Live data from Hacker News

I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

lesswrong.com

131–140 of 262 posts

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

#131
>Although 80 % of the content was my own writing, the fact that it was run in a LLM enginee for grammar and vocabulary cross-check, made it failed the "probable written by AI " metric; and it was rejected.

should be:

>Although 80% of the content was my own writing, the fact that it was run through an LLM engine for grammar and vocabulary cross-checking meant that it failed the "probably written by AI" metric, and it was rejected.

  1. 80 % -> 80%
  2. in -> through
  3. a LLM -> an LLM
  4. enginee -> engine
  5. cross-check -> cross-checking
  6. cross-checking, -> cross-checking (removed the comma)
  7. made it failed -> meant that it failed, (or "made it fail" depending on whether you want to preserve the past tense or preserve the word "made")
  8. probable -> probably
  9. by AI " -> by AI"
  10. ; and it was -> , and it was (no need for a semicolon when linking with a conjunction like "and", and I would consider another word or phrase such as ", and, as a result, it was rejected" to emphasize the causal relationship between the clauses)
That's ten corrections that are fixing straightforward typos and/or grammar and vocab mistakes in one sentence. Most are fairly objective, though I can understand different opinions on 2, 7, or maybe 10.

Relying on AI for editing seems to have atrophied the author's writing if that is what he or she thinks is worth publishing on a blog like this. I would suggest practicing editing your own work and not even thinking about passing it through AI (especially when you were told not to use any AI!) to edit for a while. Given that English is not your first (or even second or third) language, I would also suggest having a native speaker with some demonstrable writing skill review your writing and give feedback on how to make it more idiomatic. For example, writing being "run through an LLM" rather than "run in an LLM" is a relatively subtle difference compared to the others, and it's very very common for preposition mistakes like this to show up when writing in another language than your first. I am still hopeless with French prepositions.

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

#132
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 was asked to write user stories about a complex topic where I’m the SME at work. I spent two hours info dumping everything I knew about the project, everything the AI wouldn’t have any context for, using Cursor to add related projects to the workspace, tagging specific files where we’d implemented similar things with our styles, noted all the quirks of the system and how it works and where to find relevant information. I spent a lot of time on it, and then asked it to reach out using cli to grab relevant information from our infra, and write stories about how we’d accomplish everything I intend to get done. I then spent another few hours reviewing the 45 or so stories that conversation generated. It was similar to how I’d talk to a new contractor I’m onboarding to work on the work.

I have a deep knowledge of the information, have done the process we’re doing on two previous projects, but organizing all the stories would have been an absolute nightmare. I still spent half a day on this, I’d guess the fatigue from the boring parts would have made this take a week or maybe two, just because I was doing the parts I enjoy (knowing things and describing them) and I was able to offload the parts I’m not great at (using a lot of boilerplate language to organize the info I knew into scrum stories). Then I had a meeting, reviewed the stories with my coworkers, we had a discussion, deleted two or three of them that we determined weren’t necessary, and fixed up one or two where I’d provided insufficient information about some context surrounding coloring of a page.

It burned through a ton of Opus 4.6 tokens, looked through a ton of code (mostly that I’d written, pre-LLM), but has been amazing for helping me move into a lead position where grooming stories and being organized has always been my weakest point.

Also, when I wrote a postmortem for a deploy that had some issues, I wrote it all by hand. You have to know when the tools help and when they will hinder.

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

#133

>I just wrote what my brain is instructing to type (might not reread it before posting) Why would I put effort into reading something that had no effort put in by the author? This guy needs an editor, AI or otherwise.

"I think that is the beauty of writing, the raw , unedited emotions of the person behind every words either for entertainment or educational purposes, is what makes it special" - the article, clearly expressing the intent of its own mistakes and contextualizing them in the era of LLM-borne "perfect" text

I appreciate the sentiment, and good for him. However, from an audience perspective, why choose to watch a guy filming himself eating cereal with a shaky phone camera when you could watch The Sopranos? (or the latest MrBeast extravaganza, to avoid being pedantic).

