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I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

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Re: I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

#101

Post by aidenn0 »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #87
aidenn0 wrote: post #82

What does it say about me that when I run my writing through one of those "detect if AI" tools I seldom see a value of less than 70% confidence that the writing was AI generated?

It probably means that your writing stylistically is close to the vector-space average of "good" writing, which is what AI produces. FWIW, your comment history here does not look like AI at all to me, and I think I have a very (maybe too?) high sensitivity to AI slop.

I haven't tried my HN comments; I've only tried things spanning more than a few sentences and that I've put more effort into. I only discovered this when my son put an e-mail I wrote to his teacher that he was CC'd on into the tool on his school iPad.

Re: I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

#102

Post by hectdev »

piker wrote: post #86

AI for editing is garbage. Chat to it to get ideas maybe, but in its current incarnation it’s just going to degrade anything you filter through it.

I work mostly on the tech side of things but my corporate limitation has always been writing up documentation, communicating/translating to stakeholders, and recalling everything relevant when writing PR descriptions. AI has been a breath of fresh air. I actually communicate more information efficiently than I would have ever put the effort into before. I still maintain my own writing for more casual things like social media (HN included) and low stakes Slack conversations but AI for getting across ideas and then proofreading it is great.

Re: I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

#103

Post by [deleted] »

hectdev wrote: post #102
piker wrote: post #86

AI for editing is garbage. Chat to it to get ideas maybe, but in its current incarnation it’s just going to degrade anything you filter through it.

I work mostly on the tech side of things but my corporate limitation has always been writing up documentation, communicating/translating to stakeholders, and recalling everything relevant when writing PR descriptions. AI has been a breath of fresh air. I actually communicate more information efficiently than I would have ever put the effort into before. I still maintain my own writing for more casual things like soci…

[deleted]

Re: I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

#105

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

piker wrote: post #100
ArcHound wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it's quite good. Of course, I'm not taking 100% of output, but it takes care of my grammar blindspots (damn you commas and a/an/the articles!). Can you please share what and how gets degraded? Sometimes I don't like a phrase it selects, but it's not common

Well, for one example, it inhibits your desire to improve against those very blind spots. In exchange for that your audience gets 3-4x length normalized bullshit to read instead.

AI can take a rough draft, clean it up and shorten it as much as you want. The suggestions very often expose ambiguities in the original text. If you think the LLM got it wrong, it’s nearly often the LLM overreading some feature of the original that you failed to catch, which is precisely what you’d want out of your proofreader.

Yes, LLMs reduce the individual charm of prose, but the critique itself carries a romantic notion that we all loved the idiosyncratic failures of convention and meaning which went into highly identifiable personal styles, and which often go missing from LLM-edited work.

Re: I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

#106

Post by tonyedgecombe »

heavyset_go wrote: post #47

If you outsource your thinking and skills, your ability to do either atrophies. You'll become dependent on outsourcing for both. You're trading ability and competence for convenience.

For some reason I read that as "If you outsource your thinking and skills, your ability to do apostrophes."

Re: I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

#107

Post by tonyedgecombe »

stabbles wrote: post #33

Are grammatical errors and typos fashionable now? Reading this post it seems the anti-thesis in the LLM era is not to edit at all, but rather write down a stream of consciousness to make it "personal".

I don't know but capitalisation seems to have gone down the shitter.

Re: I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

#108

Post by jmmv »

watwut wrote: post #67
surgical_fire wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading what you write for editing does not make a text lose your voice. If anything, it amplifies it, you get to ensure that what you intended to say was said. Not reading what you write smells more like laziness. Same thing for spell checks, grammar checks, and even AI usage. If you use things lazily, the result will be lazy as well. Instead of asking for an AI tool to write your thoughts in your place, you can wri…

> instruct it to not rewrite anything, only give you an overall picture of text clarity, sentiment, etc. LLM cant really do that. It can help you produce correct sentence where you struggle to create own, but it does not have capabilities to do what you suggest.

It sounds like you haven't tried.

LLMs definitely can do this. The output tends to be overly positive though, claiming that any sort of rough draft you give them is "great, almost ready for publishing!". But the feedback you can get on clarity, narrative flow, weak spots... _is_ usually pretty good.

Now, following that feedback to the letter is going to end up with a diluted message and boring voice, so it's up to you to do with the feedback whatever you think best.

Re: I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

#110

Post by AndrewKemendo »

aidenn0 wrote: post #82

What does it say about me that when I run my writing through one of those "detect if AI" tools I seldom see a value of less than 70% confidence that the writing was AI generated?

Simple: The derived variance in your word usage and sequences, is outside the mean distribution range, that would be labeled as AI generated, given this specific evaluation algorithm

It’s not nondeterministic

you can probably do the shannon entropy calculation yourself if you understand what the evaluation algorithm is

That said…if the evaluator is non-deterministic, then there’s no value in the estimate anyway

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