4 ms·

AI written stuff I think has the oatmeal problem. It lacks any character, any distinctiveness, any flourishes, any vibrant or vigourous language. So yes, it fe

AI written stuff I think has the oatmeal problem. It lacks any character, any distinctiveness, any flourishes, any vibrant or vigourous language. So yes, it feels impersonal, and while it's fine to lean on it to correct errors or perhaps help you articulate something you're struggling with, it has no place in interpersonal communication between human beings with any relationship outside of the purely professional. Plus, it's really tacky.

xanderlewis 2y ago
> the oatmeal problem That’s why you add golden syrup (or maple if you’re Canadian/American). I’m not sure what the AI equivalent is.
- WantonQuantum 2y ago
  Perhaps writing a second draft using the oatmeal as the first draft?
  - MrVandemar 2y ago
    I don't know I could do that, because the first draft of anything is mostly me working out what I think and what I want to say, and it's messy so when you get to the next draft, you instinctively know where to tidy it up. You don't get that from AI. You get boring neatly paragraphed prose. It's like tidying up a room that is already tidy.
    - barfbagginus 2y ago
      So dismantle it and make a mess again and start building your draft that way. You can tell the AI to be destructive as well, to just randomly rewrite whole sections you don't like for whatever reason. All of this is stuff that good writers have to do as well... They can just as easily get stuck making meaningless edits to well tidied but unsatisfying prose - so-called polishing the turd. They also have to get the sledgehammer out sometimes. So either be destructive and rip out and reimagine whole sections, or tell the AI to help you do it. If you get it "having fun", and have fun with it yourself, you can get some really cool and satisfying stuff!
torginus 2y ago
It also lacks intrinsic value. A gold jewel is not really 'better' than one made from aluminum, except for the fact that gold is rare and thus expensive and signals somebody invested a significant amount of resources into acquiring it. A hand written email used to signal the same - that somebody took the time and effort to craft a thoughtful email to you, and holds you in high enough regard to make an investment like that. Nowadays its utterly impossible to tell.
- xanderlewis 2y ago
  ‘Costly signalling’, to give it its technical name. Now that GenAI has devalued (alternatively, read: ‘democratised’) prose, the best costly signal will be to go to great lengths to show you haven’t used AI. Whatever it can’t do will become by-definition more valuable.
  - elicksaur 2y ago
    In an equality sense, I guess it is democratizing, since everyone who uses it sounds the same. But to me, there needs to be some small element of individualism. “Democratic” is partially about each person being able to share their own voice. In that sense, it centralizes prose, since the user adopts the voice of OpenAI.
    - xanderlewis 2y ago
      It's not 'democratising' — or if it is, it wasn't wanted. I was trying to be sarcastic without being overly snarky.
- caf 2y ago
  To really drive home the point, in the 19th century there were ingots of aluminium among the crown jewels of some royal families, because at the time it was rare, expensive and required a significant resource investment to refine.
- II2II 2y ago
  > A hand written email [...] I remember when a hand written letter literally meant a hand written letter. Preferably in tidy cursive. Some viewed it as more personal. Others viewed it as a reflection of thought and effort. It is easy to say that AI is different. I don't even like it when my email client attempts to auto-complete the current word, never mind the next few words, because it wasn't my word. It makes me feel even worse if it was going to be my word. (If what I was going to say is that predictable, is it even worth saying?) Yet that shift in values over handwritten letters leads me to think there will be a shift in values regarding AI written letters. It doesn't take much imagination to to realize that someone is going to tell an AI agent to write birthday greetings to each of their friends, then send it off on their birthday.
oceanplexian 2y ago
Saying “AI writing lacks character” is like saying typewriters can’t produce an authentic letter, only a handwritten letter can be authentic. I’m sure people were having this debate when typewriters became commonplace. AI can take on any writing style of any character you desire. It can be extremely vibrant. It can be cold and calculating. It can produce beautiful prose. You can train it on your texts or emails and have it produce something indistinguishable from your own writing style. It’s completely up to the prompting (And the tuning of the model) what output it’s going to produce. The fact that someone was lazy with their use of AI isn’t the AI’s fault.
- tsunagatta 2y ago
  But, in my view, handwritten letters do feel more authentic than typewritten letters. On the surface it’s only a change to the form of delivery, but that change in form implies extra meaning beyond the content: you see the person in the way they wrote the lines, and the fact that they wrote them. Typewriting sanitizes that extra layer away, but at least you still see the person in the content. If the typewriter then went on to create the content as well as the form, then virtually none of the person would be left.
  - MrVandemar 2y ago
    It's strange how these things change context though over time. I would be actually delighted and touched to receive a genuinely type-written letter since I know that actually owning and maintaining and using such archaic equipment is an effort far in excess of hand writing a letter. Yes, it loses the expressiveness of actual hand writing, but I'd be happy that people were still using the cantankerous things.
- MrVandemar 2y ago
  > Saying “AI writing lacks character” is like saying typewriters can’t produce an authentic letter, only a handwritten letter can be authentic. You're making a flawed comparison there. It boils down to style. Style is a personal thing, it comes from your word-choices and the rhythm of your writing, which results from how you feel, your education and interests, what audience you're trying to reach, your lived experience, whether there's a 3 year old trying to show you that he can eat a bug. Now, of course, a hand-written letter has a greater expressive capacity: you have paper choices, ink or pencil or crayon, your hand-writing either natural or emphasised. A type-writer can't capture that, but the words you type are still a reflection of you. AI makes few of these considerations, and is unable to convincingly emulate them. Strongly recommend you read Don Watson's Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language for a good comparison of the bland paste we get fed by institutions (and AI) and robust writing from the heart meant to persuade or reflect feelings.
chewxy 2y ago
Most LLMs out there are very American in their writing mannerisms. The article even alludes to this: > The AI did, however, try to sound like someone. It was folksy and upbeat, talky and pretend-excited I've not seen an LLM, even when fine tuned that doesn't actually do that (Chinese LLMs excepted). There's something just inherently American about the instruction datasets that these LLMs are instructed with.
- sentientslug 2y ago
  I’d wager it’s because most LLMs are trained on Internet data which can be very American-centric
- barfbagginus 2y ago
  I got the AI to write excellent Romanian, both standard and rural dialects and styles. It wasn't hard. The standard remaining was a default, and I was able to dial in a rural character in less than 10 rounds of back and forth conversation about the area and background of the person and some of their speech mannerisms. These are broad strokes that the AI kind of filled in for me, not teaching it from scratch. So just prompt it a little bit and spend maybe 300 to 800 words talking in the style you want it to emulate. And have an extended conversation where you nail in the style. I bet you can do this to make it write in British, Australian, or Indian English styles. But I'm perhaps not really equipped to judge, since I don't know those styles natively.
px43 2y ago
AI writes filler text. Most people expect some level of filler in the things they read, to transition them from one concept to the next, but of course nothing can be all filler, or it's completely pointless. I suspect that an LLM would do a good job at figuring out what parts of a given text are "interesting" by detecting how unexpected it is. The parts that are expected are the parts we usually skim over and don't pay much attention to, but when we hit something new and unusual, we slow down and turn on the critical thinking part of our brain. I also find filler text super tedious to write, so am a huge fan of using LLMs for any sort of long form communication. My typical writing style jumps around a lot and assume that the reader can follow it.
- MrVandemar 2y ago
  I think the lesson is: stop writing filler text. Who needs it? Who reads it?

