Episode Details

n 2026, every budding prodigy in writing is in some sense a tragedy.

Anybody with experience prompting the large language models to write fiction knows that the models of today (April 2026) are considerably below peak human level. But anybody who has observed recent trends also knows that the models are quickly catching up. Regardless of whether it takes one year or several, the eclipse of human writing by AI seems inevitable. AI writing is clearly on the wall, so to speak, and us fans of human fiction have already begun our mourning phase.

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I’ve most felt this way upon reading the works of Tomas Bjartur. Each of his stories is a fresh look at “what might have been”, and with the fullness of time perhaps he could grow to be among the best science fiction writers of our generation.

In The Company Man, an AI engineer at a thinly-veiled frontier lab narrates, in a voice of carefully self-cultivated “ironic corporate psychopathy,”1 his promotion onto The (humanity-destroying) Project — alongside the utilitarian woman he's hopelessly in love with, a genius mathematician colleague with a sexual fetish for intellectual achievement, and a CEO whose “ayahuasca ego-death” convinced him [...]

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Outline:

(05:07) Interiority

(08:06) Deception and the Self

(09:34) Attention and Revelation

(12:04) Humor as Structure

(13:10) Writing AI Like It Actually Exists

(14:22) Limitations

(15:39) Our Last Prodigy

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
April 13th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xskkLe8YaRpt3c86r/tomas-bjartur-the-last-prodigy

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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