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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

#231

Post by pryce »

shagie wrote: post #210
mhurron wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 overlook…

Thank you, I remember reading this background as well.

There is no 'unedited' version of Anne's diary, as Anne herself intentionally edited and re-edited her work during her time in the Annex. A remarkable young woman. What was published to readers are various versions that have additionally been further somewhat edited by others and in places censored, with the trend being towards gradually less censorship over time.

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

#232

Post by trollbridge »

kristjansson wrote: post #136
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.

The relative value of those things are shifting. As the cost of polished LLM drivel falls to zero, some might prefer even the most unedited, off-the-cuff human writing to the slop.

I have stopped spell checking, grammar checking, and generally doing a lot of editing of my writing so that it feels more authentic. I have also had to give up my habit of prolific use of emdashes.

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

#233

Post by throw4847285 »

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…

Actually, unless they are self-published, most "new-age self-help" books are pretty thoughtfully edited. They are persuasive writing, whose goal is to convince you to believe in a framework that is not supported by evidence. Dismissing them for being incoherent is actually a mistake, in that it shows a lack of understanding of their appeal.

Though, I must admit, I'm not sure exactly what you meant by "new-age self-help" books, so I took a guess.

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

#234

Post by throw4847285 »

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.

Writing is editing.

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

#235

Post by sumeno »

john_strinlai wrote: post #99
Amekedl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

depending how hard the "the brain is a muscle" saying applies, there is no way using LLMs/chatbot systems/AI is not going to deteriorate your brain immensely.

when i was younger, we didnt have cellphones. i had ~20-30 phone numbers memorized, at least. i also used to remember my credit card number. my brain has not deteriorated now that i have offloaded that to my phone. point being: it depends on how you use it. if you offload critical thinking to ai, you will probably (slowly) atrophy your critical thinking muscles. if you offload some bullshit boilerplate or repetitive…

> my brain has not deteriorated now that i have offloaded that to my phone.

Is there empirical evidence that you haven't? You wouldn't necessarily be the best judge

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

#236

Post by xdennis »

piker wrote: post #86

AI for editing is garbage. Chat to it to get ideas maybe, but in its current incarnation it’s just going to degrade anything you filter through it.

Depends on how you use it. If you say "reword this to sound " then it does suck. But if you say "This is what I wrote. My intention is so-and-so. The audience is ... Please mention and add suggestions for how to fix typos, poor wording, unclear expression, etc.

Then you get back what it thinks is wrong and you're in charge of editing in its suggestions. If you let it edit for you you're more likely to just create slop.

---

Here's an example. My actual text is:

> I want to make it clear that I'm not hunting for things to be angry at, these are issues I've encountered in actual codebases.

If go through the route of prompting it to re-write, it changes it to:

> I’m not looking for things to be angry about—these are issues I’ve encountered in real codebases.

The em dash is a clear give away that it's AI, but it's also soulless.

If I ask it to tell me what's possibly wrong about it I get that there's a comma splice (never knew the term, I'm not a native speaker) and "about" is better than "at". So I do a minor change:

> I want to make it clear that I'm not hunting for things to be angry about. These are issues I've encountered in actual codebases.

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

#238

Post by JDups »

dpark wrote: post #171
ollysb wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I can get behind the sentiment I hope bad writing doesn't become the standard for anti AI. A simple grammar check would have greatly improved this post.

AI has plenty of training data on poor writing. If people start looking for bad grammar and typos to identify human articles, generative AI is certainly capable of spitting out prose that looks poorly edited. I kind of hope the anti-AI-writing stuff passes and we can focus on what makes writing good or bad again instead of “this is clearly AI” posted in response to every blog. I actually don’t care if it’s AI but I d…

When most of the AI written blog posts are just written via a "write a blog post about X" prompt. I don't see any value in reading any of it. If I want to know what ChatGPT thinks of a given subject I'd just ask it directly.

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

#239

Post by deanishe »

mikestorrent wrote: post #222
elbasti wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You may find that there is a continuum between textbooks and poetry; and that some folks want things that are further over towards the prose and poety side, some of us enjoyed reading Kerouac, we don't care about perfection so much as feeling a piece channel the spirit of the person who wrote it. What is being communicated is not always just the raw parsing of the text but something more, a gestalt of what it meant f…

But Kerouac didn't just crap his thoughts onto the page.

He edited his work heavily to achieve just the stream of consciousness feel he wanted.

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

#240

Post by margalabargala »

throw4847285 wrote: post #233
elbasti wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually, unless they are self-published, most "new-age self-help" books are pretty thoughtfully edited. They are persuasive writing, whose goal is to convince you to believe in a framework that is not supported by evidence. Dismissing them for being incoherent is actually a mistake, in that it shows a lack of understanding of their appeal. Though, I must admit, I'm not sure exactly what you meant by "new-age self-he…

> I'm not sure exactly what you meant by "new-age self-help" books

They're using it as a pejorative, so it's a blanket term meaning "books with ideas I don't understand and therefore dislike".

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