xanderlewis 2y ago

> the oatmeal problem That’s why you add golden syrup (or maple if you’re Canadian/American). I’m not sure what the AI equivalent is.

WantonQuantum 2y ago
Perhaps writing a second draft using the oatmeal as the first draft?
- MrVandemar 2y ago
  I don't know I could do that, because the first draft of anything is mostly me working out what I think and what I want to say, and it's messy so when you get to the next draft, you instinctively know where to tidy it up. You don't get that from AI. You get boring neatly paragraphed prose. It's like tidying up a room that is already tidy.
  - barfbagginus 2y ago
    So dismantle it and make a mess again and start building your draft that way. You can tell the AI to be destructive as well, to just randomly rewrite whole sections you don't like for whatever reason. All of this is stuff that good writers have to do as well... They can just as easily get stuck making meaningless edits to well tidied but unsatisfying prose - so-called polishing the turd. They also have to get the sledgehammer out sometimes. So either be destructive and rip out and reimagine whole sections, or tell the AI to help you do it. If you get it "having fun", and have fun with it yourself, you can get some really cool and satisfying stuff!

torginus 2y ago

It also lacks intrinsic value. A gold jewel is not really 'better' than one made from aluminum, except for the fact that gold is rare and thus expensive and signals somebody invested a significant amount of resources into acquiring it. A hand written email used to signal the same - that somebody took the time and effort to craft a thoughtful email to you, and holds you in high enough regard to make an investment like that. Nowadays its utterly impossible to tell.

