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Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

resobscura.substack.com

11–20 of 265 posts

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#11

It's sad now to see a university library where students sit among endless shelves of amazing books, sitting on laptops, almost all of them with ChatGPT open. The library has become just a place to sit and open an LLM.

It's especially sad because on of the things those LLMs are best, almost purpose built for is to tell those students which books to go open, where to find nuggets people haven't bumped into for years, to make cross-connections that would take a PhD a decade to find.

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#12
I would bet that how your brain stores information that you read from long-form text is very different from how it stores information you acquire from chatting with an LLM. When I read something challenging or new to me I spend a lot of time thinking about how what I'm reading matches my own experiences or knowledge. Although I'm a fairly fast reader, it often takes me a long time to get through difficult pages since I have to stop and think about what I'm reading. I seem to be doing a lot of integrating and reorganizing my thoughts. When interacting with LLMs it feels a lot more like I'm just receiving knowledge passively and I don't think it gets integrated as well. Not sure why this is and its somewhat counterintuitive since I don't think I'd have the same experience with a human tutor.

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#14
On a related note, I was just noting to my co-founder, as we struggle to write good case studies for our website, that I find LLMs are astoundingly bad at writing good prose.

We all know the "AI-tics" that give away a sloppily AI-written piece, but even if you steer them, they still struggle to write consistently high-quality prose.

Somehow I feel that the work of a good copywriter has never been more noticeable.

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#15

On a related note, I was just noting to my co-founder, as we struggle to write good case studies for our website, that I find LLMs are astoundingly bad at writing good prose. We all know the "AI-tics" that give away a sloppily AI-written piece, but even if you steer them, they still struggle to write consistently high-quality prose. Somehow I feel that the work of a good copywriter has never been more noticeable.

I've not really enjoyed finding out lately just how few people seem to notice what ought to be unmissable.

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#16
post #15

On a related note, I was just noting to my co-founder, as we struggle to write good case studies for our website, that I find LLMs are astoundingly bad at writing good prose. We all know the "AI-tics" that give away a sloppily AI-written piece, but even if you steer them, they still struggle to write consistently high-quality prose. Somehow I feel that the work of a good copywriter has never been more noticeable.

I've not really enjoyed finding out lately just how few people seem to notice what ought to be unmissable.

those people will also start adopting the AIsm and will become indistinguishable.

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#17
Very neat site and write-up, but I found this part amusing:

> There is really nothing “AI” about this aside from the tool that collected the data and coded it, and, crucially, semantic search […]

So really, everything about it is AI. And that’s not a bad thing! It’s okay to simultaneously preach the superiority of award winning books over AI-generated garbage while also acknowledging the same AI as a valuable tool for other uses.

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#20

I would bet that how your brain stores information that you read from long-form text is very different from how it stores information you acquire from chatting with an LLM. When I read something challenging or new to me I spend a lot of time thinking about how what I'm reading matches my own experiences or knowledge. Although I'm a fairly fast reader, it often takes me a long time to get through difficult pages since…

I listen to audiobooks while I walk and hike, and sometimes when I recall some particular thing I've learned, I can also recall where I was hiking when I heard it.

I think there's a lot to learn on how we really process information.

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