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Taste Is All That's Left

notashelf.dev

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Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#491

Post by jongala »

Very nice post, I think it captures and expresses things that many people in the software and design worlds have thought about a lot in the last couple of years.

I don't fully agree with it — for one thing, I think you can develop taste in a field without actively participating, but you have to engage with it beyond passive consumption. Basically: I think it's possible to be a good movie critic without making movies yourself. Given the collapse of the friction/effort side of things, I think that is really worth unpacking.

I have to say I find the debates about the post's style and em dashes pretty disheartening. There have always been plenty of good jokes to be made about HN's culture, but wow. For a community that has been snarky about fools counting lines of code for 40 years to be out here counting em dashes is pretty damning.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#492

Post by manlymuppet »

creshal wrote: post #465
lolpython wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author has updated the bottom of the post to clarify that it was not AI-generated. https://notashelf.dev/posts/taste-is-all-thats-left#post-mor...

I'm sceptical, where are all these essays he was supposed to have learned this very distinct style from? I certainly don't remember seeing them.

Another thing to consider is that LLMs have become a premier source of reading for the public. If more of what you read is AI generated, how you write is going to be significantly influenced by that.

One (slightly frightening) possibility is that many people write like LLMs even without assistance from LLMs. AI writing may have just become the norm for some. Maybe that's what's happening here.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#493

Post by causal »

prodigycorp wrote: post #326
nazgu1 wrote: post #310

I have mixed feelings... I stumbled upon, read a post-mortem that looks even more AI-generated than the article. "That says something about my writing. It says nothing about who wrote it." - Two contradicting sentences, author's writing skills are part of the author as-a-whole "The short sentences, the reversals, the one-word lines" and then "I will write the next one plainer.". - even more? And... I wonder if this i…

Yeah, I am suprised this article ranks so high. It's either written by AI or it's poorly written. Very little to show on behalf of "taste". "Taste" is one of these words that have been bandied about recently, in addition to "moat". I've never seen a productive conversation stem from either of those mentiosn.

It really reads like an OpenClaw agent instructed to consider itself a real human. The number of upvotes on this post is also REALLY high considering the number of comments calling out the content. Feels like shenanigans.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#494

Post by bendmorris »

jongala wrote: post #491

Very nice post, I think it captures and expresses things that many people in the software and design worlds have thought about a lot in the last couple of years. I don't fully agree with it — for one thing, I think you can develop taste in a field without actively participating, but you have to engage with it beyond passive consumption. Basically: I think it's possible to be a good movie critic without making movies…

It is absolutely not the em dashes that make it read like slop and the author even acknowledges it.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#495

Post by no_multitudes »

tfrancisl wrote: post #478
no_multitudes wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And when the floor goes, the thing that decides what is worth keeping is no longer the cost of making it." I'm 100% confident that a human did not write this sentence unless they were deliberately trying to sound like an LLM. Just look at it! You don't need Pangram. There's a classifier model between your ears that knows how humans write.

I'd retrain that model if I were you.

I'm generally quite open to the possibility that I'm wrong. I said 100% for this one because it is tooth-grindingly obvious. Could you give me some examples of long-form writing like this from before 2024? Generally to retrain my model I need data.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#496

Post by manlymuppet »

hellojomp wrote: post #8

On the topic of taste, I think of this quote in Susan Sontag's "Notes On 'Camp'" often: “For taste governs every free — as opposed to rote — human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to deve…

"Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passion"

David Hume

I like this quote because it's so blunt. Hume isn't saying we should give in to hedonistic excess, but he isn't shirking the impression either because it deserves to be said strongly.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#497

Post by Tiberium »

no_multitudes wrote: post #495
tfrancisl wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd retrain that model if I were you.

I'm generally quite open to the possibility that I'm wrong. I said 100% for this one because it is tooth-grindingly obvious. Could you give me some examples of long-form writing like this from before 2024? Generally to retrain my model I need data.

To be honest with you, I think this is pointless. However hostile this might sound, the active userbase of HN seems to be extremely dismissive to the thought of LLM detectors and they think that all those LLM written articles are actually human written. I don't know if this will change, perhaps it'll only get worse from now. (You can see my recent experience in another thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212027 )

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#498

Post by runtime_terror »

no_multitudes wrote: post #473
tfrancisl wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is not AI generated. Everyone is asserting it is but the author is well known as a critic of these tools in his communities. Why would he lie and use it to write an article with his genuine views, edit it to assuage the feelings of HN commenters, and then double down? Speedrunning losing his credibility, or, his writing style got on some people's nerves?

"And when the floor goes, the thing that decides what is worth keeping is no longer the cost of making it." I'm 100% confident that a human did not write this sentence unless they were deliberately trying to sound like an LLM. Just look at it! You don't need Pangram. There's a classifier model between your ears that knows how humans write.

Running Llama 3 between your ears?

Don't you and all the people in this thread claiming AI slop know that AI was trained on human writing?

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