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The revolt of the reader

bcantrill.dtrace.org

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Re: The revolt of the reader

#111

Post by thinkingemote »

dyauspitr wrote: post #30

This meme of trying to make it sound like LLM text is so obvious is a joke. It’s literally not, you can tell it to write in literally any style and given just a bit of an example of a person’s writing style, frontier models copy it completely and effectively. This argument can probably be leveled at vanilla raw output from an LLM, but even the slightest attempt at obfuscation bears solid fruit.

You can adapt the output if you care to do so. Almost all do not care to do so.

They just don't care to put the slightest attempt because they have a blindness to the problem. They are not doing it to intentionally mislead people.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#112

Post by lelanthran »

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…

The problem is not the LLM prose appearing everywhere, it's the legions of AI-boosters appearing in every thread attacking anyone who complains.

Apparently, even though they want to spew AI prose everywhere, they want it read by humans, not by other bots, so when a few holdout places are insisting that prose be human authored they fight very hard against the rule.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#113

Post by conmod278 »

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.

https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2022/07/results-comput...

Schwitzgebel, Strasser, and Crosby fine-tuned GPT-3 on Dennett's corpus and asked whether readers could pick Dennett's real answers to ten philosophical questions from four machine-generated alternatives, with no cherry-picking beyond mechanical length filters. Even Dennett experts averaged only 5.1 out of 10 (well below the 80% the authors predicted), blog readers got 4.8, and lay participants barely beat chance — though experts did rate Dennett's answers as more Dennett-like overall. Schwitzgebel stresses this isn't a Turing test (one-shot text is far easier to fake than extended interaction), but argues it foreshadows a future where machine outputs are humanlike enough that their moral status becomes genuinely uncertain, motivating his "Design Policy of the Excluded Middle": build machines that clearly lack moral status or clearly have it, not ambiguous ones in between.

My own take is : don't focus on the symbols on paper. focus on the facts about the world it is talking about. Isn't objectivity all about the facts? In future AI will have all the memory about what I have already read and it will just furnish the delta new information in the blog/writing so that I don't spend time on refreshing what I already know.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#114

Post by quietbritishjim »

lelanthran wrote: post #112
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…

The problem is not the LLM prose appearing everywhere, it's the legions of AI-boosters appearing in every thread attacking anyone who complains. Apparently, even though they want to spew AI prose everywhere, they want it read by humans, not by other bots, so when a few holdout places are insisting that prose be human authored they fight very hard against the rule.

I don't think I've ever seen someone on HN say that. Many people would say that AI makes them more productive at coding, not that the output is nice to read.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#115

Post by bananaflag »

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…

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

Re: The revolt of the reader

#116

Post by bcantrill »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #99

I did some experiments with very simple AI detection. You can get a very long way with simple ngram probabilities. https://meatbag.atomic14.com/ https://www.atomic14.com/2026/08/18/detecting-claude-with-le... It’s very hard to make reliable though. Different models have different characteristics and you can prompt your way out of being detected.

Interesting! Amusingly, if I feed that detector this blog post, it identifies it as confidently robot (97 out of 100 test passages). And running through my last five blog entries, they are all over the map, with three deemed at least "likely robot." Looking further back in time (and taking a somewhat random example), a blog entry from 2008, "Concurrency's Shysters"[0], is also deemed as similarly confidently robot (also 97 out of 100); do you expect this high a false positive rate?

[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2008/11/03/concurrencys-shyster...

Re: The revolt of the reader

#117

Post by jimmaswell »

pavinjoseph wrote: post #70
tdeck wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one that finds the second one much easier to parse?

I had to reread the first one but I wanted to read it! The second one was understood on the first scan but was a chore to read. Does that make sense?

The second one was very clear and to the point. Parsing it was rewarded with instant understanding and I enjoyed the word choice. The first one was just annoying; I could tell it was just listing a bunch of pointless analogies to try to make its point sound more grandiose so I immediately started skimming, and didn't come away feeling like it meant much other than "we all die in the end". The second one made an actual point and was the one that made me want to read it. The first one was the chore for me.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#118

Post by quite-sfwd »

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…

This. And the structure as well, like the repetition of the same points over and over.

I'm not entirely against using AI to help content creators improve their narrative, like finding common storytelling mistakes. But that's very different than using yourself as merely an avatar for LLM content.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#119

Post by schubidubiduba »

bananaflag wrote: post #115
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…

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

They are certainly trying to

Re: The revolt of the reader

#120

Post by esjeon »

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 intention. TBH, it would take me hours, if not days, to write a sentence this much condensed and easy to understand. I seriously like it.

Perhaps, this is more about context -- which style to use in which situation. I'm only guessing here, but, since Orwell is offering an interpretation, he probably chose to be more clinical. He probably had a point to make and didn't want to risk vagueness up-front.

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