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The revolt of the reader

bcantrill.dtrace.org

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Re: The revolt of the reader

#121

Post by jimmaswell »

Kerrick wrote: post #93
Barbing wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second helped explain the first, appreciated having both (but I’m no genius or nothin’).

Other translations keep Zinsser's preferred lack of fuzz but avoid using "is ... to" for possession. For example, the Lexham English Bible: > I looked again and saw under the sun that the race does not belong to the swift, the battle does not belong to the mighty, food does not belong to the wise, wealth does not belong to the intelligent, and success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all o…

This could be shortened to "success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all" with no meaning lost. It's self-indulgent fluff. Meanwhile, Orwell's actually adds more to the statement - much better signal to noise.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#122

Post by tudelo »

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…

Well, I can tell what sort of angle you most enjoy. Anyways -- I think there is GOOD writing and BAD writing, but only subjectively. So if you enjoy it, power to you. It's certainly not random, but it is the sort of verbosity that turns off 99 percent of the people that would read it given a comparison. I find the former rather eloquent.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#123

Post by iamflimflam1 »

bcantrill wrote: post #116
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 (a…

It really depends - it’s trained on fairly limited data (things I could generate from Claude opus 5 and ChatGPT (pre-Astra).

It’s now quite hard to get non AI training data…

Re: The revolt of the reader

#124

Post by tudelo »

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?

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.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#125

Post by tudelo »

jimmaswell wrote: post #121
Kerrick wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other translations keep Zinsser's preferred lack of fuzz but avoid using "is ... to" for possession. For example, the Lexham English Bible: > I looked again and saw under the sun that the race does not belong to the swift, the battle does not belong to the mighty, food does not belong to the wise, wealth does not belong to the intelligent, and success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all o…

This could be shortened to "success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all" with no meaning lost. It's self-indulgent fluff. Meanwhile, Orwell's actually adds more to the statement - much better signal to noise.

Writing is fluff. What do you want, a list of bullet points? There would be no books. Maybe you have a career in writing 2 page books?

Re: The revolt of the reader

#126

Post by westcoast49 »

> 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 manner. The problem, when we read a long form piece by an author, is that we imagine that there’s another “mind” at the other side. We imagine that we are following the reasoning within the mind of a fellow human being, the writer. There’s an implied sort of “intimacy” to it. And the breach is when we are fooled into thinking that we are engaged in human communication, only to discover that there is a machine on the other side.

When we ask questions to an AI, this problem does not exist, because we are fully aware that the entity on the other side is not a human being.

Yet there is no doubt that the reply from an AI can contain information that is very much worthy of our time, and of our “labor” and effort to understand it.

So I think this ultimately will be about disclosure. As long as we are being made aware of the percentage of AI use in a text, explicitly or implicitly, I think we will actually grow to accept it.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#127

Post by siscia »

It is not clear to me what the author is SPECIFICALLY against.

Only saying "LLM writing" is honestly lazy writing. Specifically what?

I get the glaring cases, I get the idea that if the prose is generated then maybe also the idea, I get the feeling when reading a complete LLM authored piece.

But that doesn't help the piece, because - beside those glaring cases - most writing today is a mix between authors ideas and LLM prose.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#128

Post by eru »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #114
lelanthran wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would say that AI prose is often still a bit iffy, but I would disagree with anyone who would want to argue that this is any indication that AI prose will always be bad in the future.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#129

Post by lelanthran »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #114
lelanthran wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I don't think I've ever seen someone on HN say that.

A 5m search got me the following:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49410941

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411042

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49059571

This thread, in particular, stands out - reader makes the claim that Pangram found that the US constitution was 100% AI generated, when others tried they found 0% (or close to it) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48378191

Re: The revolt of the reader

#130

Post by tdeck »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #106
tdeck wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The first is of course from the King James Bible which for centuries was essentially a standard that all English speaking peoples aspired to. If you find that version difficult I would expect much literary writing before the 1940s also seems difficult. This is just to say I recommend reading the King James even if you are an atheist, as I am. I also have to say that the first strikes me as being written by someone th…

In the context of newly written work in the modern era, I would argue it's best to use grammatical constructions that are used in modern 20th/21st century English, at least most of the time. Those who wrote the KJV were trying to be expressive but the whole point was to do so in language that ordinary people would be familiar with.

> the first strikes me as being written by someone that might be smarter than I am

This is why Joseph Smith tried to imitate the language of the King James Bible in the Book of Mormon, albeit not very successfully.

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