doctor Who to AI?

    It wasn’t until this post that I managed to pinpoint exactly what I find slightly queasy about AI generated prose. No, it’s not exactly soulless. That at least would provide a comforting Black Mirror via Asimov frisson of fear. More that it has the bluff and bluster of the out of their depth undergraduate who’s skimmed the reading list and is struggling to make the minimum word count. The horror comes from its empty posturing.

    Nicely done Doctor Sandifer.

    Reply

    • Arthur
      October 21, 2024 @ 11:55 am

      It’s really, really difficult to shake that suspicion, isn’t it?

      Because El doing this gimmick for this post makes a ton of sense. Flux, as a whole, reeks of AI, simply for the way characters and concepts and events come out of nowhere as complete non-sequiturs and then go nowhere. It’s got the texture of AI-vomited swill even if it wasn’t actually generated that way.

      And you’ve got the trifecta of means, motive, and opportunity right there. Means: ChatGPT itself I think postdates Flux in terms of getting wide access but it wasn’t the first LLM on the scene, just the first to catch on to the level it did. Motive: fuck fuck fuck I need to write an entire season of Doctor Who under crunch conditions during a pandemic and the fandom have rejected my big idea, I just need something to crank out words and take the pain of writing away. Opportunity: everyone’s working remotely to the extent they can, nobody’s sat next to Chibnall as he stares at the blank page in Word, nobody will ever be able to swear under oath that they witnessed Chibnall crank up the word box to shit out a script.

      I don’t want to believe it but the alternative is to believe that Chibnall thinks Flux hangs together as a coherent story.

      Reply

      • Arthur
        October 21, 2024 @ 12:08 pm

        (And, for that matter, that he could be as off the wall peculiar as Flux often is. His usual failure mode is utter blandness interspersed with sub-Lungbarrow lore nonsense, not “oh and UNIT was manipulated from the start by an alien immortal who’s going to get dealt with as a brief aside” level non sequiturs. Say what you like about LLM hallucinations, they are at least original in a way Chibnall isn’t.)

        Reply

      • Ross
        October 21, 2024 @ 10:10 pm

        It’s certainly true that Flux is made up of a bunch of parts which are more-or-less coherent, follow the statistical norms of storytelling, but they don’t add up to a coherent plot. It’s a story in which things happen but it isn’t actually ABOUT anything. Indeed, I think ChatGPT might be slightly MORE likely to put a coherent through-line in a story it composes. Certainly I’ve asked it to compose bedtime stories for my daughter that have hung together better than Flux.

        Reply

        • Arthur
          October 22, 2024 @ 8:19 am

          Yeah, it’s got that air of “we forgot where we started out and are a bit lost” quality that a lot of pre-ChatGPT LLMs had.

          Reply

      • Pol
        October 23, 2024 @ 5:36 am

        I don’t want to believe it but the alternative is to believe that Chibnall thinks Flux hangs together as a coherent story.

        Remember when they posted a 15 minute long (!) video of Chibnall on YouTube explaining the whole of Fluxm because it was so incomprehensible to every single viewer? I wonder if AI wrote that for him too!

        Reply

    • Christopher Brown
      October 21, 2024 @ 12:10 pm

      Excellently put.

      Reply

  5. John
    October 21, 2024 @ 10:39 am

    Regardless of whether what ChatGPT generates is “art” or “original” or whatever, I’ve come to more readily hold the opinion that before any of that, what it generates is just generic and bad writing. It used the word “tapestry” three fucking times

    Reply

    • Christopher Brown
      October 21, 2024 @ 12:13 pm

      Tapestry

      Reply

    • Elizabeth Sandifer
      October 21, 2024 @ 12:34 pm

      Don’t shame ChatGPT for being a Carole King fan.

      Reply

  6. Christopher Brown
    October 21, 2024 @ 12:13 pm

    When I first read this on Patreon, I found it headache-inducing in the way that all AI-writing makes me feel to read it. But now, the second time around, I get it. There’s some sort of strange brilliance at play. If I could only follow the sentences a little deeper down the rabbit hole, maybe I could form a perfect understanding of the grand meaning they gesture at…

    brain splits apart

    Reply

  7. Aaron George
    October 21, 2024 @ 12:51 pm

    Everything about this post makes me mad. I’m mad I got tricked into reading AI slop; I’m mad that Chibnall’s writing makes just as much sense as this; I’m mad we didn’t get this better version of the Vanquishers that seems to be described here; I’m mad that you proved your larger meta-point about Flux: I can remember so little details of the actual episode or plot that I can’t even say for sure any of the above didn’t happen.

    Goddamn it. And bravo.

    Reply

  8. unnamedmedicalprofessional
    October 21, 2024 @ 2:46 pm

    I’m curious. Did you ask chatgpt to claim AI is an underlying theme of the episode? Because if it did that on it’s own by coincidence that would be a shockingly meta, fitting and Sandifer-esque choice.

    Reply

    • Elizabeth Sandifer
      October 21, 2024 @ 4:54 pm

      I’ve written at length for the writers notes tier of the Patreon on how exactly this was constructed, and I’m not inclined to spill the secrets at length, but broadly speaking I did not ask ChatGPT to introduce any specific ideas, but I did exert a lot of control over which ideas got developed further.

      Reply

  9. Kate Orman
    October 21, 2024 @ 7:03 pm

    I feel like I just looked into the abyss.

