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ai;dr

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Re: ai;dr

#261

Post by lelanthran »

kyralis wrote: post #221
lelanthran wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you’re judging my writing so shallowly, I don’t think I’m writing for you. No, you are writing for people who see LLM-signals and read on anyway. Not sure that that's a win for you.

Or you're writing for the people who haven't deluded themselves into thinking that they're magical LLM detectors, which definitely does seem like a win.

> Or you're writing for the people who haven't deluded themselves into thinking that they're magical LLM detectors, which definitely does seem like a win.

What delusion? The false positive rate just on HN alone is so low it's not even a rounding error.

Re: ai;dr

#262

Post by onurkanbkrc »

LLMs are trained on vast portions of the internet.

In that sense, they are essentially systems that mimic online content.

Therefore, what an AI generates often reflects the perspectives of the people who originally created the training data, rather than the true thoughts of the person prompting it.

Re: ai;dr

#263

Post by hinkley »

Cyan488 wrote: post #241
hinkley wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to daydream of a 'dark web' but for humans not criminals. But at this point I don't know how you'd keep slop out, given how high human collusion has gotten of late.

Small private discord or slack servers meet this definition. I'm part of a few interest related ones and I'm glad to know members are more likely to be human than not

Don’t know how much longer that’ll last though.

Re: ai;dr

#264

Post by AlecSchueler »

msephton wrote: post #245
akoboldfrying wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really how it works. Gemini tells me that for thousands of years, the swastika was used as "a symbol of positivity, luck and cosmic order". Try drawing it on something now and showing it to people. Is this an effective way to fight Nazism? I think it's brave to keep using em dashes, but I don't think it's smart, because we human writers who like using them (myself very much included) will never have the mi…

When you say "show it to people" I guess you don't mean the people in India, Japan, etc who still use the symbol for its original purpose?

I think it's safe to assume they meant it within their specific cultural context. They the symbol has different connotations in other cultures doesn't really change the point being made.

Re: ai;dr

#265

Post by AlecSchueler »

abustamam wrote: post #234
akoboldfrying wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really how it works. Gemini tells me that for thousands of years, the swastika was used as "a symbol of positivity, luck and cosmic order". Try drawing it on something now and showing it to people. Is this an effective way to fight Nazism? I think it's brave to keep using em dashes, but I don't think it's smart, because we human writers who like using them (myself very much included) will never have the mi…

I'm not confident that the average person is aware of an em dash nor that it is widely associated with AI; I think the current culturally dominant meaning is just a fat hyphen (which most people just call a dash anyway).

My wife was working from home recently and I overheard a meeting she was having. It's a very non technical field. She and her team were working on a presentation and her boss said "let's use one of those little AI dashes here."

Re: ai;dr

#266

Post by AlecSchueler »

gnat wrote: post #216
ssiddharth wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest sorrow right now is the fact that my beloved emdash is a major signal for AI generated content. I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second.

We're in the brief window of time when AI's writing style is the weirdness. It's an artifact of the production process, like JPG blur, MP3 distortion, autotune's rigidity. And it didn't take long for those things to become normalized, in fact for them to become artifacts that people proudly adopted and embraced. DJs release tracks built from MP3s samples instead of waves. Autotune is famously a 'sound' that was once…

> "well of course that's how you best communicate because I see it everywhere."

These assumptions might also change though. Up until now any writing you saw "everywhere" was probably written by someone who studied and loved written communication and was brining their artisanal care to the table. That's no longer the case.

It's called slop for a reason. When I come across a GitHub README written by AI I don't feel put off just because the author used AI to write it, I feel frustrated because it's genuinely poorly communicating with me. Fill of extraneous details, artifacts from the conversation, and stuff I already know ("uses GitHub to share the source democratically!").

Re: ai;dr

#267

Post by account42 »

wiseowise wrote: post #174
ssiddharth wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest sorrow right now is the fact that my beloved emdash is a major signal for AI generated content. I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second.

I use it to trigger false positives in haters – why not?

I don't think someone who doesn't want AI slop filtering out someone who gets mad at that to the point of calling them haters is really a false positive.

Re: ai;dr

#268

Post by account42 »

kyralis wrote: post #222
ssiddharth wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest sorrow right now is the fact that my beloved emdash is a major signal for AI generated content. I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second.

This is the modern day "I can tell that's photoshopped because I've seen some 'shops in my day." The sooner we stop glorifying the people who think they're magical LLM detectors, the better, frankly.

It doesn't have to be a perfect filter to be a good heuristic. And unless you have a better suggestion how people can avoid slop then it'll keep being used.

Re: ai;dr

#269

Post by account42 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #96
steveBK123 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Ai writing is that its a waste of everyones time. It’s literal content expansion, the opposite of gzip’ing a file. It’s like a kid who has a 500 word essay due tomorrow who needs to pad their actual message up to spec.

Well, LLMs can be either side of that. They can also be used to turn something verbose into a series of bullet points. I agree that reading an LLM-produced essay is a waste of time and (human) attention. But in the case of overly-verbose human writing, it's the human that's wasting my time[1], and the LLM is gzip'ing the spew. [1] Looking at you, New Yorker magazine.

> I agree that reading an LLM-produced essay is a waste of time and (human) attention. But in the case of overly-verbose human writing, it's the human that's wasting my time[1], and the LLM is gzip'ing the spew.

gzip is lossless, LLM summaries are not.

Re: ai;dr

#270

Post by account42 »

woopwoop wrote: post #55
losvedir wrote: post #6

I really like Oxide's take on AI for prose: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576 and how it breaks the "social contract" where usually it takes more effort to write than to read, and so you have a sense that it's worth it to read. So I get the frustration that "ai;dr" captures. On the other hand, I've also seen human writing incorrectly labeled AI. I wrote (using AI!) https://seeitwritten.com as a bit of an exp…

I like the idea that various communications media have implicit social contracts that can be broken. In my opinion, power point presentations break an implicit social contract that is held in handwritten talks: if it's worth you displaying a piece of information, so that I the listener feel the need to take it in or even copy it down, it has to be worth your time to actually physically write it on the board. With pow…

Well the thing with powerpoint presentations is that the listener doesn't have to write them down and can instead use the copy you share with them if they need a future reference.

And it should still be worth for them to listen if you don't suck at presenting and don't just read the text from the slides.

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