Nice site, but most of the top biographies are US figures: Edgar Hoover, Frederick Douglass, Lyndon Johnson etc.
I'd like to see more non-US biographies.
Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
91–100 of 265 posts
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#92Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#93On a related note, I was just noting to my co-founder, as we struggle to write good case studies for our website, that I find LLMs are astoundingly bad at writing good prose. We all know the "AI-tics" that give away a sloppily AI-written piece, but even if you steer them, they still struggle to write consistently high-quality prose. Somehow I feel that the work of a good copywriter has never been more noticeable.
I recently realized this as well and I think what I’ve discovered is that AI just produces mediocre content in all realms, but you don’t really notice it except in the realms where you have real expertise. With a lot of harness and prompting you can have it pump out something that’s pretty good but by default the next best token rarely produces anything of quality it seems like and if you think it does, perhaps you m…
I do think this explains much of it. But it doesn’t explain why Claude often writes in the clipped tone of that gnomic in-house tech evangelist who was inexplicably hired because he impressed the CEO.
(I may be projecting real life experience onto the LLM.)
I am genuinely fascinated as to how Claude acquired its utterly aggravating way of writing. It’s so much more irritating than ChatGPT, which is already not good.
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently did this! I fixed my phone habit and my TV habit, and I just read no, the family has silent reading parties instead of movie night. Here’s what I did: 1. Install Jomo on the phone. There are other apps, but basically it makes me wait 5s before I can open a brainrot app, and then I can only use it for 5min, and every time I do this I have to wait an additional 5s. It resets at midnight. This introduces the…
I bought a tiny e-reader [0] and carry that as well as my phone. When the temptation to doomscroll triggers, I pull out the e-reader instead and read a book. I tried attaching the book to the phone as their marketing suggests, but that didn't click somehow. Having both out means I would check the phone and then not look at the book. Working so far, but it's only been a couple of weeks, so let's see. [0] after reading…
Yea, for me my Kindle just didnt work. I always have had one since they were first released, but it was always hard to keep the habit between book.
Having a nice library of paper books, for whatever reason, has worked a lot better for me. I think it’s passively seeing them around the house and in the background always considering what is next.
This last round I couldn’t decide what to dig in to after I’d finished True Grit, so I spent a few minutes browsing what we had on hand and it was just… a very pleasant experience.
Also, unless you pirate ebooks or have access to a library that offers them, used paperbacks are actually much cheaper than buying ebooks.
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#95I don't think we would have AI slop, if they were just trained on high quality media.
Less relatable AI, maybe, but not sloppy AI.
AI trained on other AI (i.e. distilling), can be better than the AI they were trained on, likely because of this reason. Each iteration can raise the bar.
As apposed to the deep spiral of generating shiny attention crystals for humans, and then training on that.
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
In your experience, how do you determine book slop? For me I don't really stray from authors and topics I like, and non-fiction isn't really my go to outside of sci-fi, and mystery/law books. Like on the stretch point, I can tell that in other media but not so much books.
Business books are 99% slop.
Self improvement books! All of them! "Make good habits, not bad habits because this is what Lincoln did..."
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#97I don't think we would have AI slop, if they were just trained on high quality media. Less relatable AI, maybe, but not sloppy AI. AI trained on other AI (i.e. distilling), can be better than the AI they were trained on, likely because of this reason. Each iteration can raise the bar. As apposed to the deep spiral of generating shiny attention crystals for humans, and then training on that.
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Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I gave Claude Fable $25 in Pangram API credits and, after hundreds of attempts, it was unable to produce a single readable original piece of writing that was not immediately identified as AI. This seems to be a hard problem for LLMs, as passing would probably require good self-perception ("oh no, I am writing like an AI!") and fine-grained control over its own output ("let's write like a human instead!").
I wonder if it partially because "write like a human" is kind of a vacuous request. Like, it's the objective everyone including me has been saying that we want, but there's no one way to write like a human and and humans don't even have a good definition past "I know it when I see it." There's a lot of work in the humanities about different aspects of good writing, but that's not quite the same thing. And anyway they…
Each person writes in a different personal way, so writing “like a human” would actually require a model being able to purposefully make the specific choices that an individual human writer does.
However, general purpose LLMs like Fable have been trained on huge amounts of all kinds of data, and therefore find it exceedingly hard to break out of the grooves carved by that data. They can’t avoid defaulting to centroids and averages, even when they are trying not to. This makes it possible for classifiers like Pangram to discriminate their writing.
A plausible way to work around this limitation would be to train a LLM on a limited and cohesive subset of writing materials, so it would absorb their specific writing style.
One example might be Talkie, a LLM trained on pre-1930’s English text. Talkie is a far smaller and less powerful model than Fable.
And yet, Talkie’s writing is so distinctive that it is often classified as human by Pangram.
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#99I would bet that how your brain stores information that you read from long-form text is very different from how it stores information you acquire from chatting with an LLM. When I read something challenging or new to me I spend a lot of time thinking about how what I'm reading matches my own experiences or knowledge. Although I'm a fairly fast reader, it often takes me a long time to get through difficult pages since…
> When interacting with LLMs it feels a lot more like I'm just receiving knowledge passively and I don't think it gets integrated as well. This sounds like it's more down to how the individual uses the tool. I am not someone who has even been particularly good at reading > learning the thing. I've only ever been capable of learning by doing and with capability to interrogate on the points I don't get. LLMs allow that…
> This sounds like it's more down to how the individual uses the tool.
I genuinely agree with a lot of your comment but lines like this drive me crazy. Anytime somebody has a critique of AI, so many people hand wave away with “well you’re doing it wrong.” If we can just chalk up every negative thing with AI to “incorrect tool usage” then we’ll never honestly assess it.
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#100possibly a bug - I searched for "writers like lewis thomas" and the top two results were by thomas himself.
On a similar note: on Steam, the original Dark Souls game[1] is listed with the "souls-like" tag. That's not wrong , I guess, but just kind of a tautology. Grice's maxims[2] generally have such tautologies omitted in ordinary conversation as non-informative. [1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/570940/DARK_SOULS_REMASTE... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle
For me it is surprisngly natural to include the original thing into "a set of thing-likes".
Why does it feel wrong (or meaningless) to you?