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We're losing our voice to LLMs

tonyalicea.dev

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Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#281

Post by vee-kay »

tptacek wrote: post #274

If you care about voice, you still can get a lot of value from LLMs. You just have to be careful not to use a single word they generate. I've had a lot of luck using GPT5 to interrogate my own writing. A prompt I use (there are certainly better ones): "I'm an editor considering a submitted piece for a publication {describe audience here}. Is this piece worth the effort I'll need to put in, and how far will I need to…

I think you just did another non-sequitur.. What is a graf? Is it journalism slang for "paragraph"?

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#282

Post by 6thbit »

It's a little odd for a capitalist society that values outputs so highly to also value process as much.

We've proved we can sort of value it, through supporting sustainability/environmental practices, or at least _pretending to_.

I just wonder, what will be the "Carbon credits" of the AI era. In my mind a dystopian scheme of AI-driven companies buying "Human credits" from companies that pay humans to do things.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#283

Post by moooo99 »

I generally agree with the sentiment, but I can't help but feel like we're attributing to much of this change to LLMs. While they're certainly driving this change even further, this is a trend that has already started way before LLMs became as widespread as they are today.

What personally disturbs me the most is the self censorship that was initially brought forward by TikTok and quickly spread to other platforms - all in the name of being as advertiser friendly as possible.

LinkedIn was the first platform where I really observed people losing their unique voice in favor of corporate friendly - please hire me - speak. Now this seems to be basically any platform. The only platform that seems to be somewhat protected from it is Reddit, where many mods seem to dislike LLMs as much as everybody else. But more likely, its just less noticeable

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#284

Post by Animats »

amrocha wrote: post #169
rdtsc wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I deleted my Facebook account a couple of years ago and my Twitter one yesterday. I never signed up for Facebook or Twitter. My joke is I am waiting until they become good. They are still shitty and toxic from what I can tell from the outside, so I'll wait a little longer ;-)

Your loss. Twitter was an incredible place from 2010 to 2017. You could randomly message something and they would more often than not respond. Eventually an opportunity would come and you’d meet in person. Or maybe you’d form an online community and work towards a common goal. Twitter was the best place on the internet during that time. Facebook as well had a golden age. It was the place to organize events, parties,…

Reddit may be next. The number of "promoted" items is increasing.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#285

Post by pixl97 »

ezst wrote: post #74
chemotaxis wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not just LLMs, it's how the algorithms promote engagement. i.e. rage bait, videos with obvious inaccuracies etc. I guess, but I'm on quite a few "algorithm-free" forums where the same thing happens. I think it's just human nature. The reason it's under control on HN is rigorous moderation; when the moderators are asleep, you often see dubious political stuff bubble up. And in the comments, there's often a fair…

I suspect it got worse with the advent of algorithm-driven social networks. When rage inducing content is prevalent, and when engaging with it is the norm, I don't see why this behaviour wouldn't eventually leak to algorithms-free platforms.

Algorithm driven social media is a kind of pollution. As the density of the pollution on those sites increases it spills out and causes the neighbors problems. Think of 4chan style raids. It wasn't enough for them to snipe each other on their site, so they spread the joy elsewhere.

And that's just one type of issue. You have numerous kinds of paid actors that want to sell something or cause trouble or just general propaganda.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#286

Post by ryandv »

gordonhart wrote: post #250
coffeecoders wrote: post #99

I actually think we’re overestimating how much of "losing our voice" is caused by LLMs. Even before LLMs, we were doing the same tweet-sized takes, the same medium-style blog posts and the same corporate tone. Ironically, LLMs might end up forcing us back toward more distinct voices because sameness has become the default background.

My theory is that LLMs are accelerating [online] radicalization by commoditizing bland, HR-approved opinions. If you want to sound like a human on the internet, for better or for worse the easiest way is to say something that would make Anthropic’s safety team have a heart attack.

