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The revolt of the reader

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Re: The revolt of the reader

#131

Post by tedggh »

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…

It appears LLMs are much better at writing during a debate than when explicitly asked to write. The moment LLMs are tasked with composing a blog article or intro for a book they introduce all the nuances that identify the output as AI slop.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#132

Post by watwut »

smitty1e wrote: post #4
turtleyacht wrote: post #2

A lot of similar pieces have not considered a post is both the first and final work of a thing: opinions, and experience, and less of much in cited facts; with AI, that there even was a revision pass at all. I guess there is a kind of participatory element to the discourse where, if you want an audience, there is an editing process. Whereas in other cases, we wrote these as progress notes on an unknown journey, bread…

You could use AI to come up with a draft, and to critique ahead of posting. The chief grief appears to be phoning in the whole process.

If you need AI for the draft, then it does not need to be written at all. You dont have a thing to say, you just have requirement to produce a lot of words.

And in that case, no one needs to read it ai or not.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#133

Post by lljk_kennedy »

jimmaswell wrote: post #117
pavinjoseph wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The second one was very clear and to the point. Parsing it was rewarded with instant understanding and I enjoyed the word choice. The first one was just annoying; I could tell it was just listing a bunch of pointless analogies to try to make its point sound more grandiose so I immediately started skimming, and didn't come away feeling like it meant much other than "we all die in the end". The second one made an actua…

The first communicated a feeling. A brief flutter in the soul of a picture of recognition, painted for your mind's eye with care by the author.

The second transcribed considerable information bandwidth through intentionally structured word choice for maximal density.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#134

Post by mrob »

sltkr wrote: post #78
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…

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 sourc…

But Orwell's rule 4 should be ignored:

>iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

Orwell himself routinely ignores it, even in the first sentence of the essay:

>Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.

The second clause could be rewritten in active voice by changing it to "but people generally assume". But this would make the writing worse, and Orwell, as a good writer, probably didn't even consider the option of making it worse, and therefore didn't notice the passive voice.

Passive voice is an essential tool for all good writers of English. I always give the example of the opening of Pride and Prejudice [0]:

>It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

The joke doesn't work in active voice. If you attribute this acknowledgement to some specific group of people then it's simply false, not a comedic exaggeration.

[0]: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42671

Re: The revolt of the reader

#135

Post by ares623 »

westcoast49 wrote: post #126

> we readers shouldn’t be expected to labor to understand a sentence that the writer themselves didn’t work to create. What about answers that an LLM gave to a question that we ourselves asked? Should we “labor” to understand that answer? I think the argument, as presented in this and other similar pieces of critique, is too simplistic. I do understand the criticism, but I think it should be framed in a different man…

[flagged]

Re: The revolt of the reader

#136

Post by SSLy »

kccqzy wrote: post #35

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.

Weird. I have recently created an account on my meme domain ($something.party) just fine.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#137

Post by latexr »

sltkr wrote: post #78
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…

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 sourc…

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

You’re peeved with good reason. It’s the blog equivalent of posting a screenshot of an article to social media. People, please post your sources! In the age of misinformation, that’s more important than ever.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#138

Post by vogelke »

masswerk wrote: post #98
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 w…

> in, say, two years, we will be all writing and talking like this

Shoot me now.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#139

Post by smart_asslop »

smart_asslop wrote: post #90
KPGv2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. As for invoking petitio principii and questioning other commenters' logical coherence [0], can you politely shove the argumentum ad Latinum up your…

[dead]

Re: The revolt of the reader

#140

Post by rcxdude »

bananaflag wrote: post #115
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…

Why dont they train LLMs not to speak like that? Is it some tragedy of the commons here?

LLMs get a lot of finetuning, but I suspect there are two things that can cause this kind of writing:

Firstly, some parts of the RLHF involve human graders on the LLM's performance. I suspect their general bias towards a punchy, persuasive writing style could come from what biases the graders towards preferring that response, especially in shorter segments and when the grader is not focused on writing style

Secondly, later parts of the finetuning involve reinforcement learning on achieving certain tasks which are automatically graded: stuff like coding tasks. I think this can create a kind of feedback loop where the style drifts further, and you get the kind of LLM tics which are even more extreme (it might be that they incidentally help somehow with the actual tasks, or it might be a drift that comes from the grader also now being an LLM or some of this finetuning happening on output from other models). The more recent claude models seem to suffer from this a lot, moreso than earlier ones.

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