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I'm becoming AI-blind

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Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#41

Post by deaton »

dofm wrote: post #5

Something that bothers me about AI generated content more broadly is how unmemorable it is. I don't mean as in bad . I mean literally, as in hard to remember or recall. Despite seeing a lot of them, I cannot think of one AI-generated photo that I can picture clearly in my mind; a few are partial but elusive. Whereas I can recall (visualise) a whole bunch of traditional photographs. The same is true of AI generated te…

Yeah, its really weird. Maybe its a cognitive bias that says "an AI made this, so it isn't important," but I can remember perfectly the events of a book I read 10 years ago, and a book I read 1 year ago, and another I finished 2 months ago. Meanwhile I can't remember what claude told me yesterday.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#42

Post by jes5199 »

causal wrote: post #30

There's some psychological mechanism by which my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text and just short-circuits to "there is no information here". And when I force myself to read AI-generated text I realize I'm making my brain do creative work to impart meaning to the words. It is exhausting because my brain is literally trying to do a just-in-time rewrite of the text into something valuable. Something is dee…

yes, but now I’m also experiencing that for human-written text

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#43

Post by davidgh »

My son is currently learning Romanian and I was trying to help him with verbs. I don’t know Romanian but recalled when learning a foreign language for the first time it really helped me to break down how a verb form or tense worked in English, then learn the equivalent in the new language. So I wanted to make some charts and pages that he could use as learning resources.

I used Claude to help. I don’t know how to quite describe it, but because the text was polished and well constructed my brain was giving me the the signal “if you aren’t getting this it’s because you’re not focusing” so I’d read it again and then again and it still was not landing. It sorta felt like when you read something technical or heavy when very tired - you are reading but not processing.

Only after wrestling with this for a few days did I realize that it wasn’t me. As I started going through, sentence by sentence, forcing it to re-write things to be more clear the concepts became easy to understand.

I wish there was a name for this situation. It’s almost like a pseudo-language where it has the correct form and presentation but is missing critical components.

The more complex the topic, the more I sense this.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#44

Post by demibabs »

vablings wrote: post #15
rappatic wrote: post #6

Claude has become noticeably, painfully worse at writing in the last six months. At this point it’s practically useless for anything except code.

I did notice after the fingerprinting update a marked uptake in strange language in responses. Specifically if I ask it to do something sometimes it will replace some of my request language with synonyms that don't actually make any sense. Like my request was fed through google translate twice

Watermarking doesn’t affect writing quality (on average) as long as the implementation is correct.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#45

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

josefritzishere wrote: post #2

As people rely more on AI they experience cognitive atrophy. This is measurable in IQ loss, and other symptoms we might otherwise associate with early onset dementia or Chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Well does anyone try to pretend doom scrolling make you smarter? I think platform companies have been successfully been turning people into morons for 20 years and now you don’t need to try even read a single news article or a blog post to learn how to solve a simple problem we are paving our way into intellectual (and literal) new dark ages.

Perhaps we go back to feudal society when climate change crumbles the civilisation, world economy and democracy. It didn’t really matter that French and Spanish kings where often literal morons, when you had few talented monks, bankers and scribes doing the brain-thing, the feudal lords had ruthlessness to take what they wanted and the people were illiterate superstitious folk who hardly ever left the village they were born in.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#46

Post by wolttam »

saghm wrote: post #28
wolttam wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly not. Anybody who cares about language to any reasonable degree surely notices and is repulsed by heavily AI generated content.

I care about language a lot (feel free to go back through my comments from the past few days; you'll see a number of comments I made in debate about two different forms of a specific idiom because I have strong descriptivist opinions), but I genuinely struggle to identify whether text is AI generated. Maybe you're using "heavily" as the load-bearing part of your claim (sorry, I couldn't resist, another example of me…

I think I might have been a bit heavy handed in my comment as I was rebutting the idea that only tech people can tell. I suspect it helps to have been exposed to a lot of earlier model writing, which was even more sloppy and had more of the kinds of tells we still see today.

And I’ll concede on both ends that there are probably times I suspect content is AI generated when it isn’t, and times I suspect it isn’t generated, but it was.

AI tells seem inevitable. You have millions of people communicating with one effective “personality” that has tendencies to write in certain ways. If its content is published verbatim, then it will be easier to tell whether some content is AI generated just based on its similarity (sharing certain linguistic features) to other content being posted.

It’ll never be black and white though.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#47

Post by xnx »

causal wrote: post #30

There's some psychological mechanism by which my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text and just short-circuits to "there is no information here". And when I force myself to read AI-generated text I realize I'm making my brain do creative work to impart meaning to the words. It is exhausting because my brain is literally trying to do a just-in-time rewrite of the text into something valuable. Something is dee…

> my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text

I bet it does. I bet it also recognizes some human text as AI text, and doesn't detect other AI text.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#48

Post by dofm »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #34
dofm wrote: post #5

Something that bothers me about AI generated content more broadly is how unmemorable it is. I don't mean as in bad . I mean literally, as in hard to remember or recall. Despite seeing a lot of them, I cannot think of one AI-generated photo that I can picture clearly in my mind; a few are partial but elusive. Whereas I can recall (visualise) a whole bunch of traditional photographs. The same is true of AI generated te…

I wonder what you mean by ephemerality here, since those images are definitely sloptastic as hell. Compare to works in similar style, like Dorothea Lange[1] or Gerome’s orientalist pictures[2]. Reason why those images are flat and boring is that they are just statistical guesses making a composition averaging whatever the model has been trained with. They would be technically brilliant (if made in oil), but superfici…

Well the examples I gave rise above their ephemerality due to the circumstances that make them memorable. I can remember the details of the story around them — the way the prize winners reacted in each story — in such a way as to contrast them.

The way my memory works (especially as an amateur photographer) I would thus normally have a very good chance of remembering some key details of the images; some fascinating element of each would connect with the rest of the memory.

But it does not happen. Whereas I sometimes remember photos with clarity while forgetting where I even saw them.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#50

Post by connicpu »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #3

I also find it impossible to parse half the comments that Claude tries to sneak into our pull requests. I’ve never had an issue understanding code comments written by humans like this before. The structure of the information is like a waterfall that leaves me unable to swim to the surface and grab the air of comprehension. So, “Please write a one-liner comment manually to replace these 5 lines of AI generated comment…

We're using grok and while I can usually understand the comments they're always at least 2x as verbose as they need to be. It loves explaining everything in two different ways, putting one of the explanations in parenthesis.
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