2 ms·

Overly verbose and weirdly flowery is a style, in some places and times even the default style. However when I read the overly verbose and weirdly flowery text

Overly verbose and weirdly flowery is a style, in some places and times even the default style. However when I read the overly verbose and weirdly flowery text of the late 19th century, as an example, it feels different than the weirdly flowery press release style LLMs favor.

grues-dinner 2y ago
It's a different thing entirely. The former style, in which, I must confide to you, my dear fellow, I have always found an inordinate amount of pleasure in reading, risible though you may reasonably find it to be so, written as it often is in a complex form that my erstwhile English masters would likely consider gauche and lacking in focus or, worse, perhaps even damned as trending to running-on, does rather transport my mind to the place and time of writing in a way that mere graven images, despite their undeniable detail and modern polychrome technologies, do not. Perhaps it's a result that writing and reading were both a mark of education and more complex writing was valued over a quick parse by the reader, which is highly valued today. Or, maybe, the use of hand- or type-writing led to train-of-thought subclause-rich writing, because it's hard to recast the sentence without a cursor, and one iteration of fair copying was probably enough for most purposes. Furthermore, much less writing was even done, far fewer people did it and it was expensive and laborious to do, transmit and reproduce. And what was written was often not written by, or intended for reading by, people without expensive educations. Most people probably read a lot more text now than most people did back then, and the do it faster and more disposably. Things these days are often written to be quickly scanned, perhaps only by automatic search crawlers, have keywords recognised and pulled out then the chaff is discarded. Which works better with short, simple sentences. And prominent keywords are important, leading to self-reinforcement of both a set of shibboleth words that "all good copy" should have and how and when those special words are to be used.
bartvk 2y ago
Exactly. Upon smelling the LLM excretion, I immediately get this feeling that I was tricked and I get a bit pissed off.

grues-dinner 2y ago

It's a different thing entirely. The former style, in which, I must confide to you, my dear fellow, I have always found an inordinate amount of pleasure in reading, risible though you may reasonably find it to be so, written as it often is in a complex form that my erstwhile English masters would likely consider gauche and lacking in focus or, worse, perhaps even damned as trending to running-on, does rather transport my mind to the place and time of writing in a way that mere graven images, despite their undeniable detail and modern polychrome technologies, do not. Perhaps it's a result that writing and reading were both a mark of education and more complex writing was valued over a quick parse by the reader, which is highly valued today. Or, maybe, the use of hand- or type-writing led to train-of-thought subclause-rich writing, because it's hard to recast the sentence without a cursor, and one iteration of fair copying was probably enough for most purposes. Furthermore, much less writing was even done, far fewer people did it and it was expensive and laborious to do, transmit and reproduce. And what was written was often not written by, or intended for reading by, people without expensive educations. Most people probably read a lot more text now than most people did back then, and the do it faster and more disposably. Things these days are often written to be quickly scanned, perhaps only by automatic search crawlers, have keywords recognised and pulled out then the chaff is discarded. Which works better with short, simple sentences. And prominent keywords are important, leading to self-reinforcement of both a set of shibboleth words that "all good copy" should have and how and when those special words are to be used.

bartvk 2y ago

Exactly. Upon smelling the LLM excretion, I immediately get this feeling that I was tricked and I get a bit pissed off.