Ready Player One was bad—shlock wish-fulfillment fantasy that rewards the reader for understanding fairly-basic nerd pop culture references, instead of providing any value or satisfaction derived from character, plot, emotion, philosophy, prose, or anything else that typically constitutes good writing. I say this, knowing that I should have been the target audience.
And thus it was inevitable that Ready Player Two would be worse.
So I took a few paragraphs from the free sample on Amazon, and fed them into several different AI text generators to see what would happen.
Here’s the source text I used:
Here’s what the InferKit Standard Generator gave me back:
This is just depressingly perfect.
As I paid my parking fee (The OASIS had a brilliantly integrated parking system, in which one paid for parking not once, but once for each of the virtual-reality universes it mimicked), I thought of Tony Stark, the brilliant young inventor and entrepreneur behind the Iron Man superhero armor. Having initially borrowed a few tech-industry handshakes from Stark’s old university buddies, Stark had launched the security-system company Stark Security. In fact, I would learn later, he had actually invented the Iron Man armor, and the very special superpower to which the “O” in Halliday’s trademark domain symbolizes.
Okay, Tony Stark’s also a supervillain and billionaire playboy, but that was all beside the point. He was the father of the greatest hero of the twentieth century — it was certainly true that Stark Security was the largest and most secure security-system company in the entire multiverse. So when it came time for me to make my next move, I decided I would go straight to Stark and apologize for my gaff. I left the garage and headed back toward the central mall.
The central mall was the central control center for The OASIS, in fact the only real city in The OASIS, with an estimated population of some nine trillion (although I’d heard rumors that an entire…
