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The revolt of the reader

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Re: The revolt of the reader

#141

Post by card_zero »

lelanthran wrote: post #129
quietbritishjim wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I've ever seen someone on HN say that. Many people would say that AI makes them more productive at coding, not that the output is nice to read.

> I don't think I've ever seen someone on HN say that. A 5m search got me the following: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49410941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49059571 This thread, in particular, stands out - reader makes the claim that Pangram found that the US constitution was 100% AI generated, when others tried they found 0% (or close to it) https://news.…

Those are not that. The first two are people complaining about other people incontinently identifying text as AI, because it's annoying to listen to unreliable hunches and aspersions. The second two are complaining about AI detectors not being very reliable. The claim made in the last one is a casual anecdote about "an AI detector", presumably told because it's amusing. It isn't a vehement statement about how you must accept slop into your life.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#142

Post by milkshakes »

lelanthran wrote: post #112
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…

The problem is not the LLM prose appearing everywhere, it's the legions of AI-boosters appearing in every thread attacking anyone who complains. Apparently, even though they want to spew AI prose everywhere, they want it read by humans, not by other bots, so when a few holdout places are insisting that prose be human authored they fight very hard against the rule.

i am a big fan of llms and the possibilities they enable. but i also find this type of behavior extremely rude! ai;dr for life. :is-your-human-around: is my preferred emoji for reacting to such behavior

Re: The revolt of the reader

#143

Post by somat »

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…

My take is that the generated stuff is terrible for communications.

It feels great to use, direct your machine minion to fill out your thoughts for you, but holy hell does it suck to be on the receiving end. Least of all is the disrespect, they don't care enough to even talk to you but worse is having to try and reason through that big incoherent blob.

Probably to only reasonable thing to do is to try and get your own mechanical agents to produce summaries. Inventing the lossy expansion algorithm(like compression but things get bigger on the wire), And we wept.

Now I am all depressed because it is probably inevitable, apparently thinking is hard and in general people are all to happy to outsource it to the machines.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#144

Post by bryanrasmussen »

tdeck wrote: post #130
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first is of course from the King James Bible which for centuries was essentially a standard that all English speaking peoples aspired to. If you find that version difficult I would expect much literary writing before the 1940s also seems difficult. This is just to say I recommend reading the King James even if you are an atheist, as I am. I also have to say that the first strikes me as being written by someone th…

In the context of newly written work in the modern era, I would argue it's best to use grammatical constructions that are used in modern 20th/21st century English, at least most of the time. Those who wrote the KJV were trying to be expressive but the whole point was to do so in language that ordinary people would be familiar with. > the first strikes me as being written by someone that might be smarter than I am Thi…

yes, I am very schooled in Smith's attempts.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#145

Post by somat »

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…

Very depressing, and I believe it.

I am a bit of a luddite in this domain and have so far managed to resist the lure of using the generator to expand my thoughts, and I still catch myself writing "it's not just an X it's a Y" and other generator type tells. If it infecting my patterns it is totally entering the wider subconscious as "How to write" (Sighs)

Re: The revolt of the reader

#146

Post by nilsherzig »

duhhhhh1212 wrote: post #3

Someone 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 have (an API, not an extension), but pangram is way to expensive for me to run, current (v4) pricing is $0.05 per 100 words. Should be absolutely doable if we split the cost between users tho.

I tried searching for good opensource / reasonably priced alternatives, pangram themselves even have some of their older architecture and training data on github/hugging face, but i never got that working reliably enough.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#147

Post by mikelgan »

Great piece and interesting data. The rate of LLM-based writing rejection among developers is even higher than I thought it would be.

To me, the glaring question is: What are we doing? The act of writing exists to 1) externalize and organize one's own thoughts for the purpose of considering and revising those thoughts; and 2) share one's own thoughts with other minds.

When we hand writing to a machine, we hand thinking to a machine, denying both our humanity and our role in the conversation.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#148

Post by osr00 »

"you probably shouldn’t let it write it for you if you actually expect the rest of us to read it." definitely resonates with me.

Where I kind of disagree is that I don't think most readers will revolt. I think the mountain of LLM slop has actually changed people's behavior in more ways than one. Some are already relying on LLMs to summarize articles: then it doesn't matter to them who wrote it, they're just consuming machine-condensed content with no way to tell if a human or an LLM wrote the original piece. Or if their summarizer hallucinated.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#149

Post by ahepp »

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?

I wonder if this is due to experience with reading technical documentation?

I think the second requires deeper concentration, but is still quite readable compared to the kind of low-content engagement / SEO stuff one read on the internet even before LLMs

Re: The revolt of the reader

#150

Post by bloak »

mrob wrote: post #134
sltkr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cha…

Technically, I think, that first sentence, by Austen, uses a passive participle but does not use a passive voice for any finite verb. I don't think that advice to avoid "the passive" is intended to apply to that situation.

For example, nobody would seriously suggest avoiding the passive participle in a sentence like "Put the broken plate in the bin". ("Put the plate that someone broke into the bin"?)

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