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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

#181

Post by genthree »

kristjansson wrote: post #134
Arainach wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Before LLMs, the em-dash glyph was a decent tell simply that... the author was using a Mac, because it's a simple and easy-to-remember (or even guess!) key-combo on there. Not that you can't type it on other keyboards, but the Mac one for whatever reason had a combo of users-who-wanted-to-type-it and layout-that-makes-it-easy that resulted in a high proportion of correct em-dash employers being Mac users.

(option-underscore, or option-shift-dash if you prefer to think of it that way)

On iOS, you can type it by simply holding down on the "dash" button then selecting the em-dash from the list of options it presents. It may also correct double-dash to em-dash a lot of the time, not sure.

I have used the correct em-dash everywhere I can for over a decade, which amounts to nearly everywhere.

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

#182

Post by plasticeagle »

ianseyer wrote: post #124
boca_honey wrote: post #119

>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 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"

This is not the beauty of writing. Everyone's writing needs editing. The "raw unedited emotions" are not something anyone wants to read, and this article is no exception.

The author tells us that English is their fourth language, which is certainly impressive. However their writing is messy and poorly constructed. It's difficult to read, and not at all enjoyable. The choice is not between doggerel like this, and LLM empty perfection.

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

#183

Post by dhosek »

I’ve completely avoided using AI for writing (although it looks like my coding avoidance is coming to an end). As someone who kind of views using a thesaurus as “cheating”¹, using AI to do the writing is way beyond the pale. A lot of what writing is about for me is about discovering and distilling and figuring out what I think. Take that away and I might as well just the spend the day watching television and playing video games and getting dumber by the minute.

I would go a step further, in fact, and when I’m writing something creative, I may choose to avoid whatever the autocomplete is suggesting as the next word (although I have it disabled in most contexts). People have a tendency to fall into grooves in their writing/speaking and this kind of acts as a reminder to not do that,³ although I’m far from immune myself (looking at my comment history, it’s upsetting to see the same verbal tics repeated when I have something to say).

⸻

1. If you don’t know a word well enough for it to come to mind when you’re looking for a word for something, you may not know it well enough to use it in your writing.²

2. Cue the people who will disagree. Suffice it to say that I occasionally will use a thesaurus to pull up a word that’s just out of reach, especially as my brain gets older and weaker, but even that I try to avoid.

3. When I got my MFA, there was a visiting writer who had published a creative writing book which was largely based on his former students’ transcriptions of his lectures. During the lecture he gave, even though he was speaking extemporaneously, he would speak word-for-word whole paragraphs from the book.

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

#184

Post by beepbooptheory »

kohllision wrote: post #165
jhhh wrote: post #145

I miss the text only reading era. This is a blog and should not need to have JavaScript enabled to render text to a page. I would rather not have to be annoyed by flavor of the month duplicate scroll bars, cookie banners, newsletter pop-ups 5 seconds in, scroll to the top pop-ups, idle overlays, highlight helper bars that break copy paste, etc. This blog didn't have all of those but had some. I'm sure the metrics loo…

I appreciate the sentiment, but this remark is far too common here. It does not address the content of the post and could apply to any submission from LessWrong. The author of the post has made none of those technical choices.

You are not alone! There is in fact a whole dedicated rule about this on hn:

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Clearly doesn't really move the needle much but sometimes it helps to tap the sign at people.

Charitably, we are all on our own timelines of getting to HTML zen, and its hard not to shout from the rooftops when it clicks for you and you have your plain text RSS setup on Gnus all chugging along nicely.

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

#185

Post by surgical_fire »

jmmv wrote: post #108
watwut wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 yo…

Btw, this is precisely what I implied.

I never ask the LLM to evaluate my text in terms of being good or bad. Instead I try something like this:

"In this section I tried to explain X, I intended to sound in Y and Z fashion, and I want a reader to come out with ateast W impression. Is the text achieving these goals? Do I communicate my ideas clearly and consisely, or are they too confuse and meandering?"

I typically get useful feedback. I preface specifically asking it to not rewrite, simply pointing the bits that it finds faulty and explaining why.

Of course the prompt is different is I am writing, for example, technical documentation, or if it is an attempt at creative writing.

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

#187

Post by Miraste »

SoftTalker wrote: post #123
65 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or read magazines and newspapers from reputable publications. My grammar and writing have improved tremendously from reading quality magazine articles, e.g. stuff from The Atlantic or The NY Book Review or whatever. Both magazines and books are valid forms of information consumption and books are not the only way to improve your writing, reading, and understanding of the world.

I wouldn't count on current stuff in those publications being free from AI. We're seeing it in peer-reviewed paper submissions so why not in literary forums? If you limit yourself to stuff from maybe five years ago or older, yeah it's going to be human-written and human-edited (ghostwriting still possible).

AI is much better at generating text that resembles scientific papers than it is at literary writing. Even if they're not all flagged as AI, the incidence will be much lower because they're simply bad writing. They won't make it out of the slush pile at places like GP listed.

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

#188

Post by encom »

margalabargala wrote: post #172
elbasti wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some people that believe that writing is an act of creative expression. In other words, that writing is primarily about the act (and as such, it's a quite selfish activity). Editing destroys the expressive act and must be avoided. These people's writing is usually incoherent and they are very proud of it. If you've ever read a bad new-age self-help book you've probably encountered writing like this. Good wr…

I 'm sure you consider your opinion to be correct, but there is something to writing being an act of creative expression. It's fine for it to be a selfish activity. Diaries are this way, for example, and the negativity you point at other people's hobbies is unfortunate. There's something to the idea that if the writer is writing with the intention of publishing it, that should be edited. But if you're writing for you…

Franks diary was edited, both by herself and later publishers.

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

#189

Post by bluefirebrand »

dpark wrote: post #171
ollysb wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I can get behind the sentiment I hope bad writing doesn't become the standard for anti AI. A simple grammar check would have greatly improved this post.

AI has plenty of training data on poor writing. If people start looking for bad grammar and typos to identify human articles, generative AI is certainly capable of spitting out prose that looks poorly edited. I kind of hope the anti-AI-writing stuff passes and we can focus on what makes writing good or bad again instead of “this is clearly AI” posted in response to every blog. I actually don’t care if it’s AI but I d…

> I actually don’t care if it’s AI but I do care if it’s worth reading and pleasant to read

I do care if it's AI. It makes it automatically not worth reading imo

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

#190

Post by projektfu »

plasticeagle wrote: post #182
ianseyer wrote: post #124

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 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" This is not the beauty of writing. Everyone's writing needs editing. The "raw unedited emotions" are not something anyone wants to read, and this article is no exception. The author tells us that English is their fourth language, which is cert…

I feel like French must be their first !
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