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The revolt of the reader

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Re: The revolt of the reader

#221

Post by MattyRad »

cladopa wrote: post #161

So you believe that writers are not making the necessary effort and write using LLMs, so you then use an automatic LLM to filter it as a reader(because you don't care as a reader and don't want to make the effort manually). So this way there will be a lot of false positives like with school assignments. I think a better solution would be to have a network of people that you trust manually read and label texts instead…

The [content-based] trust layer of the internet is what we have deferred to this point, and what needs to be created (which is easier said than done, of course).

Personally I think a web-of-trust Keybase-style solution could work... But buy-in is difficult... you'd need some sort of "seed" strategy to make the app useful alack of 100 (a huge number) trusted friends.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#222

Post by hackeraccount »

ahepp wrote: post #160

I was so optimistic about using LLMs for "write once, read many" English language documents, but the more I've used the tools, the more pessimistic I get. More and more, I try to ask it for low prose responses because its writing just seems like such a low signal to noise ratio I'm curious about why LLM writing fails. Particularly whether LLM writing is fundamentally flawed, or if it's just distinctive and since it o…

I think it's somewhere in the process it was asked "what's the most compelling written text?" The answer was things from great speeches "Ask not what you ..." and so on.

And that really is great and compelling. However. Great and compelling is not what I'm looking for when my question is, "Systemd-networkd is pulling an ip address for a bonded interface that only exist as a 802.1Q trunk. How do I make it stop that?"

Re: The revolt of the reader

#223

Post by knollimar »

tudelo wrote: post #124
bananaflag wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You ever wonder why recent claude models speak in riddles? I dunno, maybe all those "rare" books? They may have been rare for a reason.

Rare like a steak not like a treasure.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#224

Post by hansvm »

vogelke wrote: post #138
masswerk wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quietly

Re: The revolt of the reader

#225

Post by mpalmer »

esjeon wrote: post #120
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 think Orwell did a great job there actually. Despite its bizarre look, the sentence is evocative and eloquent. It does make me get a clear mental image from the very first word. It leaves little room for roaming and guessing, as it firmly nails elements one by one, and, by the time I reach the end of the sentence, I get the full meaning almost immediately. This sentence is not randomly written; this is crafted with…

    TBH, it would take me hours, if not days, to write a sentence this much condensed and easy to understand.
This is ridiculous on its face. Did it take you 45 minutes to write your own comment?

Re: The revolt of the reader

#226

Post by kgarten »

I enjoyed the piece. Yet, what I don't understand is the author's endorsement of Pangram ... I don't like that without interacting with authors they just labeled texts (articles, novels etc.) as AI generated (they got a lot of publicity with it). Yet, given that the work is probabilistic and there's never 100 %, I find that irresponsible. I would have expected that they would have had at least the decency to tell the authors before they published their "accusations" publicly.

Also, there are relatively easy ways to prevent being recognized and I assume as now the use of LLMs changes our way of writing and speaking, it will get harder and harder for these detection tools. We will see more false positives (as for the future there will be no text 100 % authored by humans to train on).

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hrpQxfYvF6CBGWfJX/pangram-ai...

As English is my second language, I find the help of an LLM in editing text very useful. Yet, I agree with others that I don't want to read completely LLM generated texts.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#227

Post by mpalmer »

esjeon wrote: post #217
grey-area wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read some Orwell: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

Ah, I just read through it. That’s was a fun read. > This is a parody, but not a very gross one. … So, Orwell wrote the second sentence as a parody of the first sentence, using the modern English that he was criticizing in the essay. > … in the middle the concrete illustrations – race, battle, bread – dissolve into the vague phrase ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. … > … The whole tendency of modern pro…

    He tried to argue that the second one is worse, but, unfortunately, he successfully simulated one possible interpretation of the original

    All in all, Orwell simply failed to properly simulate what he was trying to criticize
If I was going to read "Orwell was wrong about English" anywhere, I guess it was always going to be HN.

The sheer pomposity of your remarks here is the biggest clue that you are not writing them yourself.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#229

Post by armchairhacker »

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…

That one starts with a glaring hallucination "he didn't understand, nobody understood, not then or now...". But the second part is IMO better than the Ecclasiast, which has outdated phrasing ("nor yet riches to men of understanding").

> When I look under the sun, it's not the swift who win races, nor the strong who win battles, nor the wise who earn bread, nor the smart who gain riches, nor the skilled who gain favor. Ultimately, it's the lucky; every contest has a degree of unpredictability and chance.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#230

Post by westcoast49 »

layer8 wrote: post #184
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 accuratel…

The deeper question is why we register it as bad.

It has the "same voice" you say. But that is also, kind of, the same as saying that there is no humanity behind it, no identity, no "mind".

For lexical articles, like text given as an answer to a single prompt or question, AI writing can be excellent. Because, there we do want an answer that represents the average or combination of all human knowledge about the topic. We're not looking for personality, or another mind.

When we read long-form text, on the other hand, what we are engaging in, is mind-transfer. We then expect there to be a recognizable mind at the other end. And this is, in my opinion, what typically falls apart when we ask an AI to write a complete long-form text.

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