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The revolt of the reader

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Re: The revolt of the reader

#291

Post by deanishe »

OroPla wrote: post #166
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…

I already notice LLM speech patterns in people that use them a whole lot. If you speak more than one language I recommend talking to LLMs in a language that you don't use when speaking to people.

How does someone end up knowing an extra language they don't need anymore?

Re: The revolt of the reader

#292

Post by demibabs »

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…

Oh my god, this is unbelievably accurate. Do you practice this?

Re: The revolt of the reader

#293

Post by jimmaswell »

rmunn wrote: post #290
jimmaswell wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repetition can make a good impact, but it's beyond excessive in this instance. Contrast with this poem: Non est salvatori salvator, neque defensori dominus, nec pater nec mater, nihil supernum. Translated: No rescuer hath the rescuer. No Lord hath the champion, no mother and no father, only nothingness above. - Eliezer Yudkowsky I find this one profound, and it's given me a lot to think about over the years - in situ…

I never had formal training in Latin, just what I've picked up. But grammatically, I would think the second line would translate to "No champion hath the lord", not "no lord hath the champion". Am I misunderstanding the grammatical suffixes here?

I'm admittedly no Latin expert, so I can't give an authoritative answer, but the translation was actually arrived at on a forum where the author asked for help, and I can see someone asked the same question: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qpp6ZdwHLNKj6PXRp/req-latin-...

Re: The revolt of the reader

#294

Post by esjeon »

mpalmer wrote: post #238
esjeon wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, my view is more like that he was too good at English to write bad English that he was criticizing. The examples he wrote are simply too sharp to fit well into his own criticisms. They are formulated so well that you can just “welp, my intention was different”. EDIT: This kinda reminds me of the musical theory of harmony. There are strict rules to follow in music composition, but when you go against every single r…

No, my view is more like that he was too good at English to write bad English that he was criticizing. Are you sure it's not more likely that we are all way worse at reading compared to the average mid-20th centry reader? The examples he wrote are simply too sharp to fit well into his own criticisms. So he's an overeducated dolt who thinks he's making a good point, and you - and no one else in the hundred years since…

> we are all way worse at reading compared to the average mid-20th centry reader?

I would say English has changed. Modern English speakers, especially those in academia and technology, prefers explicit styles over poetic and nuanced ones. There are a lot of factors at play (e.g. i18n, the internet, education, literature) but I’m too lazy to cover them here.

> you - and no one else in the hundred years since - found his fatal mistake?

First, the essay is from 1946 — 80 years ago. Second, why not? Often-times, a different perspective is all that takes to discovers something new in the old.

I think you’re trying to make an appeal to authority here — a logical fallacy. You’re basically saying I cannot criticize his essay because Orwell is a great writer.

Also, my point is neither fatal nor about mistake. Orwell’s examples still demonstrate his claims in a relative sense, all within the context of the essay. However, when you pull them out of the context and put them out in the wild, it’s going to be very difficult to say those are bad writings right away, because, compared to other bad writings, those examples are very solid and straightforward.

> This is not even a sentence.

It is informal, sure, but I intentionally made it colloquial with something called bare quotation, a style commonly used in informal conversation. I wanted to avoid being “an overeducated dolt” and send a friendly gesture too, oh, but you chose to put that on a pitchfork. Bravo, clap clap.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#295

Post by masswerk »

demibabs wrote: post #292
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…

Oh my god, this is unbelievably accurate. Do you practice this?

Of course. As we're told to prepare for the new times… :-)

On a more serious note, I think, if we're going to criticise the kind of distortions LLMs do to language and the construction of meaning, we should be able to come up with similar productions, just to demonstrate where and how this goes wrong.

(Much like the early Wittgenstein pointed out some constructs and declared, this is not a meaningful sentence, in fact, it's not a sentence, at all. And went on to define the limits for what a meaningful proposition may convey and what it can not, what we may expect and hope for in an expression and what we may not. In other words, is there even enough in the toolset of LLMs to construct meaning? Is traversing a semantic field in an apparently well-formed sentence already meaning or is it not?)

