271–280 of 313 posts
I dont care about llm use on any ideological grounds, or believe its a voiding of the social contract like the author of this piece does. I think its just a tool. However a lot of people use the tool really badly.
Seems like it's a cat and mouse game that won't end anytime soon. LLMs are constantly getting better at writing, so at some point people won't be able to tell reliably tell the difference anymore. I wouldn't laude Pangram so highly at this point, since we're not at the final round yet.
I'm not absolutely opposed to AI in principle. If it writes things worth reading, I'm not opposed to reading them. The problem is when it writes things that have the appearance of making sense but actually don't, when it writes what could be better put in 10% of the words, when it writes with no coherent logic. I don't have the time or the mental energy to wade through that on the faint chance that there might be a g…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> " My revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text. " I saw a comment on HN that that was roughly "re: ChatGPT, when I write one sentence and I get back three screens of lecture, I don't consider that a 'chat'". I consider that comment often when prompting Claude and hoping for a two line response and getting an "it's important to note that ". At some point it may as well be the teacher in a Char…
Telling LLMs to be concise works. > Reword this concisely: > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. > Ultra-concise: Talent and effort don't guarantee success; luck and timing happen to everyone. > Punchy: The best…
This is the difference between writing to convince a broad audience and writing to explain a point. AI can summarize well but until we can contextualize a richer framework for human comprehension, LLMs will struggle to resonate.
Disclaimer: I do not like to read LLM-generated text any more than anyone else. IMHO a big problem with Pangram in particular is that they market it as a reliable tool that can be used to catch students cheating. This can obviously have disastrous effects on young lives, because it is not as reliable as they suggest. Per their own benchmarks, they do not achieve 100% accuracy even on text that is published on the Int…
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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…
> 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.
> Today, legitimate businesses are very careful about how they use bulk e-mail I don’t think this is remotely true. Sure, they’re legally obliged to let you unsubscribe, and sure, it’s not dick pills, but every US company will immediately send you a newsletter when you purchase something, review requests and, if they/you use Shop for checkout, expect an abandoned cart reminder. PR pieces and software companies don’t…
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…
No it isn't. It trades concrete imagery for empty abstractions which could encompass just about anything and are basically meaningless.
If you think this is good writing, you need a serious detox from corporate America.
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When I read the Orwell's version, I immediately had the same feeling I had when reading mathematical proofs. I hate so much to hunt the preceding text for anaphora resolution... It's just such a bad and pretentious way of writing. It's hostile to the reader with the side of flaunting author's superiority. It's like having to sit through a party with acclaimed academics: every single one is so full of themselves, they…
I agree that it's not great style for just conveying information clearly and plainly (e.g I'd hate to read documentation written like this) but I'd argue that here, the medium is part of the message. It's supposed to sound dry and depressing and somewhat sterile. > It's hostile to the reader with the side of flaunting author's superiority. I think if someone deliberately obfuscates meaning to sound fancier when the p…
Orwell is a master precisely because he understood language deeply enough to be able to produce a monstrosity on both the level of content (undue abstraction) and structure (winding, breathless syntax).
Disclaimer: I do not like to read LLM-generated text any more than anyone else. IMHO a big problem with Pangram in particular is that they market it as a reliable tool that can be used to catch students cheating. This can obviously have disastrous effects on young lives, because it is not as reliable as they suggest. Per their own benchmarks, they do not achieve 100% accuracy even on text that is published on the Int…
Now, the US criminal system is not a great yardstick for justice. But it goes to show you Pangram is really good evidence that something was LLM generated. It can be an amazing tool for enforcing AI policies in schools, and there ought to be ways to use it with caveats for the rare but inevitable false positives (appeals, etc).
[0]: see page 15 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.27183 [1]: see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4034186/