151–160 of 211 posts
No mention of Claude/ChatGPT's favourite new word genuine and friends? They also like using real and honest when giving advice. Far as I can tell this is a new-ish change. > Honestly? We should address X first. It's a genuine issue and we've found a real bug here. Honorable mention: "no ". I guess this helps reassure adherence to the prompt? I see that one all the time in vibe coded PRs.
"And honestly? That's rare"
I find this repellent; why not, instead of trying to push unwelcome generated prose below the radar, stop trying to waste everyone's time? People don't object to these patterns because they hate lists of three; they object to them in this context because of what they signal about the content. If using AI to write is nothing to be ashamed of, then you shouldn't feel the need to hide it. If it is something to be ashame…
Improving prose to remove predictable patterns is the work of an editor. This process ensures the content is worth reading and respects the audience's time.
Comparing a software tool to "poisoning a well" turns a debate over style into a moral crisis that doesn’t fit the situation. If the information is accurate and the writing is clear, the water in the well is fine, regardless of the pump used to get it there. If the water tastes good, complaining about the plumbing is just a distraction.
AI writing sucks because it doesn't have a voice. It's not trying to say anything. Human writers are interesting because they offer a unique perspective from their lived experience. It also struggles to maintain deep coherence. This is all probably related. It might be very hard or impossible to have deep coherence without human-like goals, memory, or sense of self.
I don't think lived experience matters too much to me. In some sense, AI has very unique "lived" experience, which is what creates the voice it uses ("doesn't have a voice" seems like an impossibility to me by definition). I find AI very "human-esque", and its "self-reported" phenomenology is very entertaining to me, at least. I also think AI writing might feel trashy also because most human writing is trashy.
If you are serious about sharing written ideas, I suggest you avoid using this type of prompts at all cost. I've worked with LLMs to write on my blog and they are pretty good at first glance [0]. But do it a few time and you'll notice that those tropes are the least of your problems. Not only all your articles will sound the same, but you'll see that same voice on other blogs, news articles, white paper, etc. It's as…
If someone asks a model to "write a post about X," they are outsourcing the thinking, which results in the homogenized voice everyone is tired of.
I find this repellent; why not, instead of trying to push unwelcome generated prose below the radar, stop trying to waste everyone's time? People don't object to these patterns because they hate lists of three; they object to them in this context because of what they signal about the content. If using AI to write is nothing to be ashamed of, then you shouldn't feel the need to hide it. If it is something to be ashame…
Treating the act of refining text as a confession of shame misses the point of how writing works. Whether a draft begins as a model output, a dictation, or a scribbled note, the final responsibility belongs to the person who hits publish. Improving prose to remove predictable patterns is the work of an editor. This process ensures the content is worth reading and respects the audience's time. Comparing a software too…
AI writing sucks because it doesn't have a voice. It's not trying to say anything. Human writers are interesting because they offer a unique perspective from their lived experience. It also struggles to maintain deep coherence. This is all probably related. It might be very hard or impossible to have deep coherence without human-like goals, memory, or sense of self.
I don't think lived experience matters too much to me. In some sense, AI has very unique "lived" experience, which is what creates the voice it uses ("doesn't have a voice" seems like an impossibility to me by definition). I find AI very "human-esque", and its "self-reported" phenomenology is very entertaining to me, at least. I also think AI writing might feel trashy also because most human writing is trashy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Treating the act of refining text as a confession of shame misses the point of how writing works. Whether a draft begins as a model output, a dictation, or a scribbled note, the final responsibility belongs to the person who hits publish. Improving prose to remove predictable patterns is the work of an editor. This process ensures the content is worth reading and respects the audience's time. Comparing a software too…
Parents complaint is explicitly not about the style of the prose, use whatever you want to check your grammar and reduce redundancy. The complaint of poisoning the well is regarding content that is not intended to express anything at all, the old “why would I read what nobody bothered to write”
The "why would I read what nobody bothered to write" argument only applies to people who ask a bot to hallucinate an opinion from scratch. It doesn't apply to authors using the tool to clarify their own ideas.
I'll give some examples. Some will be from this list of "AI writing tropes" and some will be from prominent human-written (prior to 2020) sources. Guess which is which (answer at the bottom).
- "Let's explore this idea further."
- "workload creep"
- "Navigating the complex landscape of "
- "Let's delve into the details"
And I'm not going to get into how silly this is as a so-called LLM trope: "Every bullet point or list item starts with a bolded phrase or sentence." I remember reading paperbacks published before the first PC that used this style.
Fractal summaries is literally how composition is taught to students. Avoiding that style will make the writing more likely to sound less like a person wrote it.
I would suggest the author upgrade this to a modern version of Strunk & White and go on a mission to sell that. Call it Anti-Corpspeak or whatever. But don't pretend that these formulations only arrived in bulk in the last 2-3 years.
ANSWER KEY: these are all obviously prominent in text published before LLMs hit, as well as in the tropes doc. They are no more signs of LLM-generated text than is the practice of using nouns, verbs, and adjectives to convey ideas.
Can someone explain why LLM's write like this when most humans don't?
When people use LLMs to generate text, they often ask it to write like a professional. (I haven't tried, but I assume that if you ask an LLM to write like a Reddit troll it will use a different set of forms.)
When you ask an LLM to write like a professional writer, it will aim to sound like a professional writer. They do in fact, and in speech, use words like "delve" and "robust" because they spend years cultivating their vocabularies.
Professional writers are comfortable with punctuation marks and know the difference between the em dash and the en dash, and when to use each versus other marks. (The typical non-professional cannot manage to use the apostrophe, much less the marks that require judgement.)
And a lot of them end up writing business content at some point in their careers. Which leads to an interesting mash where you may get "leverage" used as a verb alongside some of the other pattern tropes.
Because business writing is its own universe. LinkedIn has been swimming in content that would be flagged as LLM-generated for at least 10 years, long before ChatGPT landed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think lived experience matters too much to me. In some sense, AI has very unique "lived" experience, which is what creates the voice it uses ("doesn't have a voice" seems like an impossibility to me by definition). I find AI very "human-esque", and its "self-reported" phenomenology is very entertaining to me, at least. I also think AI writing might feel trashy also because most human writing is trashy.
The LLM “voice” is the average of Reddit, and is therefore irredeemable.