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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

#71

Post by fzeroracer »

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…

> how ai slop is better vs book slop, at least with ai you can distill the idea

Why don't you just use whatever LLM you have on hand to summarize every book you could read instead of reading it? The idea that ai slop is 'better' because you can distill the idea is an insane point to me because it treats books as a pure consumption-based concept, where the goal is strictly to finish a book and move on.

I think even the worst book is more valuable than whatever garbage an LLM writes because you can at least learn from the intent. Where and why the author failed, where they got stuck, the points they failed to make. LLM writing is a void, there's nothing to be learned.

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

#72

Post by dofm »

ijk wrote: post #65
felipeerias wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave Claude Fable $25 in Pangram API credits and, after hundreds of attempts, it was unable to produce a single readable original piece of writing that was not immediately identified as AI. This seems to be a hard problem for LLMs, as passing would probably require good self-perception ("oh no, I am writing like an AI!") and fine-grained control over its own output ("let's write like a human instead!").

I wonder if it partially because "write like a human" is kind of a vacuous request. Like, it's the objective everyone including me has been saying that we want, but there's no one way to write like a human and and humans don't even have a good definition past "I know it when I see it." There's a lot of work in the humanities about different aspects of good writing, but that's not quite the same thing. And anyway they…

I think as much it is that people write by grappling for the right phrase to represent some inner feeling or concept, writing in part for themselves, whereas LLMs write always and only for an audience.

It’s much easier to understand this once you think about other generative forms. MidJourney never just sits down and draws for fun, so fun never informs its art (only the outward appearance of others’ fun, separate from the fun itself). Suno doesn’t waste hours trying to find riffs on a guitar, so its output is never informed by the direct joy of getting it right. Its music is never optimised for playability on a particular guitar with a scratchy seventh fret and a too-high action. Neither Midjourney nor Suno have evolved their styles due to short-sightedness or carpal tunnel.

If you had a human writer who over a long career only ever wrote articles from an outline given to them by someone else, and you had all the outlines and all the resulting articles from those outlines, and you could train an LLM to generate an article from an outline, it still would not be kicking itself frustrated by an inelegant phrase in a prior article, it would not avoid certain phrases out of a passive aggressive reaction to some editor’s note, it would not ever just rush an article because everyone is gathering at the pub, and it would not choose an analogy just to rub the author of a bitchy critical letter to the editor the wrong way. An LLM could not “subtweet”. It could not write a series of articles hoping one important person will spot that they are auditioning for a job.

Creators have unseen, undocumented influences and motivations that inform their work over a long period. I don’t mean to say that these individual influences can be reliably detected in individual pieces of work. I do mean to say that I think their broad absence tends to be felt in LLM writing. As readers we develop an affinity for writers as much as for their writing, and we do this in part because we deduce things about them.

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

#73

Post by cindyllm »

dofm wrote: post #72
ijk wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it partially because "write like a human" is kind of a vacuous request. Like, it's the objective everyone including me has been saying that we want, but there's no one way to write like a human and and humans don't even have a good definition past "I know it when I see it." There's a lot of work in the humanities about different aspects of good writing, but that's not quite the same thing. And anyway they…

I think as much it is that people write by grappling for the right phrase to represent some inner feeling or concept, writing in part for themselves, whereas LLMs write always and only for an audience. It’s much easier to understand this once you think about other generative forms. MidJourney never just sits down and draws for fun, so fun never informs its art (only the outward appearance of others’ fun, separate fro…

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

#74

Post by ndarray »

dofm wrote: post #35
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…

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

#75

Post by FranOntanaya »

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.

A lot of what would be the top "reference" works aren't even that good either, they were a successful marketing phenomenon or had cultural or social relevance at their time. So, you can get a lot of bad prose going by a number of somewhat logical, externally measurable parameters.

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

#76

Post by dofm »

ndarray wrote: post #74
dofm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

#78

Post by FranOntanaya »

mpalmer wrote: post #15
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.

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

I think it's partly because of where they come from to the problem.

I have education/experience in both literature and coding, I have a pragmatic starting point when approaching text while also being able to recognize stylistic oddities, so I get to be the guy editing out AIsms sometimes.

But I've helped other people copywrite where their environment was all org-speak and academic writing, and AIsms don't really stand out in that case. AI is effectively "doing the right thing" writing the way it does for those tasks. Even tho the right thing is often a bad thing.

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

#79

Post by joeguilmette »

titanomachy wrote: post #43

Thank you for this. I sorted the "technology" and "science" sections and saw a few excellent books that I've read and a few that I would really like to read. This motivates me to start setting aside "reading time" again every day, since I've lost that habit. The recent "society & culture" books gave me some good book club ideas. Bug report: filtering by "award" appears to be broken for some awards. If I select Pulitz…

I recently did this! I fixed my phone habit and my TV habit, and I just read no, the family has silent reading parties instead of movie night.

Here’s what I did: 1. Install Jomo on the phone. There are other apps, but basically it makes me wait 5s before I can open a brainrot app, and then I can only use it for 5min, and every time I do this I have to wait an additional 5s. It resets at midnight. This introduces the necessary friction.

2. Paper books. The house is now full of paper books. Book seems interesting? Buy it. Books everywhere. Real books.

3. The actual habit. I stack habits. Right now I have a daily workout routine. First thing I leave the house and either run or go to the gym. I bring my book, and afterwards go to the cafe across the street for a coffee. At night, I read before going to bed. Once you finish a few books this way, you’re in. TV now is actually hard to pay attention to, and I feel kind of… dirty doomscrolling now (like eating junk food, it tastes good but you feel gross during the experience).

If you want something to start with: https://bookshop.org/p/books/true-grit-charles-portis/5ac454...

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

#80

Post by calvinmorrison »

paxys wrote: post #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 fo…

so much of AI is like, to me, used as was to generate basically dynamic applicaions. if we ever got anywhere with semantics, objects, etc, pushed html further, maybe we'd naturally have web clients that could take objects, natively search, collate, display, put on a map, graph, etc... but AI is like a text only shortcut to the end result we want.

I have a stupid AI app I use now for some bookkeeping which was previously, just an excel sheet. except it has a UI, it validates inputs, and does a bunch of other housekeeping stuff that makes it nice. Did the excel work? yes totally.

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