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Are there any good writing LLMs out there? I get that the mainstream ones have been RLHF'd to death, but surely there must be others that are capable?
This is called Hemingway because he was apparently good at communicating efficiently which made him a popular author.
> This post, is written without any tools assistance I just wrote what my brain is instructing to type (might not reread it before posting). How is the author complaining about the quality of their own writing while admitting to not even bothering reading what they wrote, let alone editing it? (Also, why would using a LLM based grammar checker trigger an AI writing detector? Did it end up rewriting substantial parts…
And that's, I think, a valid choice; you can choose to use all the tools and make something gramatically and stylistically as close to perfect, but who would want to read something as dry? That's for formal writing, and blog posts are not formal.
> This post, is written without any tools assistance I just wrote what my brain is instructing to type (might not reread it before posting). How is the author complaining about the quality of their own writing while admitting to not even bothering reading what they wrote, let alone editing it? (Also, why would using a LLM based grammar checker trigger an AI writing detector? Did it end up rewriting substantial parts…
What makes you think that? I presume that's just the authors (sarcastic) way to say "beware: may contain typos and grammatical errors".
Personally, I would recommend them to simple use any old editor with spellchecking enabled. That suffices for most writing where you just want to keep your own voice. To me, the red crinkly line just means that I should edit that word myself. In the rare case where I'm stumped on the spelling I'll look at the suggested edit of course, but never as a matter of course.
I never use an LLM to paraphrase my own voice as a matter of principle, but I’ve still been repeatedly accused of doing so because I happen to always have written structured posts, used “smart quotes,” and done that negative comparison thing (it’s genuinely not just fluff, it’s a genuinely useful way to— ah god damn it). Sigh.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that simple. LLMs were trained on lots of writing, and the "LLM voice" resembles in many ways good English prose, or at least effective public communications voice. For years, even before LLMs, there have been trends of varied popularity to, for lack of a better word, regress - intentionally omitting capitalization, punctuation, or other important details which convey meaning. I rejected those, and likewise…
Well that isn't what I am suggesting. I'm suggesting people ditch x. Reddit. Probably also ditch hn in the next couple months. If you can run a headless agent to post somewhere, just don't bother visiting that site, honestly a great rule of thumb right there. That should leave you with media sources like nyt and your local library, which seems healthier to me. And maybe it might encourage a new type of forum to emerg…
I hope editorial departments everywhere are taking careful notes on the ars technica fiasco. Agree there's room for some kind of quick "verified human" checkmark. It would at least give readers the ability to quickly filter, and eliminate all the spurious "this sounds like vibeslop" accusations.
I never use an LLM to paraphrase my own voice as a matter of principle, but I’ve still been repeatedly accused of doing so because I happen to always have written structured posts, used “smart quotes,” and done that negative comparison thing (it’s genuinely not just fluff, it’s a genuinely useful way to— ah god damn it). Sigh.
> This post, is written without any tools assistance I just wrote what my brain is instructing to type (might not reread it before posting). How is the author complaining about the quality of their own writing while admitting to not even bothering reading what they wrote, let alone editing it? (Also, why would using a LLM based grammar checker trigger an AI writing detector? Did it end up rewriting substantial parts…
Because they're self-aware perfectionists and are actively working to stop it, because they reach for all kinds of tools like grammar checkers and AI, but they're aware that using those will make the post lose "their" voice, or the human element of the post. And that's, I think, a valid choice; you can choose to use all the tools and make something gramatically and stylistically as close to perfect, but who would wan…
> you can choose to use all the tools and make something gramatically and stylistically as close to perfect, but who would want to read something as dry
If it is dry, then it is not stylistically perfect. Per definition, dry writing is just an imperfect writing. Stylistically perfect writing does not have to be dry and usually is not dry.
What happens here is that people use "stylistically perfect" when they mean "followed a bad stylistic advice".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't want to sound like an llm? Don't read llm content. Remove yourself from places where you might be liable to read it.
It's not that simple. LLMs were trained on lots of writing, and the "LLM voice" resembles in many ways good English prose, or at least effective public communications voice. For years, even before LLMs, there have been trends of varied popularity to, for lack of a better word, regress - intentionally omitting capitalization, punctuation, or other important details which convey meaning. I rejected those, and likewise…
It does not resembles that. It is usually grammatically correct writing, but it is also pretty ineffective writing bad writing with good gramar.
> This post, is written without any tools assistance I just wrote what my brain is instructing to type (might not reread it before posting). How is the author complaining about the quality of their own writing while admitting to not even bothering reading what they wrote, let alone editing it? (Also, why would using a LLM based grammar checker trigger an AI writing detector? Did it end up rewriting substantial parts…
The problem is that it has a pretty high false positive rate. Maybe it thinks it's AI because there are absolutely no spelling mistakes. Or maybe you're French and you use latin-roots words in English that are considered "too smart" for the average writer.
And the problem is that people run those tools, see "80% chance to be written by AI", and instead of considering that 20% is high enough to consider you don't know, will assume it's definitely written by AI.