471–480 of 650 posts
A normal and psychologically healthy personal cannot have this strong an emotional reaction to such trivial matters. The author thinks the problem is the in computer!
All witty stuff disappearing and turning into LLM mush is kind of the maximal expression of capitalism for capitalism’s sake. We don’t care if things are novel or interesting, we’re producing “content” to fulfill an imaginary content demand that we can feed to make money.
The best way to feed it is to create stuff that’s just barely enough degrees of quality from a viagra spam email that it can pass for original thought.
—- —- —- Em dashes for emotiveness.
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I want to know when I'm consuming AI content because the source of information matters. I want to know what was at stake for the author, what motives they had and didn't have, what biases I should be aware of, and, for example, whether I'm reading content farmed slop that exists solely to attract ad impressions.
You still won’t know even if it’s labeled though. Someone could put an incredible amount of effort into writing something, not be satisfied with some aspect, and have an LLM refactor it for example. Now you’ve got a lot of em dashes and you issue a shallow dismissal. There was an HN submission recently where the author spent a lot of time and effort working with an LLM to write a story and get the LLM to follow a spe…
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I didn't use Claude for a long time, but my coworkers did, so I got infected through a side channel: I ended up reading their vibed docs, noticed "load-bearing", kind of liked it, and started using it in conversation, until I got feedback that I was "talking like Claude", so now I avoid the phrase entirely. The intersection of language and social norms is interesting.
unfortunately load bearing is one of those things that became a claudism but has been part of my daily lexicon for decades. There are a lot of things I say regularly as part of my own vocal quirkiness that now I have to self censor.
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Yeah wow fascinating! It's almost like LLM output quality was never the point from a business perspective. Real people think in concepts and experiences instead of words. The words are not so important to get the idea across, but LLMs only model language. The problem is fundamental. There's no workaround. Averaging out word usage might even make the problem worse.
This sort of take is so tired and boring, and frankly has zero grounding in reality. "LLMs will never " is constantly being disproven every time they scale up to the next 10X and apply architectural improvements. Their internal representations are so cryptic and complex that even the top AI researchers don't really know how they work or what their limits are. No one is going to take you seriously as a rando HN user i…
And yet, how quickly does it cease to surprise you?
Damn right we can tell what AI's limits are. It's palpable, hard to miss. Even the people I know who're all-in on the technology are pretty jaded by now.
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Yes, I had a related experience of reading a book and observing what I thought were claude-isms, only to realize it was written in 2019. Some of the common tells are actually good writing practices, but I guess they are best in smaller doses.
Actually, AI was learning these 'AI-isms' even back in 2017/2018 (probably even earlier). I think a lot of people who just jumped on the imaginary AI bandwagon more recently don't realise the mannerisms AIs are adopting are not really new. At some point the bleed between 'you' or 'you' and AI will just become so transparent it will be obliterated, more likely than not.
Or do you mean that the patterns that AI is showing today were already present in communication around that time?
That seems obvious as well, as AI has a lot of repetitive patterns that come from all kinds of periods, of which “load-bearing” is just one.
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They are great writers if you tell them what you want. If you're unable to properly articulate the writing style you would like as you would a software spec, well, garbage in, garbage out.
That's not fair. To most users this would not be an obvious thing to do, unlike software/scientific/analytic uses of LLMs. So it's not a matter of inability but rather awareness and know-how. Then secondly, humans learn to write intuitively and heuristically (for example "paragraphs should align sentence subjects with an identifiable flow of conceptual main characters/actors" is an entire chapter of expert writing ad…
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They are great writers if you tell them what you want. If you're unable to properly articulate the writing style you would like as you would a software spec, well, garbage in, garbage out.
What do you suggest for articulating the writing style that one wants from LLMs? I’ve been experimenting with having LLMs write/update academic notebooks for me, and so far the best results I’ve gotten came from correcting their output and asking them what they’ve “learned” from my feedback.
Give it some paragraphs of writing you like, authors, writers, whatever. Also don't expect to one shot long papers. Have it write out a table of contents and write it in small chunks.
Typical things I'll say is avoid purple prose, avoid common cliches and tropes, "show don't tell", avoid wild metaphors and similes, etc. But it all depends on what you like. Look at things you do like and try to think about what it is about that writing that is different than a middle schooler or an AI writing it. Theres no formula for it.
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I wrote a thank you message on Teams to my coworkers on a project, and half of them thought I had used AI to write it. As a professional writer in a previous life, I was astonished. Then they told me that they had never seen me write anything more than a sentence or two so naturally they assumed something relatively polished had to be AI assisted.
Though I haven’t been a professional writer, I’ve been a good writer with an expansive vocabulary since high school where English was my best subject despite being a STEM maven. I hate the fact that what was previously considered an advantageous skill is now a millstone in public use. I hate having to dumb down and self—censor in order to avoid being accused of using (or being) an LLM. Even though my writing has a fe…
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They are great writers if you tell them what you want. If you're unable to properly articulate the writing style you would like as you would a software spec, well, garbage in, garbage out.
Are there any skills or publicly available repos that do what you claim here? I would love to learn to have it write better. For me, my amateur attempt is having another LLM do a review loop to remove clearly offending phrases and a heuristic eval to change sentence structures to be more similar to mine, THEN my manual HITL loop to rewrite ~20% of the sentences anyway.