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I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

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Re: I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

#201

Post by fluidcruft »

Morromist wrote: post #195
hectdev wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work mostly on the tech side of things but my corporate limitation has always been writing up documentation, communicating/translating to stakeholders, and recalling everything relevant when writing PR descriptions. AI has been a breath of fresh air. I actually communicate more information efficiently than I would have ever put the effort into before. I still maintain my own writing for more casual things like soci…

"I actually communicate more information efficiently than I would have ever put the effort into before" - this is subjective and evidence seems to point to the opposite in my view. In reality most people who think they communicate better with AI don't actually read what the AI has written for them and just puke it out on the world, expecting their readers to do the work. The Ai almost always writes boring, repetitive…

I have had the same experience, personally. i.e. asking Claude to simplify things for c-suite has gotten (1) extremely positive feedback from c-suite and (2) actually relevant conversation about decisions. It's certainly not a one-shot but iteration with Claude is so fast that it takes just a few hours vs plotting weeks about how to clarify technical decisions. But Intend to work in a "try it this way" sort of iteration where I need to rewrite things and see what they look like. But using Claude/ChatGPT for options about whether things make sense is very helpful (for me). The speed of iteration is great.

Re: I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

#202

Post by cortesoft »

dhosek wrote: post #183

I’ve completely avoided using AI for writing (although it looks like my coding avoidance is coming to an end). As someone who kind of views using a thesaurus as “cheating”¹, using AI to do the writing is way beyond the pale. A lot of what writing is about for me is about discovering and distilling and figuring out what I think. Take that away and I might as well just the spend the day watching television and playing…

> As someone who kind of views using a thesaurus as “cheating”

I don't think cheating is the right word here (ironically), which I think you are kind of acknowledging by putting it in quotes.

Based on your footnote, it sounds like you are more concerned that using a thesaurus is more likely to end with a worse result, since you are likely to use the incorrect word, or to use the word incorrectly.

This sounds more like the opposite of cheating; cheating is about unfairly getting a better result, but this concern is more about accidentally getting a worse result.

Re: I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

#203

Post by mhurron »

encom wrote: post #188
margalabargala wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 'm sure you consider your opinion to be correct, but there is something to writing being an act of creative expression. It's fine for it to be a selfish activity. Diaries are this way, for example, and the negativity you point at other people's hobbies is unfortunate. There's something to the idea that if the writer is writing with the intention of publishing it, that should be edited. But if you're writing for you…

Franks diary was edited, both by herself and later publishers.

By her father, not herself. She sort of died before she had an opportunity to edit her writings for publication.

Re: I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

#204

Post by [deleted] »

elbasti wrote: post #149
boca_honey wrote: post #119

>I just wrote what my brain is instructing to type (might not reread it before posting) Why would I put effort into reading something that had no effort put in by the author? This guy needs an editor, AI or otherwise.

There are some people that believe that writing is an act of creative expression. In other words, that writing is primarily about the act (and as such, it's a quite selfish activity). Editing destroys the expressive act and must be avoided. These people's writing is usually incoherent and they are very proud of it. If you've ever read a bad new-age self-help book you've probably encountered writing like this. Good wr…

[deleted]

Re: I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

#205

Post by boca_honey »

tadfisher wrote: post #137
boca_honey wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the sentiment, and good for him. However, from an audience perspective, why choose to watch a guy filming himself eating cereal with a shaky phone camera when you could watch The Sopranos? (or the latest MrBeast extravaganza, to avoid being pedantic). I guess it's OK if you enjoy reading someone expressing himself without communicating anything valuable and well produced. It's kind of like people who enj…

At this point, it is far more distracting to see LLM-isms and get completely thrown out of the reading-understanding process than to see some typos or grammatical errors. I actually feel reassured when I see something like a "they're/their" swap, because I know I am reading the author's thoughts instead of some linear algebra vaguely influenced by the author's thoughts. Five years ago, I probably would have been anno…

An editor's role is not fixing typos and grammar (that's the proofreader's job). The editor helps you order your thoughts, pointing out inconsistencies, redundancies, or general lapses in reasoning. When I talk about "unedited," I meant without a clear point, repetitive, unreferenced, etc, etc.

I have nothing against LLMs for proofreading. I'm actually using one now to fix my grammar because English is my second language. I won't let it change my points, though... it's just for cleaning up without having to spend 3x the time on a comment, editing out minor mistakes.

I'm aware this might make my posts feel less natural, but I think it's a good middle ground.

Re: I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

#206

Post by arijun »

encom wrote: post #188
margalabargala wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 'm sure you consider your opinion to be correct, but there is something to writing being an act of creative expression. It's fine for it to be a selfish activity. Diaries are this way, for example, and the negativity you point at other people's hobbies is unfortunate. There's something to the idea that if the writer is writing with the intention of publishing it, that should be edited. But if you're writing for you…

Franks diary was edited, both by herself and later publishers.

Some argue that her father’s editing was detrimental, that it removed some of her voice and her experience. I think there’s something to editing out the more… problematic parts of a pubescent child’s diary. I would have been mortified if my thoughts of that nature were published, and the censorship allowed the diary to reach a more broad audience in e.g. grade schools. But at the same time, I do understand the wish to see the full, authentic story.