Re: The revolt of the reader

#296

Post by pjmlp »

The interesting part is that on one hand everything is proudly announcing how their Claude token's usage is going for coding projects, while at the same time complaining about reading AI articles.

Well, I would rather not review AI code as well.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#297

Post by woolion »

I wholly empathize with the posts. Recently my writing process has become much longer as asking for LLM polish leads to spending more time rewriting to clean up the LLM smell, so I'm unsure of what the future LLM-as-editor will be.

The big problem with the linked poll by Cynthia Dunlop is that it's all self-reported. The fact that the sample is not representative of the general population rather but might be closer of 'early adopter'/'power users' is interesting. But the idea that "I prefer authenticity to polished crowd-pleasing content" is something that people love to believe about themselves, but is hardly ever supported by facts.

As someone who spends a lot of time painting (maybe more time thinking about it than doing it, but still), it is quite evident that this is a fable. AI content is now everywhere in the streets -- just yesterday I went to a fair and food stands were divided into 2, the ones that hadn't updated their menu in 10 years or more, and the one that had generated it with ChatGPT. Museums are shameless at using AI images for their signs, and way too often even for their content. People do not prefer crappy human art, and those who self-report they do fail very hard at 'image Turing tests'.

I think the general point is true, but it does not give any timescale of when the dark age might end, when the tools will adapt etc.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#298

Post by crabbone »

yummybrainz wrote: post #206
crabbone wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree in that I don't know in what context Orwell wrote the quote above. Maybe it made more sense the way it fitted in that context.

Whenever this kind of discussion happens, I recall Andrey Platonov (a Russian writer, who was so weird in his rejection of the "decadent" parts of speech and sentence clauses that he'd never use passive voice or adverbs, would never put two adjectives side by side etc. that even Soviet censorship decided to ban him.) His works were added to the mandatory high-school reading list back around the collapse of the Soviet Union. I studied book publishing in college right around that time and had taken an elective in editing (the process of preparing a manuscript for publication, especially for the more technical fields, like encyclopedias or handbooks). My professor was a huge fan of Platonov, and, probably, forever spoiled for me whatever people enjoy when they read flamboyant or contorted prose like the one quoted above.

One thing that would send my professor into a fit of rage about that quote is that the real subject is people: it's talking about how people incorrectly rationalize the connection between effort and outcome. But, it's written in a way that, formally, the subject is... "the consideration", making it necessary for the reader to work back from the formal towards intended before they can figure out what the author was really trying to say.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#299

Post by owebmaster »

GrinningFool wrote: post #168
usernametaken29 wrote: post #75

For me it’s AI videos or music / narration that is beyond off putting. What’s worse now it seems people are writing their YouTube scripts with Claude et al. so at times even if it is a human creator you can clearly and immediately tell the words are not their own. To those creators I have but one message: IT SUCKS. I’d rather have you ramble incoherently in your mic then reading an LLM script and I will remove you fr…

I don't know that we can all tell. The number of times I've seen a blog post or article's writing complimented on this site when it was clearly LLM output has been surprising.

If the title is good that's enough. More often than not, the HN discussion is much more interesting.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#300

Post by voidhorse »

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…

When human beings write we do so with a particular perspective with an intention to communicate to a particular audience. Even the driest scientific writing is partially informed by the experiences of the researchers, no matter how hard they try to remove it. Human writing has a viewpoint.

LLM generated text always lacks these elements. It's always some bland, shapeless sequence of words pulled from the ether. I'm sure with time and effort you could combat this and give LLM text more of a human feeling by giving the LLM enough context about your communication, but that would take work, which in many cases would defeat the purpose of using the LLM instead of doing the writing yourself. And if you care that much about your communication with others (and you should!) you'd probably just find using LLMs frustrating to begin with.

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