I guess it's OK if you enjoy reading someone expressing himself without communicating anything valuable and well produced. It's kind of like people who enjoy stream-of-consciousness poetry or unhinged personal blog posts. It's fine.

But most of us (I think) read for our own gain, expecting substantial / stimulating text that is ideally well researched and serves a clear purpose.

Something like that needs an editor, effective proofreading, and quite some time of work and rework.

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

#134
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "LLM voice" resembles in many ways good English prose, or at least effective public communications voice. It does not resembles that. It is usually grammatically correct writing, but it is also pretty ineffective writing bad writing with good gramar.

One of the most common criticisms is the use of the emdash. This is a classic bit of English prose that is not problematic except as a stereotype used to dismiss writing for form rather than for content. Let's grab a few books off the shelf (literally). Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has four emdashes on the very first page: > It is also the story of a book, a book called THGTTG - not an Earth bo…

No one is asking that we reject all prose with emdash. Not all emdash-users are LLMs, but many LLMs are profligate emdash-users, so adjust your priors accordingly.

Secondarily, I think there's a part of the discourse missing: the presence of a syntactic emdash in a sentence on the internet is not itself a strong signal of LLM-writing - but the presence of an actual emdash glyph (—) should raise some eyebrows, esp. in fora that aren't commonly authored in rich text editors (here, twitter, ...)

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

#135
Every now and then when I'm reading something, the writer will use a turn of phrase, a specific word, a metaphor, etc, that is unusually clever, or allows me to see the concept in some obtuse light. Or even, they are just able to choose the right words to make something sound musical or rhythmic in some pleasant way. It's intellectually delightful to come across these in writing.

I've never been surprised at AI writing. Emotion the biggest part of communication and these grey boxes have none.

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

#136

>I just wrote what my brain is instructing to type (might not reread it before posting) Why would I put effort into reading something that had no effort put in by the author? This guy needs an editor, AI or otherwise.

The relative value of those things are shifting. As the cost of polished LLM drivel falls to zero, some might prefer even the most unedited, off-the-cuff human writing to the slop.

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

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I think that is the beauty of writing, the raw , unedited emotions of the person behind every words either for entertainment or educational purposes, is what makes it special" - the article, clearly expressing the intent of its own mistakes and contextualizing them in the era of LLM-borne "perfect" text

I appreciate the sentiment, and good for him. However, from an audience perspective, why choose to watch a guy filming himself eating cereal with a shaky phone camera when you could watch The Sopranos? (or the latest MrBeast extravaganza, to avoid being pedantic). I guess it's OK if you enjoy reading someone expressing himself without communicating anything valuable and well produced. It's kind of like people who enj…

At this point, it is far more distracting to see LLM-isms and get completely thrown out of the reading-understanding process than to see some typos or grammatical errors. I actually feel reassured when I see something like a "they're/their" swap, because I know I am reading the author's thoughts instead of some linear algebra vaguely influenced by the author's thoughts.

Five years ago, I probably would have been annoyed by the same.

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

#138
post #8

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.

It's absolutely shocking how many people think that inverting all the quality metrics that we've traditionally used "because LLMs" will lead to good things. Nothing about this will end well.

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

#139
post #20

I want to emphasize a thought you expressed: > "..but maybe it's a good thing that most of us don't allow this technology to reframe our thoughts." No, you're not the only one experiencing this: I too had the same concerns as you: with every new thought, every new creation, I had to ask the AI's opinion, as if I were no longer able to judge, to decide, without consulting the AI (...just to be safe, you never know...)…

>as if I were no longer able to judge, to decide, without consulting the AI

"the Whispering Earring" – https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/2012-10-03-yva...

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

#140
wrong, or at least, slightlywrong, but not, lesswrong

you are missing the writing era, which is gone. whatever we have now will slowly congeal into cold grue that will get a name or names

the madness of bieng chastised for speakerphoning and disturbing people gulping the slop

what do we call that?

Post reply on HN