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Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring

theregister.com

21–30 of 234 posts

Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring

#21
post #8

I wonder why AI labs have not worked on improving the quality of the text outputs. Is this as the author claims a property of the LLMs themselves? Or is there simply not much incentive to create the best writing LLM?

The argument is that the best writing is the unexpected, while an LLM's function is to deliver the expected next token.

Yeah, that makes banana.

Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring

#23
Bible 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 come up with that phrase.

Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring

#24
post #5

Could we invert a sign somewhere and get the opposite effect? (Obviously a different question from "is an AI lab willing to release that publicly” ;)

It's a hard problem and so far not a profitable one (I hope the solution will emerge as a byproduct of another innovation)

https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/778041178124926976/hy...

https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/792464928029163520/th...

Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring

#26
post #7
post #3

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,…

I'm sure this can be corrected by AI companies.

[flagged]

Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring

#27
post #8

I wonder why AI labs have not worked on improving the quality of the text outputs. Is this as the author claims a property of the LLMs themselves? Or is there simply not much incentive to create the best writing LLM?

I mean there's tons of better-writing tools that use AI like Grammarly etc. For actual general-purpose LLMs, I don't think there's much incentive in making it write "better" in the artistic sense of the world... if the idea is to make the model good at tasks in general and communicate via language, that language should sound generic and boring. If it's too artistic or poetic or novel-like, the communication would app…

I mean, no one is asking for artistic writing, just not some obvious AI slop. The fact that we all can now easily determine that some text has been written / edited by AI is already an issue. No amount of prompting can help.

Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring

#28
Nonsense. 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.

Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring

#29
post #8

I wonder why AI labs have not worked on improving the quality of the text outputs. Is this as the author claims a property of the LLMs themselves? Or is there simply not much incentive to create the best writing LLM?

I remember an article a few weeks back[1] which mentioned the current focus is improving the technical abilities of LLMs. I can imagine many (if not most) of their current subscribers are paying for the technical ability as opposed to creative writing.

This also reminded me that on OpenRouter, you can sort models by category. The ones tagged "Roleplay" and "Marketing" are probably going to have better writing compared to models like Opus 4 or ChatGPT 5.2.

[1]: https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/sam-altman...

Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring

#30

Bible 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…

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