Blocked EVERY single LLM generated blog and content farm with uBlacklist.
Another great day where Google only gives me 2 results on the first page.
The revolt of the reader
81–90 of 311 posts
Re: The revolt of the reader
#82I'm confused and disturbed by the need to invoke Pangram (a model) as the arbiter of slop here. Slop, like smut, is self evident. You know it when you see it. Yes, some effort may be required before realizing that something is slop, which, yeah, is annoying, but that's nothing in comparison to outsourcing your shiite detection to a model! What do you get, except the loss of self worth, by needing a model to have the…
The part about false positives was telling. The author doesn't want to demonize human trash, that's not fashionable, they're only concerned about virtue signalling.
Re: The revolt of the reader
#83I see this at work. People are "writing" specs and design proposals with bots. This is noticeable and is a huge turn off. I don't have issues with using bots to aid research, but I'm not reading the doc you slopped together.
I work with a guy that I swear is addicted to LLMs. He uses them for literally all communication, often dropping mountains of text for design specs that could have been written with half the words. Even on a 1:1 Zoom call, he'll type things into Claude and then read me the response! It's infuriating, and I've told him on a number of occasions, in as many polite ways as I can, that I would prefer to speak and work with him instead of Claude, but he just can't break the addiction.
Re: The revolt of the reader
#84if its not worth your time to write, its not worth my time to read this goes 10x for all the slide decks and google docs and wikislop everyone's trying to pass off as an accomplishment lately
You're marginalizing yourself. I don't have hard data for writing, but I do for another area: YouTube Thumbnails. AI generated thumbnails outperform human thumbnails, often with a +2-5% delta in CTR. Yet "so many" people loudly complain about how they HATE AI thumbnails and block channels that have them. Clearly the incentive is there, and (in the case of YT) these are mobs of angry people who don't really matter but scream and bitch as if they did.
Re: The revolt of the reader
#85My 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 found it an improvement too
Re: The revolt of the reader
#86Hi Bryan, I liked your piece, and agree with almost all of it, but I'm surprised by your faith in the accuracy of Pangram at detecting AI writing. Is your faith based on testing it with lots of writing of known origins, or are you just saying that it reaches the same conclusion that you do as a talented human? In particular, I wondered if you have tried running all of your own writings through it to verify that it th…
My experience is using Pangram quite often with lots of writing of all flavors (including a bunch of known origin). As for my own writing, I didn't do this experiment, but one of my co-workers did -- and over 176 posts spanning 22 years, all 176 (well, 177 now with my latest) are 100% human. This is not hugely surprising in that (in addition to me having actually written them!) my voice is very... distinctive. What w…
Now that you’ve seen it can be brittle (e.g. if a small sample is provided, per this single case), would it be sensible to add a disclaimer to the post? It’s a great ad for the tool (& I’d love for a perfect tool to exist!), so it’ll sell subscriptions & we wanna make sure that some teacher out there doesn’t falsely accuse a kid, or engineer doesn’t think worse of their colleague unfairly, etc.
False negatives are mentioned, but the false positive is what could hurt people.
To human writing. Thank you!
Re: The revolt of the reader
#87My 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?
Second helped explain the first, appreciated having both (but I’m no genius or nothin’).
Re: The revolt of the reader
#88The 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.
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Re: The revolt of the reader
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
That was exactly my experience, and I found it to be a little bit depressing.
Re: The revolt of the reader
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this is about edge cases where someone has successfully disguised the writing to some degree: the current crop of LLMs have some pretty blatant (and frankly annoying) habits by default, ones that are hard to miss once you have read a decent amount of their output. If I had to describe them broadly, I would say they are a collection of habits which are common in certain kinds of persuasive and emotive wr…
> the current crop of LLMs have some pretty blatant This is just "em dash redux." Except now we've moved on to accusing anyone who does "It's not X. It's Y." of being AI. In six months, it'll be "use of the word 'petrichor'" or something.
I went to /show and chose a random project with a GitHub repo. Here's the README:
https://github.com/ucsandman/declick/blob/main/README.md
Please let me know if you
(a) believe this is human prose
(b) enjoy reading this prose
(c) would enjoy reading 100 READMEs like this.