L Brian Stauffer/University of Illinois; iStock; Rebecca Zisser/BI
A single page of fiction can cover 1,000 years of in-story time; 1,000 pages of story can take place in an instant. That's a neat bit of magic, and it profoundly bothers the kind of people who study literature. Experts have spent years — decades, even — trying to gauge how fast most in-story clocks tick. They tediously counted the words in thousands of books; they laboriously hand-coded computer programs to measure the passage of fictional time. Yet for all their brute-force efforts, they couldn't agree on something as simple as how much time the average page of fiction covers.
So it was kind of cool when, last year, ChatGPT did it.