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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

#101

Post by conception »

dofm wrote: post #93
conception wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently realized this as well and I think what I’ve discovered is that AI just produces mediocre content in all realms, but you don’t really notice it except in the realms where you have real expertise. With a lot of harness and prompting you can have it pump out something that’s pretty good but by default the next best token rarely produces anything of quality it seems like and if you think it does, perhaps you m…

I do think this explains much of it. But it doesn’t explain why Claude often writes in the clipped tone of that gnomic in-house tech evangelist who was inexplicably hired because he impressed the CEO. (I may be projecting real life experience onto the LLM.) I am genuinely fascinated as to how Claude acquired its utterly aggravating way of writing. It’s so much more irritating than ChatGPT, which is already not good.

Yeah the latest batch is really keyed on certain phrases - well beyond “you’re absolutely right!” Of the past. And the readability is trash almost always by default. Probably because they are forcing code so hard that it’s aligning prose into functional groups or something.

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

#102

Post by dofm »

conception wrote: post #101
dofm wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think this explains much of it. But it doesn’t explain why Claude often writes in the clipped tone of that gnomic in-house tech evangelist who was inexplicably hired because he impressed the CEO. (I may be projecting real life experience onto the LLM.) I am genuinely fascinated as to how Claude acquired its utterly aggravating way of writing. It’s so much more irritating than ChatGPT, which is already not good.

Yeah the latest batch is really keyed on certain phrases - well beyond “you’re absolutely right!” Of the past. And the readability is trash almost always by default. Probably because they are forcing code so hard that it’s aligning prose into functional groups or something.

Interesting. So you think it’s somewhat emergent, in that sense, rather than a sort of designed tone of voice/writing style specified by supervised fine tuning (or the system prompt)?

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

#104

Post by dingdongditchme »

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…

Very elegantly put! So much so in fact, that I finally put down my phone to grab my laptop in order to write this. I have had a similar much cruder version of this thought: LLMs are not human, they don't know what it's like to stub their toe, despite having read probably millions descriptions of it. Even amongst humans there are experiences which are impossible to share, despite us having evolved to communicate quite effectively. Writing is just a small part of it, and cannot replace the actual experience of being human.

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

#105

Post by vouaobrasil »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #36
raincole wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's absolutely right. Math is difficult to understand without writing it down on paper. As one of my professors said, "something magical happens when you write down a problem from scratch and work it out". LLMs make people believe they are improving their productivity and that may be so, but it also removes that magic and removes that deep learning.

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

#107

Post by seizethecheese »

The article resonates, there is great serendipity in somewhat random exploration of books. But then the web app seems to be the antithesis of this? I clicked a few categories and the top ranked books all had the “popularity contest” smell, sort of the antithesis of random exploration.

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

#108

Post by jeffreyrogers »

altmanaltman wrote: post #89
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…

Any such bet would be grossly misguided given how different people acquire information differently. Just because you don't like using LLMs doesn't automatically extrapolate to a general realisation about the human brain or how one approaches knowledge. Your subjective experience matters in this case. Almost completely.

I like using LLMs and one of the main things I'm working on would be impossible for me to tackle without them, but I do think they cause some skills to atrophy despite being a big productivity booster overall.

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

#110

Post by throwaway219450 »

northhex wrote: post #4

Thank you for sharing this. I do think book prizes are a better-than-average signal but I previously volunteered with a book award. I will caution that pretty much every publisher mass-submits these books for consideration in every remotely relevant prize. It is a cost of doing business (similar to how photographers pay to enter photography competitions to try and win the "award winning photographer" title, or busine…

Awards are also a product of their time, representing biases among the judges, literary preferences from the readership, and straight up nepotism/favoritisim/elitism. Look at the Hugo/Nebula/Locus and you'll find a lot of so-so winning work throughout the years; especially when you look at the other nominees.
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