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Analyzing student votes across AI models for college essay help

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Re: Analyzing student votes across AI models for college essay help

#71

Anything is better than the current crop of Claudes, its prose has become painful.

You make some good points, but the best one is the one you might not be aware you've made.

You may not be aware of the most important emergent property of this comment: it made me piss myself laughing. Strong work, architect of intent.

Re: Analyzing student votes across AI models for college essay help

#72

The spread isn't as large as I thought from the headline. It's closer to a toss-up than I would have expected. The length of the response is a huge factor: > Students tended to prefer longer responses. The selected answer was 37% longer on average than the alternatives. The longest response won 47.7% of decisive writing comparisons. The shortest still won 25.0%. So the score is partially a proxy for longest responses…

Matches my experience. When I need to think or reason about something, between Clause and ChatGPT, the latter is my go to. With more to read, there’s just more to work with. For the same reason it’s bonkers for tech issues. How many times did I get a ChatGPT reply a mile long, do the first thing, and then read more after it didn’t work. Only then realize chatgpt didn’t offer the best answer first.

Re: Analyzing student votes across AI models for college essay help

#73
> “The best response must be complete without becoming shapeless, structured without sounding mechanical…”

Anyone else scratching their head at these descriptions? Uh, your writing is shapeless. You’re 5% too mechanical. Who talks like this? Fiction writers and editors??

Re: Analyzing student votes across AI models for college essay help

#74

> “The best response must be complete without becoming shapeless, structured without sounding mechanical…” Anyone else scratching their head at these descriptions? Uh, your writing is shapeless. You’re 5% too mechanical. Who talks like this? Fiction writers and editors??

TBH :') that one was an AI slip through. In other comments i've flagged the things that were hard rewritten - but even on me that's bad.

Re: Analyzing student votes across AI models for college essay help

#77

Author, that doesn’t mean you need to get Gemini to write your article.

TBH i did a bit of both - we used AI to get us insights in the db, we then wrote and rewrote the article to be readable. It's really hard because usually when i write reports they're so terse its not fun to read

We need a new kind of "view source" on the web.

Re: Analyzing student votes across AI models for college essay help

#78
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH i did a bit of both - we used AI to get us insights in the db, we then wrote and rewrote the article to be readable. It's really hard because usually when i write reports they're so terse its not fun to read

We need a new kind of "view source" on the web.

Kind of a 'at what stage did this article use AI or written by a human'?

Re: Analyzing student votes across AI models for college essay help

#79

I use Fable for writing code and some planning. I use GPT for planning/roadmaps and code review, it checks Fable. I use Gemini for stray conversations. Gemini has a better conversational style than GPT, less robotic; it hallucinates more unfortunately, it has plainly fallen quite a bit behind, but it's still highly useful to converse with, research with, etc. And it spares me wasting usage of GPT or Fable. I use Gemi…

Thankfully, college essay writing isn't in that 'serious' category!

Re: Analyzing student votes across AI models for college essay help

#80
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For real, the "Claudish" has become so painful to read that it just takes me out of whatever task I was working on. When prompted to use simple English without jargon, it's still filled with load bearing honest caveats in every footgun seam it talks about — what I should have led with. And I'm not the only one to notice this. Next time it's up for renewal, my team is abandoning it for GH Copilot in order to use liter…

That claim about load bearing is doing a lot of work there! I'm curious to know how "Claudish" emerged during the training process. Why each AI has a particular voice if much of the training material is the same across AIs?

They train Claude on its own output and conversations with users, so tics like this are going to get amplified by virtue of being more common in the training set.

That, and my conspiracy hat says it's a way of watermarking the output.

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