The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
mohammedshehu.com
The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
1–10 of 83 posts
Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
#2Nah, AI writing is bad because it breaks the implicit trust between the reader and the author. It's implicitly assumed when you read something that a person write it. It's not merely a tool. the writing is worse, and people feel like they are being ripped off when they see it and it's undisclosed.
Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
#3I think it depends on the context too. Dale Carnegie (in his famous Win Friends.. book) mentioned how it's annoying to receive letters that say Dictated But Not Read. So people don't want to read (for example) a twitter reply or email that's written on their behalf rather than their own thoughts
When it comes to something like a LinkedIn post however who cares. Everyone uses AI cause the content itself is mercenary anyway right. Thought leadership.
But I have been using Sonnet to write some Youtube narrations and I think I've discovered a kind of value that is not 'AI slop'. I already posted one of them -- about the giant pink hologram in Blade Runner 2049 -- and it's been getting thousands of views and a dozens of likes when clipped into shorts. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK-TsLQkIos]
The text is like: "The neon is pink. Her hair is blue. Her face is light. She smiles because she was made to smile, and somewhere beneath the awareness of that fact is the older, simpler, more animal truth: a face is smiling at you. Someone said your name. Someone said “you look lonely” and meant it as an invitation rather than a wound."
To me that is a kind of LLM writing that's "value above replacement". Like if I lost that Sonnet 4.6 script I wouldn't be able to get it again it was just a particular permutation of the neural network manifold that emerged from our discussion about the movie and the style I wanted etc.
Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
#4I once had a scriptures class where I had to hit word count on an essay and replaced every instance of “Jesus” with “Jesus the only begotten Son of God who died on the cross so that we may be saved from our sins”.
So, yes, humans can also expand text in a mechanical way. I just don’t want to read expanded text. So really the question is “is this text expanded?”. Pre-LLM very little was. Post-LLM much is and has certain distinct flavours that are detectable.
But I’m happy to say that I also don’t like human expanded text and the content in OP certainly reads expanded. It’s like inlining functions everywhere and then writing unrelated comments around them. Not interesting.
After all, if I just want to read text there are reams of content marketing blog posts and SEO keyword concatenations that I could go read. Or to put it in a different way: SaaS dropshipping shemale singles near you this one mother found a puppy buy crypto toys cheap car loans zero down furniture sale foreclosure mesothelioma lawyers car Trump USAID ethereum get rich quick
Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
#5Why are comments turned off on the blog posts itself? I was planning to make 200 thoughtful comments with the cheapest AI I could find to prove a point, but the lack of an option to comment shows you already know the point: something has to gate participation in the conversation. Human authorship is a fantastic gate, which keeps me from pulling my stunt here, where that gate is firmly in place. You could achieve almost the same goals by requiring blog comments to hash to a number ending in X 0s, but requiring human writing is a strict improvement on this. A true devotee of “human writing is not fundamentally better than ai” is signing themselves up to never read a block of text written with actual effort again without some proof of effort mechanism.
Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
#6The article is quick to shoehorn LLMs in as the last of a long list of established tools.
LLMs are fundamentally different from other writing tools because they attempt to construct meaning in a way that is not done by the author. A main purpose of writing is to convey meaning, so LLM writing defeats that purpose.
Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
#7> A person can type 3,000 words by hand and have no thought pass through their head beyond the need to finish before lunch.
This isn’t the common case. How many of the thoughts produced while working on the words have much novelty or high quality may be an open question, but it’s rare to type or handwrite 3000 words and not have any thoughts.
> Another can dictate an idea, argue with a language model for an hour, reject six drafts, rearrange the whole piece, rewrite half of it, and publish something they understand down to the final comma
Also probably not the common case. And so far my experience is that models make decent to good editors/critics, but average originators (though with remarkable breadth and sometimes outlier originations).
Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
#8[dead]
Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
#9I think we're just in an transition point.
When I get materials that are clearly AI generated, I look at them as if there was less effort put into it.
But that is irrational. If it was verified for accuracy, and edited for conciseness, and addresses the task at hand, does it matter?
Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
#10I simply don’t like AI writing because its prose is terrible. It gives me the ick. No other justification is needed for my dislike. Same with AI generated code for the most part. Takes a lot of work to make AI generated anything palatable, which is fine - we don’t really want to deprecate effort or skill do we?