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Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

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

#31

Post by sandspar »

zahirbmirza wrote: post #9

Fascinated that the author shares an experience of discovery in libraries. The internet, in its early days felt like that. Of course, no longer. Libraries are certainly declining in their traditional form. I find it odd that everyone has a digital resources in their pocket yet libraries are squeezing out physical books to make way for more and more computers. Try to find paper copy of the Sony founder's book.... that…

AIs are fantastic for discovery. Just today I asked Chatgpt to find blogs 1) about old school newspaper cartoons 2) that have been writing for more than 10 years and 3) are run by one or two passionate people rather than a team. Within seconds Chatgpt found 7 candidates. Within another handful of seconds it gave me RSS links to the ones I wanted.

This is incredible!

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

#34

Post by cwnyth »

Mtinie wrote: post #23
cyanydeez wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

AI adopted humanisms, we just weren’t used to seeing them at the same scale we do today. Diversity of writing styles was part of that, but I’d point to vernacular exposure as the larger component. We’re going to go through a period where we try to adapt to a form of “Universal English” for those of us who read primarily English writing. Other languages’ readers may be experiencing the same dissonance when they come a…

This is right. AI is using human speech, but just doing so in a consistently peculiar way. The em-dash in particular is frustrating, because it's all over high-quality, pre-2022 academic work. But now instead of proper and erudite it's seen as AI-slop. Well, maybe if they didn't use it — all — time — ! It's even an auto-replacement in Word and can be (by one's choice) in LibreOffice, replacing three dashes (and two is replaced by an en-dash).

But when I submit a novel with em-dashes, will sloppy agents and sloppy editors be able to tell that em-dash was deliberately put there by me?

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

#35

Post by dofm »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #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.

Random observation: Google's Gemma 4 models write so much nicer prose than ChatGPT or Claude.

Though this might be me as a British reader, simply preferring a rather less American turn of phrase.

I reckon the more transatlantic, english-as-international language DeepMind team have had a subliminal (or maybe deliberate) impact on the way it chooses to write.

Or perhaps small open weights models simply aren't under the same commercial pressure to be engaging and sycophantic and are therefore less likely to adopt the samey overly casual, upbeat, Californian sales assistant manner. (Don't get me wrong, I like this from real human Californians just fine!)

Either way, the default tone is much less showy. I would be interested to find out if you agree.

I am very much an LLM cynic. I am engaging because I must, and trying to learn fundamentals, but I would not say I am overly excited by any of this, just glad that small open weights models exist as a counterpoint.

I loathe the way ChatGPT writes, and the Claude-isms that are everywhere; it is actually quite enraging, especially when you start seeing it in internet comments from people who used to try to write out their own thoughts.

But in my experiments with open weights models I have found I am much less aggravated by summaries and outlines written by Gemma 4, so much that I am happy enough to read them, because they have fewer irritants that take me out of the reading flow.

Though this evening it told me very kindly that my photography is a bit "safe". How very dare it… understand me that well.

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

#36

Post by jeffreyrogers »

raincole wrote: post #26
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #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…

> When interacting with LLMs it feels a lot more like I'm just receiving knowledge passively It's... almost an oxymoron, and very different from my experience.

In college I used mathematica a lot while taking linear algebra. I ended up having to relearn a lot of that math later since I never really understood it at a deep level, although I was able to use it and apply it under class conditions. I feel like a lot of my LLM derived knowledge is similarly superficial.

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

#37

Post by [deleted] »

OgsyedIE wrote: post #27

Suggested additions: the Axiom Business Book Awards, Library Journal Best Books of the Year and Booklist Magazine's Editor's Choice Awards. There's also a few popular substacks that have big sideshows in regular book reviews, but I wouldn't even recommend my favourite for a public aggregator like this.

[deleted]

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

#38

Post by benbreen »

OgsyedIE wrote: post #27

Suggested additions: the Axiom Business Book Awards, Library Journal Best Books of the Year and Booklist Magazine's Editor's Choice Awards. There's also a few popular substacks that have big sideshows in regular book reviews, but I wouldn't even recommend my favourite for a public aggregator like this.

Original author/creator of the site here - thank you! Will add the Axiom one. I am on the fence about whether/how to add "book of the year" type lists as they are somewhat distinct from book awards, but I do think that would probably be the next step to get more books in the corpus.

And any other ideas that HN readers have for awards to add would be welcome. Currently it's probably too history-slanted since I'm a historian and knew those awards better.

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

#39

Post by tclancy »

theshackleford wrote: post #21
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #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…

> 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. This sounds like it's more down to how the individual uses the tool. I am not someone who has even been particularly good at reading > learning the thing. I've only ever been capable of learning by doing and with capability to interrogate on the points I don't get. LLMs allow that…

Seconded. At a minimum, you can literally tell the agent to guide you but not point you and only help when you are stuck if you're actively trying to learn something. It's been a help for me to bridge a couple of gaps I'd struggled to cross before (mainly hardware things).

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

#40

Post by jonfromsf »

tolugenius wrote: post #30
maxdo wrote: post #29

I participate book club for several years with friends, we casually navigate certain topics, and i can tell you human slop in literature is a real thing. - almost every book try to stretch core idea into book size format - unique ideas are rare people attack them under different angels - a later phenomena : their believes almost predict entire book, outcomes etc, brainwash impact is real so not sure, how ai slop is b…

In your experience, how do you determine book slop? For me I don't really stray from authors and topics I like, and non-fiction isn't really my go to outside of sci-fi, and mystery/law books. Like on the stretch point, I can tell that in other media but not so much books.

Business books are 99% slop.
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