An excellent article that perfectly articulates the absurdity of focusing on style of writing over content.
It's Not Just X. It's Y
101–110 of 155 posts
Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y
#102"So, if we publicly shame people whose text looks like it might have been written by a machine – because it mimics the language used for human reasoning – and people stop writing in ways that they internalize as "AI writing" out of fear of false detection, it sends a signal that your language for reasoning must be policed, or you too could be held up to public scrutiny." This is honestly both terrifying and well arti…
This is honestly a very, very naive statement. We are social animals and we naturally gravitate towards devaluing and shaming certain styles of speech. We police speech already! It’s often unfortunate, but it’s not devoid of function. I, for one, am happy with shaming LLM speech. It’s never been so easy to detect lazy thinking.
Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans are just trying to do what Pangram is trying to do: guess what is AI, badly. The post argues against this: > In the end, shaming people for writing that gets flagged as AI can lead people to sidestep structures the model has learned from us: structures that are effective tools for argumentation. We take the tools of critical thinking out of the kit at the time we most need them.
This is my position with this stuff. It became part of the LLM loop because it’s used a lot- it’s used a lot because it’s effective. Now we’re going to stop using effective rhetorical methods because they imply AI, even if we know we’re not using AI? It reminds me of, as a teenager, asking my dad if he ever saw Led Zeppelin live. He hadn’t, because he didn’t really like fans of Led Zeppelin and didn’t want to be asso…
I don’t think it’s quite the same though. The way it constructs thoughts is very algorithmic. If you look at the Wikipedia ai text doc it’s a much better explanation and arguments for not immediately blaming someone for using ai.
Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's like knowing to stay away from a Github repo because it has a readme that's full of emoji bullet points.
I thought I was the only one that did this. Double stay away if at the end you find out it was "made with love"
I just look for the CLAUDE.md or related.
Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y
#105Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you read The Mac is Not a Typewriter in 1992—thus burning Option-Shift-hyphen into your typing patterns for life, along with a dogmatic love for serif body fonts—you're the real victim here.
There's something similar in Microsoft Word, Ctrl-Alt-Minus on the numpad.
I remember that being how you shut off turbo mode on your XT clone in DOS.
Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y
#107It's easy to focus in on particular linguistic tics, which will probably get smoothed away in future training. The underlying issue is that the LLM is trying to ape meaningful writing - which takes the reader from A to a surprising Z - without generally basing it on a meaningful insight.
Most of the common tells stem from that desire to signal the gap between what it's writing about now and how you previously thought things worked. And they really fall flat when it's writing about some milquetoast truism with all the edges sanded off.
Rather than have "Z" be self-evidently interesting, the LLM need to tell us that it's not "A". Except no one thought anything was "A" in the first place, and the "Z" is barely a "B" let alone a "Z".
Or things are "quietly X," implying that there is some secret knowledge that other people have.
Barring that, the LLM will signpost arguments, telling you how interesting things are. "This is the critical part..." before launching into another banal non-observation. Why have only "Section Header" when you can have "Section Header (another idea I had) - omg I just have so much to say about this". Maybe a list of weak ideas, presented in multiple ways. Bulleted with emojis. As a rule of three. As choppy sentences in a paragraph.
All of these follow the same pattern - trying to follow the FORM of having something interesting to say that differs from consensus understanding, without having the intelligence or boldness to actually midwife a new concept into the world.
Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y
#108Another bunch of dead give aways in code bases with READMEs is the repetitive: - "No X, No Y, No Z." pattern - "Here is X - it makes Y" The worst and most obvious one is the constant over use of emoji ticks and crosses.
/* This function doesn't return an int. It doesn't return a float. It doesn't return a char. It doesn't ret-- */
I've seen AI-generated API documentation do this: "Good for X and Y. Do NOT use for Z - use foo instead."
A human writer would add that sparingly, for cases where there might be some ambiguity. But the bot added that to basically every single API endpoint.
Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y
#109"So, if we publicly shame people whose text looks like it might have been written by a machine – because it mimics the language used for human reasoning – and people stop writing in ways that they internalize as "AI writing" out of fear of false detection, it sends a signal that your language for reasoning must be policed, or you too could be held up to public scrutiny." This is honestly both terrifying and well arti…
This is honestly a very, very naive statement. We are social animals and we naturally gravitate towards devaluing and shaming certain styles of speech. We police speech already! It’s often unfortunate, but it’s not devoid of function. I, for one, am happy with shaming LLM speech. It’s never been so easy to detect lazy thinking.
What do you think about TFA and its contention that perfectly normal language is being targeted by the AI witch-hunt?
I personally avoid the em dash, but it has been used in writing for a long, long time.
Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y
#110It's easy to focus in on particular linguistic tics, which will probably get smoothed away in future training. The underlying issue is that the LLM is trying to ape meaningful writing - which takes the reader from A to a surprising Z - without generally basing it on a meaningful insight. Most of the common tells stem from that desire to signal the gap between what it's writing about now and how you previously thought…
AI output reads like homepage marketing content (e.g. the text that fades in when you scroll down an apple product page) expanded to fill some context window size (the paragraphs tend to be about the same size).
What you get is vacuous, choppy, wordy, and hyperbolic. I have found that adding secondary passes for tone and style improve the readability dramatically.