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You'll love GreaterWrong, then: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BJ4pnropWdnzzgeJc/i-am-de...

> I had to load this page four times. First initially, and then disabling JavaScript

Had to?

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 writers understand that writing is about communication. The initial act of writing (ie, word puke) is worthless. What matters most is a piece of writing's ability to communicate clearly.

This writing is usually pleasant, concise, and clear.

"I think that is the beauty of writing, the raw , unedited emotions of the person behind every words either for entertainment or educational purposes, is what makes it special"

- the article, clearly expressing the intent of its own mistakes and contextualizing them in the era of LLM-borne "perfect" text

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.

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 work mostly on the tech side of things but my corporate limitation has always been writing up documentation, communicating/translating to stakeholders, and recalling everything relevant when writing PR descriptions. AI has been a breath of fresh air. I actually communicate more information efficiently than I would have ever put the effort into before. I still maintain my own writing for more casual things like social media (HN included) and low stakes Slack conversations but AI for getting across ideas and then proofreading it is great.

I was asked to write user stories about a complex topic where I’m the SME at work. I spent two hours info dumping everything I knew about the project, everything the AI wouldn’t have any context for, using Cursor to add related projects to the workspace, tagging specific files where we’d implemented similar things with our styles, noted all the quirks of the system and how it works and where to find relevant information. I spent a lot of time on it, and then asked it to reach out using cli to grab relevant information from our infra, and write stories about how we’d accomplish everything I intend to get done. I then spent another few hours reviewing the 45 or so stories that conversation generated. It was similar to how I’d talk to a new contractor I’m onboarding to work on the work.

I have a deep knowledge of the information, have done the process we’re doing on two previous projects, but organizing all the stories would have been an absolute nightmare. I still spent half a day on this, I’d guess the fatigue from the boring parts would have made this take a week or maybe two, just because I was doing the parts I enjoy (knowing things and describing them) and I was able to offload the parts I’m not great at (using a lot of boilerplate language to organize the info I knew into scrum stories). Then I had a meeting, reviewed the stories with my coworkers, we had a discussion, deleted two or three of them that we determined weren’t necessary, and fixed up one or two where I’d provided insufficient information about some context surrounding coloring of a page.

It burned through a ton of Opus 4.6 tokens, looked through a ton of code (mostly that I’d written, pre-LLM), but has been amazing for helping me move into a lead position where grooming stories and being organized has always been my weakest point.

Also, when I wrote a postmortem for a deploy that had some issues, I wrote it all by hand. You have to know when the tools help and when they will hinder.

It’s kinda useful to me for the following three reasons:

- spelling - grammar or weird grammar as English is not my native language - read proofing and finding things that do not make sense in terms of sentence structure

I do not use it for ideas, discussing the writing, or anything else because that beats the purpose of writing it myself (creative writing).

I thought it's quite good. Of course, I'm not taking 100% of output, but it takes care of my grammar blindspots (damn you commas and a/an/the articles!).

Can you please share what and how gets degraded? Sometimes I don't like a phrase it selects, but it's not common

Only if you don't understand how to control AI. If you understands how it works and have the skills to ride it like a wild horse, you can make yourself a 10x developer. Its maybe a bit of an insult, but you seriously have to change that mindset. AI is not going to be worse tomorrow. It will get better and it will dramatically change our life as developers. Code will no longer be a prominent thing we are working on in the near future.

I know this is a spicy take, but it probably just means you're more eloquent in your writing than most netizens...

And that's not really a hard bar to clear if you look at how people write comments online (including places like GitHub).

Anyone that uses punctuation, and capitalises words, probably automatically gets past the 70% confidence line.

AI detectors don't work.

What it says (and this fact is not popular around here) is that you write better than the average person.

have you tried pangram? it's basically the only good AI detector, and they have nearly 0 false positives

Simple: The derived variance in your word usage and sequences, is outside the mean distribution range, that would be labeled as AI generated, given this specific evaluation algorithm

It’s not nondeterministic

you can probably do the shannon entropy calculation yourself if you understand what the evaluation algorithm is

That said…if the evaluator is non-deterministic, then there’s no value in the estimate anyway

It probably means that your writing stylistically is close to the vector-space average of "good" writing, which is what AI produces.

FWIW, your comment history here does not look like AI at all to me, and I think I have a very (maybe too?) high sensitivity to AI slop.

try it with something published before 2022. do you still get the same results?

I really doubt those tools are good for anything

about you? not much. but i wouldnt spin up a blog, or even longer comments here, if you want to keep your sanity.

the amount of "that is obvious ai slop" comments i see on mine or other people's genuine non-ai writing has discouraged me from sharing anything more than roughly a paragraph for probably the rest of my life.

>as if I were no longer able to judge, to decide, without consulting the AI

"the Whispering Earring" – https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/2012-10-03-yva...

A friend described it as "there's no blank page any more".

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.

Fun fact: Editors are usually also people. Except for that one dog I met during a cold winter's day in 1987 in a run-down London pub.

Or read magazines and newspapers from reputable publications. My grammar and writing have improved tremendously from reading quality magazine articles, e.g. stuff from The Atlantic or The NY Book Review or whatever.

Both magazines and books are valid forms of information consumption and books are not the only way to improve your writing, reading, and understanding of the world.

> one stinking word

"hey robot give me every word even mildly related to $SOME_SENSE_ON_THE_TIP_OF_MY_TOUNGE" is a wildly satisfying and underrated experience.

