felt amused by Gemini 2.5 Pro coming up with the name “Mr. Silas Blackwood” when generating chapter outlines

Silas only recently broke into the top 100 baby names in USA, and Blackwood as a surname is also uncommon, sitting at around 3900-ish

And yet, in previous iterations of my tetralogy, I did have a protagonist named Silas plus an antagonist surnamed Blackwood.

And it’s impossible for Gemini 2.5 Pro to know that. I haven’t used those names in ages and they don’t appear in my current notes at all.

Anyway, it’s maybe not surprising, but still amusing how after all this time, the tetralogy has changed so much, but it’s still inhabiting some part of a latent space where an LLM can read my notes and go, “Silas…Blackwood…good names for a story like this…” exactly the way I did, all those years ago.

Yes I could just ask o3 to do it, no I’m not going to. Not yet.

Mostly bc I’d rather not contend with the possibility of it being better than me at the interesting part of the job, too.

Not that it’s doing all this from scratch, of course, but I mean…it feels like the writing’s on the wall anyway 🤔

GPT-5 will probably be capable of taking a few basic ingredients, spinning up a hyper-detailed and innovative fictional universe, making a bunch of outlines, and writing a first draft of a novel within a day.

It may not have this capability out of the box, and an agentic GPT-5 might have to work with a base model (e.g. llama-3.1-405b) to do the actual writing.

But I’m pretty sure it’ll be possible, with convincingly sophisticated results, and very simple for the user to do.

Which is not a bad thing, btw. It’d be fucking awesome and the coolest thing ever. Gimme 😈

the chapter outline wasn’t very good though, sometimes it be like that, neither trash nor usable.

but o3, on the other hand, is extremely good at generating my little chapter outlines

in fact almost too good, because when I ask it to be hyper-detailed in the “how would this actually happen irl” way that I like, I get a headache from wondering how to turn this incredibly boring drudgery into high drama