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Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

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Re: Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

#71
post #8

This feels like a desperate attempt to stay relevant in a post-LLM world. They’re basically wrapping an LLM in a "professional" skin and calling it an expert review. The problem is that once you start letting an AI "expert" dictate tone and logic, you effectively lobotomize the writer’s original intent. We’re reaching a point where AI is just reviewing other AI-generated text, creating a feedback loop of pure mediocr…

> The problem is that once you start letting an AI "expert" dictate tone and logic, you effectively lobotomize the writer’s original intent

Isn't that what grammarly has always been, since long before the invention of the transformer? They give you a long list of suggestions, and unless you write a corporate press release half of them are best ignored. The skill is in choosing which half to ignore

Re: Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

#72
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about children or students? I think most people write because they want to communicate.

Children and young students, certainly. Adult students: almost 100%. If writing is your job, then by definition, and your problem is more often finding something to say, not writing it.

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Re: Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still confusing "has a result that looks the same" and "uses the same process"; these are different things.

Why do you say it has a different process? When I ask it to do integrals it uses the same process as me

Not everything works like integrals. Some things don't have a standard process that everyone follows the same way.

Editing is one of these things. There can be lots of different processes, informed by lots of different things, and getting similar output is no guarantee of a similar process.

Re: Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

#75
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can understand his biography and analyses about how shakespeare might have written. You can apply this knowledge to modify your writing process. The LLM does not model text at this meta-level. It can only use those texts as examples, it cannot apply what is written there to it's generation process.

no it does and what you said is easily falsifiable. can you provide a _single_ example where LLM might fail? lets test this now.

Yes, what I said should be falsifiable. The burden is on you to give me an example, but I can give you an idea.

You need to show me an LLM applying writing techniques do not have examples in its corpus.

You would have to use some relatively unknown author, I can suggest Iida Turpeinen. There will be interviews of her describing her writing technique, but no examples that aren't from Elolliset (Beasts of the sea).

Find an interview where Turpeinen describes her method for writing Beasts of the Sea, e.g.: https://suffolkcommunitylibraries.co.uk/meet-the-author-iida...

Now ask it to produce a short story about a topic unrelated to Beasts of the Sea, let's say a book about the moonlanding.

A human doing this exercise will produce a text with the same feel as Beasts of the Sea, but an LLM-produced text will have nothing in common with it.

Re: Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

#76
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you change the words in a sentence then it changes its meaning.

Yeah but obviously my point in this context is that it doesn't. Its not like I said to replace the word with "potato". Thanks for your genius comment.

It changes the meaning significantly. An LLM has very little in common with a human student.

Re: Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say it has a different process? When I ask it to do integrals it uses the same process as me

Not everything works like integrals. Some things don't have a standard process that everyone follows the same way. Editing is one of these things. There can be lots of different processes, informed by lots of different things, and getting similar output is no guarantee of a similar process.

I don’t see why editing is any different. If a human can learn it why not an llm

Re: Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

#78
post #3

The most interesting is the realization that if the LLM's input is only the output of a professional (human), then by definition the LLM cannot mimic the process the (human) professional applied to get from whatever input they had to produce the output. In other words an LLM can spit out a plausible "output of X", however it cannot encode the process that lead X to transform their inputs into their output.

i don't get what the point of what you are saying is? i can ask it to explain how to solve an integral right now with steps. i can ask it to tell me how to write like a person X right now.

Actually this is the crux and the nuance which makes discussing LLM specifics a pain in the general space.

If you built an LLM exclusively on the writings and letters of John Steinbeck, you could NOT tell the LLM to solve an integral for you amd expect it to be right.

Instead what you will receive is a text that follows a statistically derived most likely (in accordance to the perplexity tuning) response to such a question.

Re: Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

#79
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but llm can do both. so what's the point? can you give a specific example of what an llm can't do? be specific so we can test it.

like OP originally said, the LLM doesn't have access to the actual process of the author, only the completed/refined output. Not sure why you need a concrete example to "test", but just think about the fact that the LLM has no idea how a writer brainstorms, re-iterates on their work, or even comes up with the ideas in the first place.

> has no idea how a writer brainstorms

This isn't true in general, and not even true in many specific cases, because a great deal of writers have described the process of writing in detail and all of that is in their training data. Claude and chatgpt very much know how novels are written, and you can go into claude code and tell it you want to write a novel and it'll walk you through quite a lot of it -- worldbuilding, characters, plotting, timelines, etc.

It's very true that LLMs are not good at "ideas" to begin with, though.

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