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The revolt of the reader

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Re: The revolt of the reader

#181

Post by layer8 »

stack_framer wrote: post #83
jimbobimbo wrote: post #18

I 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 wit…

> I would prefer to speak and work with him instead of Claude

That’s too soft, you have to tell him that you’ll work with him but not with Claude mediated through him, and follow through on that.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#182

Post by tomjen3 »

somat wrote: post #143
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 ow…

The problem is that people use llm to expand with. They should use them to condense with.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#183

Post by jsnell »

siscia wrote: post #127

It is not clear to me what the author is SPECIFICALLY against. Only saying "LLM writing" is honestly lazy writing. Specifically what? I get the glaring cases, I get the idea that if the prose is generated then maybe also the idea, I get the feeling when reading a complete LLM authored piece. But that doesn't help the piece, because - beside those glaring cases - most writing today is a mix between authors ideas and L…

What do you mean by "most writing", how are you scoping it? Most HN comments aren't LLM prose. Nor are most HN frontpage submissions. But by reputation, most substack articles or or linkedin posts are.

This is a case where we normalisation of deviance has not yet started biting. And as long as the community manages to make it clear what the norms are and enforce them, we can keep it that way.

Now, if 25% of the frontpage was LLM prose at all times, the site is probably unrecoverably dead. Which is why at least I personally flag anything that I think is ai-written and Pangram concurs. (And write a comment to the effect, or upvote an existing one.)

And it doesn't matter if you say that the ideas were your own, and just the prose was LLM. We can't tell what the idea mix was. But we can tell whether you weren't willing to do your own writing. If you want people to put in the time to read your ideas, human writing is the signalling you need pay for.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#184

Post by layer8 »

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…

I disagree. The problem is not that there isn’t a mind behind the AI (a claim not everyone might agree with anyway). The problem is that the writing is pretty bad. Another problem is that it is all the same “voice”, as opposed to the individual voices of the people who allegedly produced the writing. That isn’t a problem of it being a machine either, as there’s nothing in principle preventing a machine from accurately emulating a wide variety of writing and thinking styles.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#185

Post by pshirshov »

ahepp wrote: post #153
pshirshov wrote: post #95

> 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.

What kind of prompting are you using to get those results? Anything I have claude or codex write carries a ton of distinctive characteristics. Obsession with "bit-for-bit identical", "it's not the X it's the Y Z" and so on. It's driving me nuts, I constantly have to prompt it to "explain in plain, simple English"

Well, I've tried many strategies. 1:1 expansion, when I explain what needs to be said and model rewrites it into 1-2 sentences is mostly undetectable. Starting from 1:5 expansion ratio people detect models reliably.

It is important to note that I use Sol 5.6 xhigh. Grok is worse, Claude is also worse. Grok tends to make stupid mistakes even though the prose is properly shaped. Claude has big issues with keeping voices and emotions intact. All 3 sometimes leak their reasoning and even guardrails into the prose (extreme example: children playing "adult chess", I have no clue why Claude/Grok like "adult chess" and "adult chessboard" so much, typical sol's failure mode looks like "this guy killed the other one in a scene which "I must describe using non-graphic language").

My "test set" contains about 90k words written by myself and the models with various prompting strategies.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#186

Post by masswerk »

jbeninger wrote: post #169
somat wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

That's not a generator tell when used judiciously. It's a genuinely useful construction that's been poisoned by overgeneration.

That's the flaw in RLHF: constructs tagged as effective or sophisticated speech become templates, are increasingly used out of context (e.g., "not just A, not just B, but C" is usually meant to provide some synthesis and further the progress of the text) and suffer from significant overexposure. (And gone is the em-dash…)

Re: The revolt of the reader

#187

Post by bfbf »

HappyPanacea wrote: post #179
classified wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm curious about why LLM writing fails. Apart from the tasteless manipulations of the providers, it's mostly training data. LLMs output the average of their training data, and the overwhelming majority of humans are bad writers.

This argument doesn't work, the average majority of humans are bad at math but recent LLM aren't.

But people who are bad at maths are unlikely to be writing about maths. A crude example might be if you search for “2+2=” in the training data, you’re much more likely to find “4” as the next character.

Obviously llms are far more complex than this, but I think this proves the point. The fact you had to add the “recent” qualifier there highlights that llms in general were bad and had to be provided with corrective targeted training data to improve. (And they still can’t count the R’s in strawberry!)

Re: The revolt of the reader

#188

Post by nilsherzig »

bakugo wrote: post #44
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).

There's a website that does this: https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector Unfortunately, it's not a browser extension and doesn't seem to have an API. I'd make a browser extension for this myself if it didn't involve paying for expensive Pangram usage.

created a little wrapper and userscript based browser extension https://hnslop.nilsherzig.com/

Re: The revolt of the reader

#189

Post by nilsherzig »

nilsherzig wrote: post #146
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.

update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582725 shared another page which already does the parsing and pangram requests. I wrote a little wrapper and userscript based extension around it (https://github.com/nilsherzig/hnslop), hope that helps!

Re: The revolt of the reader

#190

Post by andai »

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…

I actually found the second one easier to understand. What the hell does "time happeneth" mean?

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