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The revolt of the reader

bcantrill.dtrace.org

71–80 of 311 posts

Re: The revolt of the reader

#71
post #68

My 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?

Seconded

Re: The revolt of the reader

#72

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 agree. Most human-generated content I've run across on the internet over the past couple decades has been fairly low quality and, to be honest, most of the self-admitted LLM-generated content is higher quality. I'm continually surprised that so many consider any content written by humans to automatically be more worth their time to read.

I'm much more interested in the content itself than the author that wrote it.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#73
Disclaimer: I do not like to read LLM-generated text any more than anyone else.

IMHO a big problem with Pangram in particular is that they market it as a reliable tool that can be used to catch students cheating. This can obviously have disastrous effects on young lives, because it is not as reliable as they suggest.

Per their own benchmarks, they do not achieve 100% accuracy even on text that is published on the Internet, and which is likely encoded into the models themselves.

There is validity to their goals, but that is overshadowed by the irresponsible way in which it is marketed.

(All of this, swirling in a context where students are being told that they absolutely must become proficient at using LLMs to do exactly this kind of work by the highest levels of state and federal governments, faculty leadership, as well as the leaders of the workforce into which they hope to graduate. The message to youth is extremely muddled at best.)

Re: The revolt of the reader

#74
post #68

My 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?

The grammar is more straightforward. It has some extraneous words, and makes conspicuously bad choices of vocabulary, but it's still a more direct statement.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#75
For me it’s AI videos or music / narration that is beyond off putting. What’s worse now it seems people are writing their YouTube scripts with Claude et al. so at times even if it is a human creator you can clearly and immediately tell the words are not their own. To those creators I have but one message: IT SUCKS. I’d rather have you ramble incoherently in your mic then reading an LLM script and I will remove you from my feed immediately. I concur with the author on all accounts. We all can tell the BS people are selling us, unoriginal ideas, shallow concepts, open ended questions that hint at exactly nothing. Don’t be an LLM echo

Re: The revolt of the reader

#77
post #13

How can you tell if people can accurately identify AI generated text? If a person reads AI generated text and does not notice, they by definition will not know about it. There have been numerous cases of people accessing human created content as being AI. There are instances where it seems relatively uncontroversial that it is AI generated, but without knowing both the amount of AI content people are exposed toand th…

AI writing just means "writing I don't like" now. Just like Nazi means whatever and whoever I politically disagree with. Words have lost their meaning.

Just like "violence" can now mean speech you don't agree with, "genocide" means military action you don't agree with, and nobody seems to know what "woman" means anymore, Maybe the solution is to stop using words.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#78

My 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…

Orwell's entire essay (Politics and the English Language) is well worth reading if you haven't before:

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

(I'm guessing Zinsser's comments are from "On Writing Well", which you can also find online even though it is still under copyright.)

It's a bit of a pet peeve when people include quotes on a blog post without linking or otherwise references their source.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#79
post #13

How can you tell if people can accurately identify AI generated text? If a person reads AI generated text and does not notice, they by definition will not know about it. There have been numerous cases of people accessing human created content as being AI. There are instances where it seems relatively uncontroversial that it is AI generated, but without knowing both the amount of AI content people are exposed toand th…

Pieces that people aren't revolted by will be fine. Readers aren't revolting because of a flood of high quality writing though.

Some people are still losing their shit over em-dashes, with no other tells, and humans can't use the not x; y construction anymore either, regardless of any other merit to the writing.

LLM writing is verbose and meandering, but people are making a much bigger deal over this stuff than necessary for virtue signalling purposes. You don't want to read someone else's LLM writing? Get a summary of the page from yours. No time wasted, no pretentious posturing, and you don't make the error of assuming because the piece was written by an LLM that there was no thought put into the subject or there's no value in what is being communicated.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#80

My 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…

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