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The revolt of the reader

bcantrill.dtrace.org

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Re: The revolt of the reader

#91

Post by hobo123 »

daveguy wrote: post #48
raincole wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right that Nazi doesn't mean Nazi anymore. It means neonazi / white supremacist / white nationalist, which is a much broader group of people that, for some baffling reason, are under the impression that people don't care about their fascism and racism anymore.

Clearly not, or this wouldn't be something people discuss at all.

There are lots of people who belong to the above groups, sure, but at least here in Germany Nazi is now applied to basically anyone who doesn't vote green, it's ridiculous.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#92

Post by smart_asslop »

dyauspitr wrote: post #55
bcantrill wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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." An…

99% of college essays and pretty much everything “product” in corporate America is now LLM generated with some marginal oversight. It passes muster for the most part.

Talking about attempts to bypass ML detection:

>This argument can probably be leveled at vanilla raw output from an LLM, but even the slightest attempt at obfuscation bears solid fruit

Whoops, disproven by bcantrill's comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582629

Let's talk about the detection ability of corporate normies instead:

>pretty much everything “product” in corporate America is now LLM generated with some marginal oversight. It passes muster for the most part.

Goalposts: moved.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#93

Post by Kerrick »

Barbing wrote: post #87
tdeck wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’).

Other translations keep Zinsser's preferred lack of fuzz but avoid using "is ... to" for possession.

For example, the Lexham English Bible:

> I looked again and saw under the sun that the race does not belong to the swift, the battle does not belong to the mighty, food does not belong to the wise, wealth does not belong to the intelligent, and success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all of them.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#94

Post by Barbing »

Kerrick wrote: post #93
Barbing wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second helped explain the first, appreciated having both (but I’m no genius or nothin’).

Other translations keep Zinsser's preferred lack of fuzz but avoid using "is ... to" for possession. For example, the Lexham English Bible: > I looked again and saw under the sun that the race does not belong to the swift, the battle does not belong to the mighty, food does not belong to the wise, wealth does not belong to the intelligent, and success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all o…

Easiest! Loses some color, gains much clarity.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#95

Post by pshirshov »

> do you think readers can’t tell?

No. I have good anecdata: readers cannot reliably distinguish my own prose from LLM-written one apart from cases where LLMs use odd metaphors or one of their specific patterns. I've been specifically experimenting with that.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#97

Post by Bratmon »

This entire article is the bad toupee fallacy.

Readers think they don't like LLM-authored text because they only recognize bad LLM-authored text as LLM-authored.

Blind trials have actually shown that readers generally prefer LLM authored books to human-authored ones on the same subject.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#98

Post by masswerk »

kierangill wrote: post #65

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…

In contemporary YouTube-script wording:

> The Ecclasiast looked under the sun, but there was something he didn't understand. Something that wasn't right. Something that was not as it was supposed to be. And here is what the Ecclesiast didn't understand. Here is what nobody understood. Not then. Not in the years that followed. Not now. It was not the swift who won the race. Not the strong who won the battle. Not the wise who earned the bread. Not the men of understanding who gained the riches. Not the men of skill who gained the favor. And here is what I found: to any story of success, there is an element of unpredictability and chance.

(There are really just two possible outcomes: either the article is right or in, say, two years, we will be all writing and talking like this, as in humans learning from mediamatically reinforced human feedback.)

Re: The revolt of the reader

#99

Post by iamflimflam1 »

I did some experiments with very simple AI detection. You can get a very long way with simple ngram probabilities.

https://meatbag.atomic14.com/

https://www.atomic14.com/2026/08/18/detecting-claude-with-le...

It’s very hard to make reliable though. Different models have different characteristics and you can prompt your way out of being detected.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#100

Post by macleginn »

tdeck wrote: post #68
kierangill wrote: post #65

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?

This is why almost 100% of hard and social scientific discourse reads almost exactly like this these days.
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