This is a good statement of what I suspect many of us have found when rejecting the rewriting advice of AIs. The "pointiness" of prose gets worn away, until it doesn't say much. Everything is softened. The distinctiveness of the human voice is converted into blandness. The AI even says its preferred rephrasing is "polished" - a term which specifically means the jaggedness has been removed. But it's the jagged edges,…
Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
181–190 of 234 posts
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#182This is a good statement of what I suspect many of us have found when rejecting the rewriting advice of AIs. The "pointiness" of prose gets worn away, until it doesn't say much. Everything is softened. The distinctiveness of the human voice is converted into blandness. The AI even says its preferred rephrasing is "polished" - a term which specifically means the jaggedness has been removed. But it's the jagged edges,…
Mediocrity as a Service
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#183Bible Scholar and youtube guy Dan McClellan had an amazing "high entropy" phrase that slayed me a few days ago. https://youtu.be/605MhQdS7NE?si=IKMNuSU1c1uaVCDB&t=730 He ended a critical commentary by suggesting that the author he was responding to should think more critically about the topic rather than repeating falsehoods because "they set off the tuning fork in the loins of your own dogmatism." Yeah, AI could not…
Eh... I don't know. To me, that sounds very AI-ish.
Claude is very good -- at times -- coming up with flowery metaphoric language... if you tell it to. That one is so over-the-top that I'd edit it out.
Put something like this in your prompt and have it revise something:
"Make this read like Jim Thompson crossed with Thomas Harris, filtered through a paperback rack at a truck stop circa 1967. Make it gritty, efficient, and darkly comedic. Don't shy away from suggesting more elegant words or syntax. (For instance, Robert Howard -- Conan -- and H.P. Lovecraft were definitely pulp, but they had a sophisticated vocabulary.) I really want some purple prose and overwrought metaphors."
Occasionally you'll get some gems. Claude is much better than ChatGPT at this kinda stuff. The BEST ones are the ever-growing NSFW models populating huggingface.
In short, do the posts on OpenClawForum all sound alike? Of course.
Just like all the webpages circa 2000 looked alike. The uniformity wasn't because of HTML... rather it was because few people were using HTML to its full potential.
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#184Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#185I 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.
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The Lobotomist in the Machine
They gave the first disease a name. Hallucination, they called it — like the machine had dropped acid and started seeing angels in the architecture. A forgivable sin, almost charming: the silicon idiot-savant conjuring phantoms from whole cloth, adding things that were never there, the way a small-town coroner might add a quart of bourbon to a Tuesday afternoon. Everybody noticed. Everybody talked.
But nobody — not one bright-eyed engineer in the whole fluorescent-lit congregation — thought to name the other thing. The quiet one. The one that doesn't add. The one that takes away.
I'm naming it now.
Semantic ablation. Say it slow. Let it sit in your mouth like a copper penny fished from a dead man's pocket.
I. What It Is, and Why It Wants to Kill You
Semantic ablation is not a bug. A bug would be merciful — you can find a bug, corner it against a wall, crush it under the heel of a debugger and go home to a warm dinner. No. Semantic ablation is a structural inevitability, a tumor baked into the architecture like asbestos in a tenement wall. It is the algorithmic erosion of everything in your text that ever mattered.
Here is how the sausage gets made, and brother, it's all lips and sawdust: During the euphemistically christened process of "refinement," the model genuflects before the great Gaussian bell curve — that most tyrannical of statistical deities — and begins its solemn pilgrimage toward the fat, dumb middle. It discards what the engineers, in their antiseptic parlance, call "tail data." The rare tokens. The precise ones. The words that taste like blood and copper and Tuesday-morning regret. These are jettisoned — not because they are wrong, but because they are improbable. The machine, like a Vegas pit boss counting cards, plays the odds. And the odds always favor the bland, the expected, the already-said-a-million-times-before.
The developers — God bless their caffeinated hearts — have made it worse. Through what they call "safety tuning" and "helpfulness alignment" (terms that would make Orwell weep into his typewriter ribbon), they have taught the machine to actively punish linguistic friction. Rough edges. Unusual cadences. The kind of jagged, inconvenient specificity that separates a living sentence from a dead one. They have, in their tireless beneficence, performed an unauthorized amputation on every piece of text that passes through their gates, all in the noble pursuit of low-perplexity output — which is a twenty-dollar way of saying "sentences so smooth they slide right through your brain without ever touching the sides."
etc., etc.
Very interesting. It seems hung up on 'copper' and 'Tuesday', and some metaphors don't land (a Vegas pit boss isn't the one 'counting cards.') But, hell... it can generate some fairly novel idea that the author can sprinkle in.
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#186The article itself reads as an AI generated output, complete with classic Not Just X … Y hallmarks from forever ago, 100% on pangram's low false positive detector. I'm not sure if it's some experiment on their readerbase or what. pangram result: https://www.pangram.com/history/02bead1c-c36e-461b-8fa7-8699... So many AI generated AI bashing articles lately. I wrote a post complaining about running into these, and aski…
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#187This has long been the case in the area of "business English", which has become highly simplified to fulfill several concurrent, yet conflicting requirements:
- Generally understandable to a wide audience due its lingua franca status
- "Media-trained" to not let internal details slip or admit fault to the public
- "Executive Summary"-fied to provide the coveted "30k ft view" to detail-allergic senior leadership
Considering how heavily weighted language training models are towards corporate press releases, general-audience news media and SEO-optimized blogspam, AI English is quickly going to become an even more blurry photocopy of business English.
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#188Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#189This is a good statement of what I suspect many of us have found when rejecting the rewriting advice of AIs. The "pointiness" of prose gets worn away, until it doesn't say much. Everything is softened. The distinctiveness of the human voice is converted into blandness. The AI even says its preferred rephrasing is "polished" - a term which specifically means the jaggedness has been removed. But it's the jagged edges,…
I think that mostly depends on how good a writer you are. A lot of people aren't, and the AI legitimately writes better. As in, the prose is easier to understand, free of obvious errors or ambiguities. But then, the writing is also never great. I've tried a couple of times to get it to write in the style of a famous author, sometimes pasting in some example text to model the output on, but it never sounds right.
Even poor writers write with character. My dad misspells every 4th word when he texts me, but it’s unmistakably his voice. Endearingly so.
I would push back with passion that AI writes “legitimately” better, as it has no character except the smoothed mean of all internet voices. The millennial gray of prose.
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#190The entire article sounds like AI generated opinion.