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I'm becoming AI-blind

cymerys.com

171–180 of 533 posts

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#171

"There's an ongoing discussion of whether humans are good at recognizing AI-generated text. While most research claims that humans don't really do a good job there, I disagree. " I wonder if humans that spend all day working in tech are good at recognizing AI-generated text, but people who spend all day doing jobs that don't involve computers aren't as good. And I wonder if those of us in tech are the only ones who r…

People are good at pattern recognition.

If you're exposed to AI a lot, you're going to start noticing patterns that allow you to identify it.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#172
post #52

I don't like AI-generated text at work, at all. It feels lifeless and unfocused. But what I hate the most is that it is objectively better than what I had before. No typos, clear structure, and, regrettably, the verbosity and autistic obsession with detail of the LLM is more actionable and useful than the human guy who wrote lists of commands and URLs as documentation, without explaining anything. Or the colleague wh…

I don't think either one was better or worse than the other.

Underdocumented, underexplained and sometimes out of date... or overly verbose, repetitive, information sparse, and sometimes halucinating.

Both are bad and with some effort could be prevented.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#174
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…

I kind of wonder if our ability to skim has been stymied.

blah blah blah

- blah blah nugget blah blah

- blah blah blah wrong blah blah nonsense

- blah blah blah obvious blah blah

- blah blah blah off-base

blah blah blah

It is that we HAVE to skim because the text is so cheap, and it wears us out.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#175
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…

we are working on it, the thousands of gig workers tuning frontier models

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#176
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligence is compression, compression requires subtraction, and for some reason LLMs are not good at subtracting. To create a coherent model you kinda have to subtract correlations until only the essential parts are still there. What I don't understand is why LLMs haven't been able to do this yet, if it's the harness or some orchestration layer above the LLM that is needed. Because fundamentally if you can identif…

Intelligence is compression? What do you mean? Intuitively that doesn't seem right. >What I don't understand is why LLMs haven't been able to do this yet LLMs are just trained on what humans have said. Why is it surprising that it's still not possible to reconstruct the intelligence that wrote all that by working backwards? Think of your own work experience. When you look at a piece of code, say, are you always able…

I guess they mean that intelligence is being able to hold models (compressed versions of reality) internally and use them to make predictions with a probability better than chance. That last part is the definition of information.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#177
post #134

In high school, a teacher gave me a copy of "How To Read Better And Faster" which teaches you speed reading. This came in very handy in college. I find that when I try to speed read modern human writing, there are often errors (like missing or misused words) or awkward expressions that I do have to slow down and think harder a lot to really parse it. With AI writing, it's sort of self redundant and the information de…

That's interesting. You're saying speed reading helps you grasp information density of text? As someone who hasn't practiced speed reading, how does that happen? Is it something about the way your brain tries to connect ideas from different parts of the text? Or the redundancy making the signal more stable?

When you speed read, you can grab the words off the page faster than you can understand and fully process the information conveyed by the text. How much time you have or want to spend re-reading or thinking about what you've read is quite obvious. There's a stark experiential difference between reading an informationally-dense passage and one that spends a lot of time rephrasing things, using LLMisms to restate concepts, adding in extra connecting phrases, etc.

If your reading speed is limited by how quickly you can subvocalize the words to yourself, this is significantly less obvious. Unless the passage is dense enough to require multiple read-throughs at conversational reading pace or vapid enough to be boring, you're going to feel done with the text at roughly the same time. Speed readers do a lot more re-reading and varying of reading speed, and that is going to correlate pretty hard with information density.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#179
post #43

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 qui…

> It’s almost like a pseudo-language where it has the correct form and presentation but is missing critical components.

Slop. The word is slop. Has been for years now. I mean, is this not exactly what we've all been talking about the whole time?

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#180
I used some check marks and x-es in a work chat, because it was easy to do, and so I could highlight the good and bad outcomes, and someone immediately asked me if I was using AI. I was caught totally flat-footed, because I hadn't used AI, but it looked VERY MUCH as though I had.
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