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The revolt of the reader
61–70 of 310 posts
Re: The revolt of the reader
#62AI detection should NEVER be used in an educational setting where the only acceptable false positive rate is 0%. That being a rate that which will never be achieved.
Yeah, even Pangram is a bit problematic here. It has been notoriously fragile. Minor edits can flip scores from 100%-human to 100%-AI, because Pangram is crazy sensitive to local and surfacial features of text. Simple consulting with LLMs for word choices can result in 100%-AI score. Insane.
Re: The revolt of the reader
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is very handwavy and dismissive. It is pretty safe to assume that must of us catch it most of the time because the simple fact is so many people just copy and paste whatever the LLM outputs without even trying to edit it or mask that they used one. We’ve all seen so many examples of the exact same cadence and verbiage that we’ve learned how to identify it pretty reliably. The ones who are “slipping past us” are…
> It is pretty safe to assume that must of us catch it most of the time because the simple fact is so many people just copy and paste whatever the LLM outputs without even trying to edit it or mask that they used one. This statement does not logically cohere. "We can spot it because so many people make it easy to spot." You don't see how this is just petitio principii in action?
What is your point? It’s not that complicated. Obvious slop is obvious. Maybe there are some humans out there who sound like Claude but I’m not going to force myself through 900 slop blog posts on the off chance that one of them might actually be written by a human.
Maybe some people stop reading LLM slop purely because it violates their moral principles or whatever but most people bail out because slop is mentally painful to read. If you are a human and you write like today’s AI find a different writing style, not because reads like AI, but because it reads like shit.
Re: The revolt of the reader
#64When I write technical documentation, here's how I use LLMs:
* If I need to learn something before I write about it, I rely on LLMs heavily to answer questions that I have about other source materials, e.g. to clear up ambiguities.
* I've recently started prompting it to find grammatical and spelling errors.
* And I've prompted it to find technical errors, places where I'm just wrong.
For all the prompting, I additionally tell it to not rewrite anything or offer any prose suggestions. It can keep all that to itself, thank you.
And I verify what it gives back for correctness.
(I'd encourage non-native speakers to use LLMs in much the same way. Don't sacrifice your human voice by letting the AI rewrite your words. Personally, I'd very much rather hear it from you, blemishes and all, than hear it from an AI.)
But if I could step back for a minute:
Why write anything?
If your writing goal is to flood the zone and make as much money as humanly possible from ads, then hell yeah, paperclip the everliving shit out of that.
But if your writing goal is to learn material or share material, then put that LLM on the back burner and don't use it to directly generate your text. It's bad for you, and the results are subpar.
When I'm learning something, I can go through reams of tokens and then, once I understand it, I digest that to single a paragraph about the topic. The paragraph is as concise and as helpful as I can make it. Now, I could just share the prompts that I went through with those pages of back-and-forth with the LLM... but wouldn't you rather just read the concise paragraph that gets the point across?
It's not hard to be better than an AI at writing for humans, so the minimum low bar to aim for is "better than an AI". And we can all get there with a small amount of practice. The real goal is to greatly exceed the LLMs' capabilities for sharing information.
Finally, I think everyone should write a lot. Blogs, morning pages, fiction, technical books, letters, whatever. Especially when it comes to technical content, nothing makes you do your research like putting your ass out in the ether to get flamed by 5 billion people. And teachers the world over know the best way to learn something is to teach it. Pick a topic, research, and write it up more clearly and concisely than anyone else ever has. You'll learn so much, and your readers will, as well. Writing fires up your brain. Don't give that up to an LLM.
Re: The revolt of the reader
#65My revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text. A trope typically indicates I’m in for an uphill read.
I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1].
> Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes:
> > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
> Orwell's version goes:
> > Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
> First notice how the two passages look. The first one at the top invites us to read it. The words are short and have air around them; they convey the rhythms of human speech. The second one is clotted with long words. It tells us instantly that a ponderous mind is at work. We don't want to go anywhere with a mind that expresses itself in such suffocating language. We don't even start to read.
Re: The revolt of the reader
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Are you footing the bill yourself, or would you be supporting BYOK? Not sure whether logging in with user's account would also be a good workaround or not.
Re: The revolt of the reader
#67Someone 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.
Years ago I used a rudimentary (text matching) Greasemonkey script that hid Reddit posts and comments from accounts matching a few behavioral/history signals.
I wonder if that idea could be modernized now for this.
Re: The revolt of the reader
#68My revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text. A trope typically indicates I’m in for an uphill read. I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1]. > Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes: > > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is…
Am I the only one that finds the second one much easier to parse?
Re: The revolt of the reader
#69When I write technical documentation, here's how I use LLMs: * If I need to learn something before I write about it, I rely on LLMs heavily to answer questions that I have about other source materials, e.g. to clear up ambiguities. * I've recently started prompting it to find grammatical and spelling errors. * And I've prompted it to find technical errors, places where I'm just wrong. For all the prompting, I additio…
“Personally, I'd very much rather hear it from you, blemishes and all, than hear it from an AI.”
Yes! Well said. If I already know someone, reading their own words, technical or businesss or personal, is meaningful to me. Warts and all. And if I don’t yet know the author then I definitely want to read their own words so I can get to know them.
Either way, taking the time to think and then write is a gift and I respect that.
Re: The revolt of the reader
#70My revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text. A trope typically indicates I’m in for an uphill read. I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1]. > Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes: > > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is…
Am I the only one that finds the second one much easier to parse?
I had to reread the first one but I wanted to read it!
The second one was understood on the first scan but was a chore to read.
Does that make sense?