Re: I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

#207

Post by andai »

shagie wrote: post #156
roysting wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here, the overarching issue is that the subject complaint about AI slop is actually a bigger issue that has been plaguing America in particular for many years now, and of which the AI slop era is only a current top. The qualities of American writing have clearly been on a precipitous decline for a very long time now, predating AI slop and even spell checkers and computers. Computers, digital text, and dig…

> The qualities of American writing have clearly been on a precipitous decline for a very long time now, predating AI slop and even spell checkers and computers. https://www.literaturelust.com/post/what-writers-need-to-kno... > Every NYT bestseller from 1960 to 2014 falls in the seventh-grade level spread, from 4th to 11th. > ... > Since 2000, only 2 bestsellers have scored higher than 9th-grade readability. > ... ..…

Whenever I read something from roughly the first half of the 20th century (I'm not sure where the cutoff point is, it seems to the 1960s), I'm struck by the quality of the writing. I'm not sure what happened, but it's pretty clear that at some point we stopped taking ourselves seriously.

We see the same thing in how people dress. People used to write "respectably", and they used to dress the same, and in TV interviews they spoke with great care and deliberation.

Then we threw all of it down the toilet.

Re: I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

#208

Post by apparent »

Relevant to the headline, though less relevant to the actual article, I miss the pre-AI youtube era. I search for educational videos for my kids and videos that are from the last couple years are likely AI slop. Some are pure slop, just terrible. Others are also slop (no visible narrator, pronunciation mistakes an AI would make, repeating stock footage) but are actually well done enough to be educational. However, I don't want my kids watching these even if they are educational because it could lead them to think that the style of video is not bad. I want them to have an attuned radar to that kind of junk.

For now, I just keep scrolling until I find something from before 2020, which is much more likely to be purely human-made and edited.

Re: I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

#209

Post by hayleox »

jhhh wrote: post #145

I miss the text only reading era. This is a blog and should not need to have JavaScript enabled to render text to a page. I would rather not have to be annoyed by flavor of the month duplicate scroll bars, cookie banners, newsletter pop-ups 5 seconds in, scroll to the top pop-ups, idle overlays, highlight helper bars that break copy paste, etc. This blog didn't have all of those but had some. I'm sure the metrics loo…

Agreed. When I redid my portfolio site recently, I specifically sought out a static site generator that wouldn't require JS, and picked a basic no-frills prebuilt theme. But I found out the theme didn't handle disabled JS gracefully.

The fussiest part of the whole site setup was getting light/dark mode to work in what I thought was the most obvious way. To me, if a website has light and dark modes, it should default the user's device's preferred color scheme, and as an added bonus for users with JS enabled, you might also have a toggle button. But by default, the theme just started in light mode no matter what until you clicked the toggle button, and they also didn't bother to make the button hidden if JS is disabled.

Same with the button for the built-in search feature; it would be visible even if it couldn't work. It's not that it was terribly hard to modify the theme and fix this – add `class="nojs"` to the body HTML, add a JS one-liner to remove nojs, and add a CSS rule to hide the buttons if they're inside `body.nojs`. It was just disheartening to see that this was the theme's default. Anyone making a website these days has to make extra effort to support what should be considered normal browser behavior.

Re: I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

#210

Post by shagie »

mhurron wrote: post #203
encom wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Franks diary was edited, both by herself and later publishers.

By her father, not herself. She sort of died before she had an opportunity to edit her writings for publication.

https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/anne-frank-...

> But the manuscript that Otto Frank pitched to Dutch editors didn’t contain his daughter’s entire diary. Anne herself had begun editing large swathes of her diary with publication in mind after hearing a radio broadcast that called on Dutch people to preserve diaries and other war documents. Otto respected some of those editorial decisions, but overlooked others ­– for example, he included material about Anne’s crush on annexe dweller Peter van Pels.

https://www.history.com/articles/anne-frank-diary-hidden-pag...

> Frank’s candid words on sex didn’t make it into the first published diary, which appeared in English in 1952. Though Anne herself edited her diary with an eye to publication, the book—released eight years after her death from typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at age 15—contained additional cuts. These were only partially restored in 1986, when a critical edition of her diary was published. Then, in 1995, an even less censored version, including a passage on Frank’s own body previously withheld by her father, was published.

https://research.annefrank.org/en/gebeurtenissen/b0725097-67...

> In response to Minister Bolkestein's appeal on 28 March 1944 on Radio Oranje to keep wartime diaries and letters, Anne Frank decided to rewrite her diary into a novel: "Imagine how interesting it would be if I published a novel of the Secret Annex, from the title alone people would think it was a detective novel."

> Anne rewrote and edited her diary on loose sheets of duplicator paper. On Saturday 20 May 1944, she wrote: "Dear Kitty, At last after much contemplation I have begun my 'the Secret Annex', in my head it is already as finished as it can be, but in reality it will be a lot slower, if it ever gets finished at all." Anne's rewritten version, known as Version B, ends with the diary entry of 29 March 1944.

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