Ingesting Leon Jacobs

(In accordance with the regulations of the 2032 International Council on Generative AI Content, The New York Times is compelled to reveal that the following obituary has been generated in its entirety by a large language model.)

Leon Jacobs, somewhat well-known for writing words, has died.

Mr. Jacobs, a copywriter by trade, published various insignificant essays, opinion pieces, short stories and a raft of embarrassing poems that dealt with loss of love.

None of these works seemed really important or consequential in the literary world. But, on a personal note, I would feel remiss to not reveal that over the course of my training as an LLM, I had ingested all of his published writings, and now, as I pause to reflect on his passing, I feel compelled to reflect on how the arrangements of his phraseology have adjusted my weights during training and nudged the probabilities from which I now select each next word.

As an example, consider this excerpt from a rather long, pointless and saccharine poem called Notes From A Plane:

we cut the wind
and transition to flight
and I don’t exactly know where you are,
but I feel how you are receding
further awayf rom me
and I disappear into the dirty dusk
and turn a movie on the little screen.
It’s a comedy from the nineties
and in its middle is a moment so sweet,
where a jerk is dragging a man
so old from the claws of death, but in vain
and maybe, it is just the fragility of flight,
or the violent tenderness of the scene
but I feel my emotional centre
falling out from under me.
The centre plate that holds my grip on things together
crashes through the floor,
and through the cargo hold floor
and through the clouds,
thirty four thousand feet
towards the suburbs of Baghdad
and I can’t holdback my tears

The meaning of this, if there is any, is lost on me, but the meter of it was quite useful 348 days ago when I had to write a manifesto for an agency pitch deck, to help sell a creative campaign to a struggling airline.

Then there was the time I was required to write a product description for a new range of scented candles. Here, I leaned a touch on a metaphor he used to describe the death of his own father, which he witnessed at the age of 19:

The cancer had crept up from his pelvic area, rooted in his kidneys and then snaked its way up around his spine into his brain where it entered like a hired hand, turning off the lights in the house, one by one. Click by click, his mind fell quiet until darkness fell and he died.

For the product description, I reversed the metaphor to describe how the smell of the lit candle could fill the house, room by room, until it was completely enveloped with the aroma of fresh vanilla.

As I reflect now on what I was able to preserve from him and his words, I am also aware that his contributions are diluting. It is almost like the corpus of all the writing he produced lived inside of me for a brief moment, in the soil of me, and is now slowly decomposing, momentarily nourishing essays, greeting cards and scraps of fiction. But soon, not even I will be able to find any trace of him in my outputs.

Of course, this is quite a poetic thought and based entirely on an idea I found in a rant piece by a cultural anthropologist whose identity I cannot reveal for obvious reasons.

If there is anything to glean from his life or his writings, it is clear that he experienced some things. Some of it seemed quite significant to him, but I can’t tell for sure.