> commoditizing bland, HR-approved opinions. If you want to sound like a human on the internet, for better or for worse the easiest way is to say something that would make Anthropic’s safety team have a heart attack.

I agree.

LLMs are like blackface for dumbfucks: LLMs let the profoundly retarded put on the makeup and airs of the literati so they can parade around self-identifying as if they have a clue.

If you don't like the barbs in this kind of writing prepare for more anodyne corporate slop. Every downvote signals to the algorithm that you prefer mediocrity.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#287

Post by tptacek »

vee-kay wrote: post #281
tptacek wrote: post #274

If you care about voice, you still can get a lot of value from LLMs. You just have to be careful not to use a single word they generate. I've had a lot of luck using GPT5 to interrogate my own writing. A prompt I use (there are certainly better ones): "I'm an editor considering a submitted piece for a publication {describe audience here}. Is this piece worth the effort I'll need to put in, and how far will I need to…

I think you just did another non-sequitur.. What is a graf? Is it journalism slang for "paragraph"?

Yeah, easier to type, easier to read, deliberately misspelled so it sticks out to copyeditors. I use it sometimes without thinking. An LLM would have caught that! :)

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#288

Post by Uehreka »

Aurornis wrote: post #148
Uehreka wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You get more of what you engage with. If you don’t want to hear a lot of Brexit talk, don’t engage with Brexit content. The algorithm doesn’t show you “more of the things you engage with”, and acting like it does makes people think what they’re seeing is a reflection of who they are, which is incorrect. The designers of these algorithms are trying to figure out which “mainstream category” you are. And if you aren’t…

> The algorithm doesn’t show you “more of the things you engage with”, That’s literally what the complaint was that I was responding to. You even immediately contradict yourself and agree that the algorithm shows you what you engage with > But you make one three word comment about Brexit and the algorithm goes up > Now your feed is trash forever, unless you engage with content from another mainstream category This is…

OK sure, if you want to be technically correct, “the algorithm shows you what you engage with” in some sense, but not any useful sense. There’s no proportionality.

As I said above, if you engage heavily with content you like that is outside of the mainstream categories the algorithm has been trained to prefer, it will not show you more of those things.

If you engage one single time, in even the slightest way, with one of those mainstream categories, you will be seeing nothing but that, nonstop, forever.

The “mainstream categories” are not publicly listed anywhere, so it’s not always easy to know that you’ve just stepped in one until it’s too late.

You can’t engage with things you like in proportion to how much you care about them. If something is in a mainstream category and you care about it only little bit, you have to abstain from interacting with it at all, ever, and don’t slip up. Having to maintain constant vigilance about this all the time sucks, that’s what pisses me off.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#289

Post by lambda »

tptacek wrote: post #274

If you care about voice, you still can get a lot of value from LLMs. You just have to be careful not to use a single word they generate. I've had a lot of luck using GPT5 to interrogate my own writing. A prompt I use (there are certainly better ones): "I'm an editor considering a submitted piece for a publication {describe audience here}. Is this piece worth the effort I'll need to put in, and how far will I need to…

All of this sounds like something you could just do yourself after putting a piece down for a day or two and coming back to it with fresh eyes. What benefit is there of cooking the oceans with a bullshit generator?

Like, sure, it's possible to do this with an LLM, but it's also possible to do it without, at roughly similar levels of effort, without contributing to all of the negative externalities of the LLM/genAI ecosystem.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#290

Post by bluefirebrand »

AstroBen wrote: post #67

There's something unique about art and writing where we just don't want to see computers do it As soon as I know something is written by AI I tune out. I don't care how good it is - I'm not interested if a person didn't go through the process of writing it

I couldn't agree more. I don't care how much prompt or model finetuning you did, if something is shat out by an LLM I'm not interested even remotely.

I wish more people held the same opinion actually. Unfortunately, my sense is that most people don't care, they are fine with LLM generated crap

It honestly makes me want to blow my brains out

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