I’ll take a clumsy sentence written by a non-native speaker any day over LLM generated mush. At least I know you chose those words specifically so it gives me some insight into your state of mind and intended meaning.

Any native English speaker who doesn’t live under a rock is very accustomed to reading and hearing English from non-native speakers and familiar with the common quirks and mistakes. English is quite forgiving as a language, we understand you. When in doubt, simplify it.

In some specific work contexts, such as writing pull request descriptions, not sounding like AI is something I've given up on trying to optimize. It's simply not worth the effort for me being non-native and writing detailed PR descriptions being so arduous, and the agent already has full context anyway. Obviously any fluff or inaccuracies are aggressively weeded out but I don't care anymore about the AI voice.

This. My personal style have always been llm-like, including the generous use of em-dashes, and "not-only-this-that" style mannerisms. It' increasingly difficult to retain reputation.

Don't want to sound like an llm? Don't read llm content. Remove yourself from places where you might be liable to read it.

Agree. This also ties into the hypothesis that we're hitting a local maximum in terms of the state of the art in creativity as we offload that work.

For some reason I read that as "If you outsource your thinking and skills, your ability to do apostrophes."

Typos and minor grammatical errors within a well-reasoned piece are aesthetic now, means you didn't run it through an LLM...

I've started letting some run on sentences remain because it feels closer to how humans think and usually write. Letting typos go seems silly though.

I don't know but capitalisation seems to have gone down the shitter.

When writing letters of recommendation now, I write in a more human tone to avoid sounding like a bot with a line of explanation at the start. Not an error in the sense you mean, but an error in tone for a letter of recommendation, certainly.

Definitely think it is. It will be glorious. We will focus more on content than on just aesthetic as people try to signal that they are not llm

Maybe it is.

Just like hand made items are popular for their imperfections.

I mean yes? I am more likely to read and trust something that is not written or cowritten by ai.

I want real humans giving real human opinions not ai giving their best opinion on what is the most "rewarding" weighted opinion

Right. The LLMs' quirks aren't bad in themselves, they're bad when they're in every damn paragraph. They're mostly things that in moderation actually improve writing, and that if you see them once (without the knowledge that they're things LLMs do) would rightly tend to make you think better of the author. And so, of course, in RLHF training they get rewarded, and unfortunately it's not so easy for an LLM to learn "it's good to do this thing a bit but not too much.

The structured thing you mention is the one that bugs me most. I genuinely think that most human writing would be improved by having more of the "signposts" that LLMs overuse. Headings, context-setting sentences, bullet points where appropriate, etc. I was doing "list of bullet points with boldfaced intro for each one" before the LLMs were. But because the LLMs are saturating their writing with it, we'll all learn to take it as a sign of glib superficiality and inauthenticity, and typical good human writing will start avoiding everything of that kind, and therefore get that little bit harder to read. Alas.

I refuse to cater to the "em dashes are AI" crowd.

And I was just noticing that my home-built blog render pipeline produces dumb quotes and that was embarrassing to me. Needs to be fixed.

(Counterpoint, dumb quotes are 7-bit clean and paste nicely... Hmm.)

I feel ya. I've never been accused of using an LLM, fortunately, but depending on the context I do use “smart quotes” (even in „Dutch” or »German«) and the em-dash obviously… (And that ellips fella there. It's just so simple to type with a compose key set up.)

It's absolutely shocking how many people think that inverting all the quality metrics that we've traditionally used "because LLMs" will lead to good things. Nothing about this will end well.

Same here, I've always used em dashes and have been called out on negative comparisons – I didn't even know they were an LLM thing. Should I read more LLM to know what phraseology to avoid, or will doing that nudge me towards sounding more LLM? :-(

https://hemingwayapp.com/ gives you advice about your writing.

This is called Hemingway because he was apparently good at communicating efficiently which made him a popular author.

Because they're self-aware perfectionists and are actively working to stop it, because they reach for all kinds of tools like grammar checkers and AI, but they're aware that using those will make the post lose "their" voice, or the human element of the post.

And that's, I think, a valid choice; you can choose to use all the tools and make something gramatically and stylistically as close to perfect, but who would want to read something as dry? That's for formal writing, and blog posts are not formal.

There is no reliable way to detect AI writing. It probably trains on texts known to be AI, on texts known to be written by humans, then classify the text according to this training.

The problem is that it has a pretty high false positive rate. Maybe it thinks it's AI because there are absolutely no spelling mistakes. Or maybe you're French and you use latin-roots words in English that are considered "too smart" for the average writer.

And the problem is that people run those tools, see "80% chance to be written by AI", and instead of considering that 20% is high enough to consider you don't know, will assume it's definitely written by AI.

Yes, these people are so unbelievably stupid that think others more intelligent than them can't tell when they use AI to write their stuff. And then they act so annoyed when they get exposed... It's unbearable.

The article here is still full of AI slop, and so many people in the comments are defending the author. Blows my mind.

> Also, why would using a LLM based grammar checker trigger an AI writing detector? Did it end up rewriting substantial parts of the original submission?)

Grammarly has seriously started rewriting whole paragraphs recently, I have been having to reject more and more "prompts" where in the past I would accept them almost by default because they actually were Grammer checks.

What makes you think that? I presume that's just the authors (sarcastic) way to say "beware: may contain typos and grammatical errors".

I remember taking a machine learning course in which the instructor explicitly warned us to make wise fiscal decisions, based on the assumption that ML funding follows a hype-driven boom/bust cycle.

"Save during the summers and you'll make it through the winters".

The slop decade will be a slop "rest of humanity." There's no going back from this.