xanderlewis 2y ago
‘Costly signalling’, to give it its technical name. Now that GenAI has devalued (alternatively, read: ‘democratised’) prose, the best costly signal will be to go to great lengths to show you haven’t used AI. Whatever it can’t do will become by-definition more valuable.
- elicksaur 2y ago
  In an equality sense, I guess it is democratizing, since everyone who uses it sounds the same. But to me, there needs to be some small element of individualism. “Democratic” is partially about each person being able to share their own voice. In that sense, it centralizes prose, since the user adopts the voice of OpenAI.
  - xanderlewis 2y ago
    It's not 'democratising' — or if it is, it wasn't wanted. I was trying to be sarcastic without being overly snarky.
caf 2y ago
To really drive home the point, in the 19th century there were ingots of aluminium among the crown jewels of some royal families, because at the time it was rare, expensive and required a significant resource investment to refine.
II2II 2y ago
> A hand written email [...] I remember when a hand written letter literally meant a hand written letter. Preferably in tidy cursive. Some viewed it as more personal. Others viewed it as a reflection of thought and effort. It is easy to say that AI is different. I don't even like it when my email client attempts to auto-complete the current word, never mind the next few words, because it wasn't my word. It makes me feel even worse if it was going to be my word. (If what I was going to say is that predictable, is it even worth saying?) Yet that shift in values over handwritten letters leads me to think there will be a shift in values regarding AI written letters. It doesn't take much imagination to to realize that someone is going to tell an AI agent to write birthday greetings to each of their friends, then send it off on their birthday.

oceanplexian 2y ago

Saying “AI writing lacks character” is like saying typewriters can’t produce an authentic letter, only a handwritten letter can be authentic. I’m sure people were having this debate when typewriters became commonplace. AI can take on any writing style of any character you desire. It can be extremely vibrant. It can be cold and calculating. It can produce beautiful prose. You can train it on your texts or emails and have it produce something indistinguishable from your own writing style. It’s completely up to the prompting (And the tuning of the model) what output it’s going to produce. The fact that someone was lazy with their use of AI isn’t the AI’s fault.

tsunagatta 2y ago
But, in my view, handwritten letters do feel more authentic than typewritten letters. On the surface it’s only a change to the form of delivery, but that change in form implies extra meaning beyond the content: you see the person in the way they wrote the lines, and the fact that they wrote them. Typewriting sanitizes that extra layer away, but at least you still see the person in the content. If the typewriter then went on to create the content as well as the form, then virtually none of the person would be left.
- MrVandemar 2y ago
  It's strange how these things change context though over time. I would be actually delighted and touched to receive a genuinely type-written letter since I know that actually owning and maintaining and using such archaic equipment is an effort far in excess of hand writing a letter. Yes, it loses the expressiveness of actual hand writing, but I'd be happy that people were still using the cantankerous things.
MrVandemar 2y ago
> Saying “AI writing lacks character” is like saying typewriters can’t produce an authentic letter, only a handwritten letter can be authentic. You're making a flawed comparison there. It boils down to style. Style is a personal thing, it comes from your word-choices and the rhythm of your writing, which results from how you feel, your education and interests, what audience you're trying to reach, your lived experience, whether there's a 3 year old trying to show you that he can eat a bug. Now, of course, a hand-written letter has a greater expressive capacity: you have paper choices, ink or pencil or crayon, your hand-writing either natural or emphasised. A type-writer can't capture that, but the words you type are still a reflection of you. AI makes few of these considerations, and is unable to convincingly emulate them. Strongly recommend you read Don Watson's Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language for a good comparison of the bland paste we get fed by institutions (and AI) and robust writing from the heart meant to persuade or reflect feelings.

chewxy 2y ago

Most LLMs out there are very American in their writing mannerisms. The article even alludes to this: > The AI did, however, try to sound like someone. It was folksy and upbeat, talky and pretend-excited I've not seen an LLM, even when fine tuned that doesn't actually do that (Chinese LLMs excepted). There's something just inherently American about the instruction datasets that these LLMs are instructed with.

sentientslug 2y ago
I’d wager it’s because most LLMs are trained on Internet data which can be very American-centric
barfbagginus 2y ago
I got the AI to write excellent Romanian, both standard and rural dialects and styles. It wasn't hard. The standard remaining was a default, and I was able to dial in a rural character in less than 10 rounds of back and forth conversation about the area and background of the person and some of their speech mannerisms. These are broad strokes that the AI kind of filled in for me, not teaching it from scratch. So just prompt it a little bit and spend maybe 300 to 800 words talking in the style you want it to emulate. And have an extended conversation where you nail in the style. I bet you can do this to make it write in British, Australian, or Indian English styles. But I'm perhaps not really equipped to judge, since I don't know those styles natively.

px43 2y ago

AI writes filler text. Most people expect some level of filler in the things they read, to transition them from one concept to the next, but of course nothing can be all filler, or it's completely pointless. I suspect that an LLM would do a good job at figuring out what parts of a given text are "interesting" by detecting how unexpected it is. The parts that are expected are the parts we usually skim over and don't pay much attention to, but when we hit something new and unusual, we slow down and turn on the critical thinking part of our brain. I also find filler text super tedious to write, so am a huge fan of using LLMs for any sort of long form communication. My typical writing style jumps around a lot and assume that the reader can follow it.

MrVandemar 2y ago
I think the lesson is: stop writing filler text. Who needs it? Who reads it?