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LLM Writing Tropes.md

tropes.fyi

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Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#161

Post by runako »

tiahura wrote: post #22

Many of these are standard fare in legal writing. Negative parallelism is a staple of briefs. "This case is not about free speech. It is about fraud." It does real work when you're contesting the other side's framing. Tricolons and anaphora are used as persuasion techniques for closing arguments and appellate briefs. Short punchy fragments help in persuasive briefs where judges are skimming. "The statute is unambiguo…

I can't believe people are still using the em dash as a flag. Packages like MS Word have converted hyphens to em dashes for over a decade without the user even trying to do so.

Honestly, the easiest way to verify if a person wrote something is to look for apostrophe use.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#162

Post by lametti »

It's unfortunate that "smart" quotes are listed. Most CMS worth their salt (and even static site generators and word processors) should be able to generate typographically appropriate and localized quotes for anything that isn't a quick comment.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#164

Post by cadamsdotcom »

Would be interesting to turn this into code (or an external model call) that can check any writing, so instead of just handing it to an LLM and hoping the LLM obeys, a set of checks has to pass before the LLM’s writing is even shown to a human..

Kind of like enforcing linting or pre-commit checks but for prose.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#165

Post by rogerrogerr »

mobrienv wrote: post #157
jazzyjackson wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 issue is that you're conflating the process of transcription with the act of expression. If I feed an LLM my own raw research notes and technical observations and use it to help structure those thoughts into a readable essay, I haven't "avoided writing". 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 au…

LLM-generated text that is a hallucinated-from-scratch opinion is practically indistinguishable from LLM-generated text that is rooted in your research notes.

I find putting the former into my brain abhorrent to such an extent that I am willing to forego reading the few instances of the latter. I'd much rather have your raw research notes and observations.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#166

Post by lelanthran »

matricks wrote: post #128
lelanthran wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That will change over time with training I would hope. There's precious little training material left that isn't generated by LLMs themselves. Consider this to be model collapse (i.e. we might be at the best SOTA possible with the approach we use today - any further training is going to degrade it).

> There's precious little training material left that isn't generated by LLMs themselves. Percentage-wise this is quite exaggerated. > Consider this to be model collapse (i.e. we might be at the best SOTA possible with the approach we use today - any further training is going to degrade it). You consider this above factor to lead to model collapse? You’ve only mentioned one factor here; this isn’t enough. I’m aware o…

> There's precious little training material left that isn't generated by LLMs themselves.

> Percentage-wise this is quite exaggerated.

How exaggerated?

a) The percentage is not static, but continuously increasing.

b) Even if it were static, you only need a few generations for even a small percentage to matter.

> You consider this above factor to lead to model collapse? You’ve only mentioned one factor here; this isn’t enough. I’m aware of the GIGO factor, yes. Still there are at least ~5 other key factors needed to make a halfway decent scaling prediction.

What are those other factors, and why isn't GIGO sufficient for model collapse?

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#167

Post by saint-evan »

>Disclaimer: Creation of this file was AI-assisted. If you thought I was going to write out a .md file for AI myself you must be mad. AI for AI. Human for Human.

'you must be mad'. Aggressively hilarious. Love it!

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#168

Post by Wilder7977 »

mobrienv wrote: post #152
Planktonne wrote: post #143

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…

This seems completely detached from reality.

For example it ignores the gazillion medium(-like) "articles" that are not much more than the output of a prompt. Here AI is not about style, is about content too. If you open such a post, maybe with the intent of learning anything, and you realize is AI slop, you might close it. Making it harder to recognize is poisoning the well in such cases.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#169

Post by RugnirViking »

ilitirit wrote: post #62

Can someone explain why LLM's write like this when most humans don't?

Generally, the more you write (and especially, the more you write long form content), the better your writing becomes. This also goes in reverse. Those who have great trouble writing, are unlikely to do much of it.

This alone can account for the seeming disparity. Though many people write poorly, they do not write much text for public consumption at all.

Re: LLM Writing Tropes.md

#170

Post by jug »

Lerc wrote: post #149
firefoxd wrote: post #146

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…

I have seen people suggest that the problem is that LLMs let you express any of your ideas, but the number of people with ideas worth expressing is limited. In a sense I think this is accurate, but not inevitable. I think there is a lack of creative thinking, but it has come from a world that doesn't value it and suppresses difference. There is a brilliant line in Treehouse of Horrors IV where Principle Skinner says…

I think it has more to do with LLM's being statistical models than human creativity lacking in the input. The creativity and millions of voices and tones may be there, but since these models tend to go for the most likely next words, polishing this away becomes a feature.

A text by a human mind may be seen as a jagged crystal with rough edges and character. Maybe not perfectly written but it's special.

An LLM takes a million of crystals and trims the most likely tokens to be chosen into what would rather appear as a smooth pebble; the common core of all crystals. And everyone using the LLM will get very similar pebbles because to the LLM, regardless who is speaking to it, it will provide the same most likely next tokens. It's not that creativity is lacking in the input, but the LLM picks the most commonly chosen words by all humans in given contexts.

For that to sound imaginative and great as you go, it would have to not only exist in the data, but be a common dominating voice among humans. But if it was, it wouldn't be seen as creative because it would be the new normal.

So I'm not sure how there's a good way out of this. You could push LLM temperature high so that it becomes more "creative" by picking less popular tokens as it writes, but this instead tend to make it unpredictable and picking words it shouldn't have. I mean, we are still dealing with statistical models here rather than brains and it's a rough tool for that job.

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