Race to the middle really sums up how I feel about AI.
[dead]
Well yeah, when you race to the middle, the middle becomes the top, and then you've got to go find the new middle.
Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
141–150 of 234 posts
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#142The "AI voice" is everywhere now. I see it on recent blog posts, on news articles, obituaries, YT channels. Sometimes mixed with voice impersonation of famous physicists like Feynman or Susskind. I find it genuinely soul-crushing and even depressing, but I may be over sensitive to it as most readers don't seem to notice.
I find it extremely difficult to focus on any piece of writing the moment I see the patterns. Can’t tell if it’s an attitude problem I need to get over or if it’s just that all AI writing really is that bad.
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#143the word choice here is so obtuse as to trigger my radar for "is this some kind of parody where this itself was AI generated". it appears to be entirely serious, which is disappointing, it could have been high art. the words TFA is looking for is mode collapse https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t9svvNPNmFf5Qa3TA/mysteries-... and the author could herself learn to write more clearly.
It almost certainly is AI generated. It reads like it is, pangram thinks it is, https://www.pangram.com/history/02bead1c-c36e-461b-8fa7-8699... and pangram's unlikely to give false positives https://www.pangram.com/blog/third-party-pangram-evals
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#144[flagged]
I’m not convinced removing RLHF would really make the probabilities generator give us distributions that can diverge from the mean while remaining useful.
In other words, this might not a problem that can be overcome in LLMs alone.
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#145I'd like to see some concrete examples that illustrate this - as it stands this feels like an opinion piece that doesn't attempt to back up its claims. (Not necessarily disagreeing with those claims, but I'd like to see a more robust exploration of them.)
I just sent TFA to a colleague of mine who was experimenting with llm's for auto-correcting human-written text, since she noticed the same phenomenon where it would correct not only mistakes, but slightly nudge words towards more common synonyms. It would often lose important nuances, so "shun" would be corrected to "avoid", and "divulge" would become "disclose" etc.
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#146I wonder how much of it could be prompted away. For example the anthropic Frontend Design skill instructs: "Typography: Choose fonts that are beautiful, unique, and interesting. Avoid generic fonts like Arial and Inter; opt instead for distinctive choices that elevate the frontend's aesthetics; unexpected, characterful font choices. Pair a distinctive display font with a refined body font." Or "NEVER use generic AI-g…
Many have tried, it does not work. Regression to the mean always sets in.
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a colleague that recently self-published a book. I can easily tell which parts were LLM driven and which parts represent his own voice. Just like you can tell who's in the next stall in the bathroom at work after hearing just a grunt and a fart. And THAT is a sentence an LLM would not write.
> And THAT is a sentence an LLM would not write. Really? Here's some alternatives. Some are clunky. But, some aren't. …just like you can tell whose pubes those are on the shared bar of soap without launching a formal investigation. …just like you can tell who just wanked in the shared bathroom by the specific guilt radiating off them when they finally emerge. …just like you can tell which of your mates just shitted a…
[dead]
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find most people can write way better than AI, they simply don’t put in the effort. Which is the real issue, we’re flooding channels not designed for such low effort submissions. AI slop is just SPAM in a different context.
You may be in a bubble of smart, educated people. Either way, one of the key ways to "put in the effort" is practice . People who haven't practiced often don't write well even if they're trying hard in the moment. Not even in terms of beautiful writing, just pure comprehensibility.
I may be in a bubble of smart people, but IMO AI consistently far worse than many high school works I’ve read in terms of actual substance and coherent structure.
Of course I’ve had arguments where people praise AI output then I’ve literally pointed out dozens of mistakes and they just kind of shrug saying it’s not important. So I acknowledge people judge writing very differently than I do. It just feels weird when I’d give something a 15% and someone else would happily slap on a B+.
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#149[flagged]
I wonder if you can use lower quality models (or some other non-llm related process) to inject more "noise" into the text in between stages. Of course it wouldn't help retain uniqueness from the original source text, just add more in between.
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#150Nonsense. I’ve written bland prose for a story and AI made it much better by revising it with a prompt such as this: “Make the vocabulary and grammar more sophisticated and add in interesting metaphors. Rewrite it in the style of a successful literary author.” Etc.
[dead]
So what even if that is true? You confirmed that it improved upon what he could manually produce, which is still a win. It doesn't always make sense to pay $20000 to a professional author to turn it into a masterpiece.