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The revolt of the reader

bcantrill.dtrace.org

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Re: The revolt of the reader

#31

Post by ofjcihen »

Look, in the future we may get to a point where LLMs are indistinguishable from humans in writing style.

Even then, I would say that using an LLM is robbing you of the process of writing, a process that is crucial to developing and understanding your own ideas.

Think about the last time you wrote something for consumption and the sentence to sentence thought processes you’re going through. I bet a lot of that was “is that right?” Or “does that make sense?” Or “am I communicating this at the level of my reader?”.

All of that is fundamental to your readers understanding, but more importantly, its fundamental to YOUR understanding.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#33

Post by wmf »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #32

The idea that readers "can tell" remains laughable. Readers routinely claim they "can tell" on things that turn out to be entirely hand authored. If you want to read something good, read a good book.

I don't want to read human slop either.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#34

Post by bcantrill »

dyauspitr wrote: post #30

This meme of trying to make it sound like LLM text is so obvious is a joke. It’s literally not, you can tell it to write in literally any style and given just a bit of an example of a person’s writing style, frontier models copy it completely and effectively. This argument can probably be leveled at vanilla raw output from an LLM, but even the slightest attempt at obfuscation bears solid fruit.

Well, give it a shot -- you'll likely find that that technique doesn't work nearly as well (at least with Pangram 4) as you think it might. When we had Max on the podcast[0], Adam explicitly asked him about exactly this (after all, you can give an LLM access to Pangram and let it iterate!), and Max reported that someone had attempted to do this -- and ended up burning through $700 in tokens and had a "sad Claude." Another interesting bit: according to Max, newer models are diverging more from human writing not less. I think that that was more anecdotal than quantified, but an interesting comment nonetheless.

[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/ai-detectio...

Re: The revolt of the reader

#35

Post by kccqzy »

I would love to use Pangram but they simply don’t allow signing up with my custom email domain. The error was “This email address can't be used for signup. Please use a different email.” I’m not about to create a Gmail is to use your service. To me the attack on the decentralized nature on Internet infrastructure is no less serious than the attack on the human provenance of writing itself.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#36

Post by demibabs »

pavo-etc wrote: post #27
duhhhhh1212 wrote: post #3

Someone should make a browser extension to label HN posts with Pangram results of the top 100 posts, so I don't waste my time reading crap. Always a pleasure reading Bryan's writing; it's like Bryan is sitting there with you and saying the words (hard to convey the feeling).

I would go even further, I want a browser extension that scans all words on every page and colours them more and more transparent as the likelihood of llm prose is increased.

I’m working on something like this! My issue is that using Pangram for it ends up being quite expensive.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#37

Post by AnodicElegy »

dyauspitr wrote: post #30

This meme of trying to make it sound like LLM text is so obvious is a joke. It’s literally not, you can tell it to write in literally any style and given just a bit of an example of a person’s writing style, frontier models copy it completely and effectively. This argument can probably be leveled at vanilla raw output from an LLM, but even the slightest attempt at obfuscation bears solid fruit.

If someone uses an LLM to write and is able to tailor their writing such that it isn't obviously written by an LLM, then I'm fine with it! But two of my otherwise-favourite news sources -- the Hacker News front page and FT Alphaville -- are inundated by articles where the LLM usage is blindingly obvious.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#38

Post by KPGv2 »

> To those who read broadly, the hand of the LLM is so clear it’s as if the writer’s intellectual fly is open

I dunno, man, according to Hardcover, I've read 76 fiction books this year, and I can't tell. All the "AI tells" fail the vibe check. I'm a writer and I get flagged by many of them.

And according to PhD linguists with expertise in the field, most AI tells are just the equivalent of old wives' tales. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORgKY9AlybA

I vaguely recall that researchers were able to train people to tell, but only for a minority language that AIs likely aren't particularly good at mimicking, and after training.

This whole thing reminds me of how "you can recognize a vegan because they'll tell you." There, you have a ton of false negatives (i.e., since you aren't polling people to find out if they're vegan, you're only flagging the obvious vegans and missing all the regular people who happen to be vegan).

Except here, it's a bunch of false positives and negatives I bet. You don't really have a way of knowing, so you're accusing some people (without complete accuracy) and missing some people (without complete accuracy). But you have no way of knowing, so you're just like "hell yeah, my vibes tell me I'm right."

Research and experts disagree.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#39

Post by gdwatson »

I am bad at recognizing LLM writing off the bat, though I am getting better. It's pretty common that the writing is good enough to get me reading on a topic I am interested in; then, once I am invested in the piece, it turns out to be shallow, wildly incomplete, or simply wrong.

It's common enough that it's training me to recognize and recoil from AI tics through sheer classical conditioning.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#40

Post by bakugo »

dyauspitr wrote: post #30

This meme of trying to make it sound like LLM text is so obvious is a joke. It’s literally not, you can tell it to write in literally any style and given just a bit of an example of a person’s writing style, frontier models copy it completely and effectively. This argument can probably be leveled at vanilla raw output from an LLM, but even the slightest attempt at obfuscation bears solid fruit.

This isn't very effective on any models released in recent years. With older ones, you used to be able to influence writing style significantly by just putting examples in the context, but newer models have gone through so much assistant RLHF, they really want to revert back to their default "assistant voice" during their turn.

You can still influence their writing style in a broad manner that might look correct at a glance, but the repetitive little patterns that give it away will always be there - if it was that easy to get rid of them, don't you think the AI labs themselves would've done it before releasing the models?

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