> It robs me of getting to know you. Ugh, you are not entitled to get to know me. There is a threshold between all that I share with the world and the rest of me. Hell, not every person gets the same picture , and that's deliberate and healthy --my customers don't get to know what my proctologist knows. My mother doesn't get to know what my wife knows. You don't get to know all of me, because I don't trust you . This…
> Ugh, you are not entitled to get to know me. If your comment is at all indicative of how you are in real life, I really don't think you have to worry about people wanting to get to know you.
Allow me to get to know you, mistakes and all
141–150 of 172 posts
Re: Allow me to get to know you, mistakes and all
#142I find that AI is very useful for getting me past the 'blank page' writing block, but inevitably it writes in ways I would never, and so I end up editing it heavily. But, for me, a boy with ADHD, editing something is infinitely easier than writing it from scratch . I think this is the opposite of how most people tend to use LLMs, and I actually think my way is the "better" way. My issue has never been the act of writ…
And I’m thankful - I’d really hate to rely on something else to get me going…
Re: Allow me to get to know you, mistakes and all
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is already studies that confirm your fear, I think. They found that mainstream language is changing due to AI. Certain words get used proportionally more than before, etc. Also, if you check out some reddits, it's crazy how generic many things are. Because of AI. I do agree wholeheartedly that we need to read more. And also, that AI can also be a very cool tool for giving some people more power in a way.
The em dash in particular is being used a lot more thanks to AI. It’s become one of those tells where people start to ask if it’s AI or not.
Like... That. Rhetorical ellipsis. Like you see in a 12 year old's fanfic.
I know one of the AIs had a style change. I think Grok. But it started using drama dots so now they are everywhere.
And unlike the em dash, _nobody_ notices. _Nobody_ sees it.
Re: Allow me to get to know you, mistakes and all
#144AI writing sucks. The punchy words, the hyperbole, the monotony and pervasiveness are all exhausting. But I can’t deny there’s one upside. People who grew up speaking and living in other languages, people whose english is poor, finally have a level playground. It’s a great equaliser of our english writing privilege. The thing that worries me most is that it's going to redefine the way we write. We absorb language. To…
Re: Allow me to get to know you, mistakes and all
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
The em dash in particular is being used a lot more thanks to AI. It’s become one of those tells where people start to ask if it’s AI or not.
The em dash is famous but I've noticed since (I think) December every hustler suddenly at once started using drama dots. Like... That. Rhetorical ellipsis. Like you see in a 12 year old's fanfic. I know one of the AIs had a style change. I think Grok. But it started using drama dots so now they are everywhere. And unlike the em dash, _nobody_ notices. _Nobody_ sees it.
I just hope the LLMs don’t come for parenthesis for aside comments.
Re: Allow me to get to know you, mistakes and all
#146AI writing sucks. The punchy words, the hyperbole, the monotony and pervasiveness are all exhausting. But I can’t deny there’s one upside. People who grew up speaking and living in other languages, people whose english is poor, finally have a level playground. It’s a great equaliser of our english writing privilege. The thing that worries me most is that it's going to redefine the way we write. We absorb language. To…
It's full of fluff. Analogies that sound like something a 12 year old would make, but make no sense when you stop to think about them.
It's full of baloney that the author didn't even intend to communicate.
That's where the "soulless" part comes from. There's no consistent mind behind the writing with opinions of its own, formulated into one understandable framework it's trying to convey. It's just a mishmash of BS that only superficially resembles it, made to trick us.
Re: Allow me to get to know you, mistakes and all
#147I totally agreed with you. I'm French (nobody is perfect ^^), I'm not so fluent in english and I'm dyslexic, that why I often write my message, then I ask to Claude to translate it in english because i'm feeling I will lose the credibility of my message if there is too much mistake... But you're right, so this message is not translated by LLM :D
I'm curious, why would you use an LLM to translate French to English? Why not use a dedicated translator such as DeepL, which will not only save you tokens/energy, but will also be much closer to your personal phrasing?
Re: Allow me to get to know you, mistakes and all
#148And I use it for myself and what I send to others is 99% written by me.
For people who treat writing, especially business writing as a craft to communicate ideas, seeing AI slop is just like nails on chalk board.
I've copies of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style and https://workingbackwards.com/ and I've been trying to shift us from a slides-first culture or a quick-email-first culture to a serious writing-first culture.
I genuinely care about this stuff. Thoughtlessly blurting out pages and pages of vanilla unedited LLM output seems disrespectful to the reader.
As writer you're saying: I didn't care enough to craft my message personally, here read this generated content I haven't even seriously edited.
And for the reader it's saying the same: This guy sent me a document to read, I need to sift through it to figure out if there's any actual merit or novel ideas or actional information here.
The asymmetry of effort is disrespectful IMO.
Re: Allow me to get to know you, mistakes and all
#149Maybe we'll use AI as a personal PR department. Companies want to present a unified, curated experience to their customers. People do too: we dress up sometimes; we swear differently depending on the audience; we write emails differently for work vs. friends. The only reason people don't use PR departments is because it's too expensive (you can bet that Bill Gates uses a PR department to look over his annual letters). Does that mean that people will all sound like companies? Of course not! Different companies sound different. How Monster Beverage Corporation talks is different from how Boeing talks.
Maybe we'll use AI to eliminate all boring person-to-person coordination. Instead of sending emails saying, "Where do you want to eat on Saturday?" we'll just have our AIs coordinate. It will be like having an executive assistant who makes sure everything goes smoothly.
Maybe we'll use AI to expand or deepen our relationships. There are many friends that I wish I were more in touch with. I don't need to have a heart-to-heart with them every week, but I would love to know how they're doing this week. If they emailed me every week just to tell me things like, "Gargoyle's in David Square closed down and I'm bummed." or "My kid saw a sunrise for the first time and he thought it was lame." I would read that. Imagine that once a week, an AI prompted me with what to send and I said things like, "Tell everyone about us going to beach and the new restaurant we went to. Tell close family/friends about how John is struggling in school and ask for advice." Or maybe, throughout the week, I tell the AI things like, "Send the best pictures of our beach trip to friends and family on the next update."
Okay, maybe you think all three of these ideas are stupid. You're probably right. But I thought Twitch (watching people play video games) was a stupid idea too. The bottom line is that we don't know how people will end up using AI and prematurely dismissing any specific use case smacks of unwarranted confidence, IMHO.
Re: Allow me to get to know you, mistakes and all
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
The em dash in particular is being used a lot more thanks to AI. It’s become one of those tells where people start to ask if it’s AI or not.
The em dash is famous but I've noticed since (I think) December every hustler suddenly at once started using drama dots. Like... That. Rhetorical ellipsis. Like you see in a 12 year old's fanfic. I know one of the AIs had a style change. I think Grok. But it started using drama dots so now they are everywhere. And unlike the em dash, _nobody_ notices. _Nobody_ sees it.