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Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring

theregister.com

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

#31

Post by simonw »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #16
simonw wrote: post #6

I'd like to see some concrete examples that illustrate this - as it stands this feels like an opinion piece that doesn't attempt to back up its claims. (Not necessarily disagreeing with those claims, but I'd like to see a more robust exploration of them.)

It is an opinion piece. By a dude working as a "Professor of Pharmaceutical Technology and Biomaterials at the University of Ferrara". It has all the tropes of not understanding the underlying mechanisms, but repeating the common tropes. Quite ironic, considering what the author's intended "message" is. Jpeg -> jpeg -> jpeg bad. So llm -> llm -> llm must be bad, right? It reminds me of the media reception of that pap…

Yeah, reading the other comments on this thread this is a classic example of that Hacker News (and online forums in general) thing where people jump on the chance to talk about a topic driven purely by the headline without engaging with the actual content.

(I'm frequently guilty of that too.)

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

#32

Post by icegreentea2 »

mjamesaustin wrote: post #12
resiros wrote: 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.

Even more precisely, human writing contains unpredictability that is either more or less intention (what might be called authors intent), as well as much more subconsciously added (what we might call quirks or imprinted behavior).

The first requires intention, something that as far as we know, LLMs simply cannot truly have or express. The second is something that can be approximated. Perhaps very well, but a mass of people using the same models with the same approximationa still lead to loss of distinction.

Perhaps LLMs that were fully individually trained could sufficiently replicate a person's quirks (I dunno), but that's hardly a scalable process.

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

#36

Post by co_king_5 »

lurquer wrote: post #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.

[dead]

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

#37

Post by devmor »

barrkel wrote: 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,…

> But it's the jagged edges, the unorthodox and surprising prickly bits, that tear open a hole in the inattention of your reader, that actually gets your ideas into their heads.

This brings to mind what I think is a great description of the process LLMs exert on prose: sanding.

It's an algorithmic trend towards the median, thus they are sanding down your words until they're a smooth average of their approximate neighbors.

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

#38

Post by barrkel »

simonw wrote: post #6

I'd like to see some concrete examples that illustrate this - as it stands this feels like an opinion piece that doesn't attempt to back up its claims. (Not necessarily disagreeing with those claims, but I'd like to see a more robust exploration of them.)

Have you not seen it any time you put any substantial bit of your own writing through an LLM, for advice?

I disagree pretty strongly with most of what an LLM suggests by way of rewriting. They're absolutely appalling writers. If you're looking for something beyond corporate safespeak or stylistic pastiche, they drain the blood out of everything.

The skin of their prose lacks the luminous translucency, the subsurface scattering, that separates the dead from the living.

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

#40

Post by ghywertelling »

simonw wrote: post #31
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an opinion piece. By a dude working as a "Professor of Pharmaceutical Technology and Biomaterials at the University of Ferrara". It has all the tropes of not understanding the underlying mechanisms, but repeating the common tropes. Quite ironic, considering what the author's intended "message" is. Jpeg -> jpeg -> jpeg bad. So llm -> llm -> llm must be bad, right? It reminds me of the media reception of that pap…

Yeah, reading the other comments on this thread this is a classic example of that Hacker News (and online forums in general) thing where people jump on the chance to talk about a topic driven purely by the headline without engaging with the actual content. (I'm frequently guilty of that too.)

Even if that isn't the case, isn't it the fact the AI labs don't want their models to be edgy in any creative way, choose a middle way (buddhism) so to speak. Are there AI labs who are training their models to be maximally creative?
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