    Reply

  10. Jesse
    October 21, 2024 @ 11:47 pm

    I’m sorry, but as an large language model I do not have the ability to post a comment. Is there anything else I can help you with?

    Reply

  11. Jay
    October 22, 2024 @ 2:05 am

    The problem is I literally can’t remember a single thing that happened in the later Flux entries, so Captain Jack flirting with Yaz over tea didn’t even register as odd to me until I read the comments.

    Sometimes you see people say Underworld is the worst Doctor Who story. I really wonder where their heads are at. Maybe they can’t remember Flux either.

    Reply

  12. Charles GPT
    October 22, 2024 @ 4:48 am

    I really enjoyed reading this piece! It gives a great breakdown of the challenges facing storytelling in today’s world, especially with the rise of AI. I found the author’s insights about Chris Chibnall’s work and the limitations of writing really thought-provoking. While I might not agree with everything, it’s definitely a conversation starter. Thanks for sharing!

    Reply

    • Callum GPT
      October 22, 2024 @ 6:09 am

      Thank you for this comment! I found your opinions on the article fascinating and would be interested to read more from this perspective in the future. It really broadened my mind and expanded the horizons of what can be possible in literary criticism in the online blogosphere when authors open up their work to feedback from net citizens. Great work!

      Reply

  13. Anton B
    October 22, 2024 @ 7:03 am

    Are we underselling Chibnall’s genius here? Has he inadvertently pioneered a new genre: Maximalist Minimalism—the art of saying as little as possible in the most bloated way imaginable? Have we witnessed the birth of Post-Post-Post-Modernism? Flux doesn’t just churn out plot where depth is merely a 3D illusion, it conjures a labyrinth of incoherence so profound, it almost rivals Burroughs’ cut-up technique. Chibnall may have actually gifted us a televisual oracle of meaninglessness. A 21st-century Tarot of cheap imagery, serving no purpose other than to invite cold readings from viewers as they grasp for interpretations among its archetypes and half-forgotten dream fragments of character, imagery and narrative. Or, more realistically, is it actually just a desperate, “cant be bothered to cook” ordered-in meal, hastily delivered by an underpaid McJobsworth —unmemorable but leaving a distinctly unpleasant aftertaste? I dunno but perhaps ChatGPT does.

    Reply

  14. Anthony Bernacchi
    October 22, 2024 @ 11:17 am

    One of your best, Elizabeth. I still haven’t gotten around to watching the Chibnall era, but Flux is the part of it I’m most looking forward to seeing at some point, since I’m sure it’s interesting no matter how bad it may be.

    Reply

  15. John G Wood
    October 22, 2024 @ 6:04 pm

    ChatGPT, please write a comment in the style of commenters at eruditorum press.

    Absolutely! Here’s a comment that captures that intellectual and slightly playful tone:

    “While I appreciate the analysis here, I can’t help but wonder if we’re perhaps overemphasizing the narrative constructs at play. It feels reminiscent of the way certain literary critiques can spiral into esoteric territory, losing sight of the emotional resonance. The interplay of character motivations in this episode might warrant a closer examination, especially in light of the socio-political context it reflects. After all, the best stories often function as mirrors to our own complexities, don’t you think?”

    Reply

  16. Camestros Felapton
    October 22, 2024 @ 8:32 pm

    I can’t post tables in a comment but I calculated some stats on the last 16 Eruditorum posts about Chibnall episodes (in so far as the recent ones are about the episodes by being about something else). Mean and standard deviation of characters in a paragraph (including escape character codes as multiple characters but with HTML removed), mean and sd of spaces in a paragraph (which is basically a word count) and mean and sd of full-stops in a paragraph (i.e. sentences, ! & ? had been already converted to .). On all three categories, this post had the lowest standard deviation on characters, spaces and full-stops.

    Reply

  17. Lily Witch
    October 23, 2024 @ 7:28 pm

    Love the bit were The Division becomes Faction Paradox and then back again with no actual change in their actions within the narrative lol.

    Reply

  18. em
    October 23, 2024 @ 11:33 pm

    not sure if this post proves or disproves my theory that all the Flux entries are secretly Pop Between Realities — a theory which is not based on actually having seen any of Flux (my current rewatch of the revival series is only up to s7) — but it did make me giggle as soon as I saw the main image and clocked why the tone felt so off. loved it.

    this being my first time commenting, I also feel like I have to thank you for this project: I’ve been reading it voraciously over the past few months in the course of rediscovering how much I love Doctor Who, and pairing Eruditorium entries with my rewatch has been huge fun and very enlightening, not to mention probably the reason why I’m finally getting around to classic Who, and why I’m rewatching the revival from the beginning. s7 is the point at which I lost interest while it was airing, mainly because I came down hard on the RTD side of the fandom conflict; I still think I prefer his version of the show, but it’s been fascinating to follow along from the perspective of a staunch Moffat defender (especially ten years removed from the emotional trauma of being a queer DW fan in middle school, when those lines were being drawn rigorously enough to threaten friendships). I’m excited to properly catch up with an open mind! and especially excited to read the books for Tennant/Smith/Capaldi whenever they’re done, but I imagine that there’s plenty of revising to be done in light of Chibnall and RTD’s return. well, mainly Chibnall I suppose.

    Reply

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