As someone longtime involved in software development, can we call this "best practices" instead of some like "semantic ablation" that nobody understands?
Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
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Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#52I'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…
> Yet we're not seeing any collapse, despite models being trained mainly on synthetic data for the past 2 years.
Maybe because researchers learned from the paper to avoid the collapse? Just awareness alone often helps to sidestep a problem.
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#53The "AI voice" is everywhere now. I see it on recent blog posts, on news articles, obituaries, YT channels. Sometimes mixed with voice impersonation of famous physicists like Feynman or Susskind. I find it genuinely soul-crushing and even depressing, but I may be over sensitive to it as most readers don't seem to notice.
Yes, I get more and more visceral reactions to it. I'm reminded of JPEG artifacts - unnoticeable in 1993!
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#54I 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 wish it would just say "k, updated xyz to 1.2.3 in Cargo.toml" instead of the entire pages it likes to output. I don't want to read all of that!
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#55Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#56Couldn't you simply increase the temperature of the model to somewhat mitigate this effect?
When applied to insightful writing, that is much more likely to dull the point rather than preserve or sharpen it.
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#57The "AI voice" is everywhere now. I see it on recent blog posts, on news articles, obituaries, YT channels. Sometimes mixed with voice impersonation of famous physicists like Feynman or Susskind. I find it genuinely soul-crushing and even depressing, but I may be over sensitive to it as most readers don't seem to notice.
Yes, I get more and more visceral reactions to it. I'm reminded of JPEG artifacts - unnoticeable in 1993!
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Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#58Race to the middle really sums up how I feel about AI.
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Ive noticed that the subtle/nunance gets lost with every so-called improvement with the models.
Im in no way anti-LLMs as I have benefited from them, but I believe the issue that will arise is that their unpredictable nature means that they can only be used in narrowly defined contexts. Safety and trust are paramount. Would you use online banking if the balance on your account randomly changed and was not reproducible? No chance.
This does not achieve the ROI that investors of these model producers are thinking. The question is whether said investors can sell off their shares before it becomes more widely known.
Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#59This 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,…
Mediocrity as a Service
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Re: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Ive noticed that the subtle/nunance gets lost with every so-called improvement with the models. Im in no way anti-LLMs as I have benefited from them, but I believe the issue that will arise is that their unpredictable nature means that they can only be used in narrowly defined contexts. Safety and trust are paramount. Would you use online banking if the balance on your account randomly changed and was not reproducibl…
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