6 ms·

I really like Oxide's take on AI for prose: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576 https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576 and how it breaks the "social

I really like Oxide's take on AI for prose: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576 https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576 and how it breaks the "social contract" where usually it takes more effort to write than to read, and so you have a sense that it's worth it to read. So I get the frustration that "ai;dr" captures. On the other hand, I've also seen human writing incorrectly labeled AI. I wrote (using AI!) https://seeitwritten.com https://seeitwritten.com as a bit of an experiment on that front. It basically is a little keylogger that records your composition of the comment, so someone can replay it and see that it was written by a human (or a very sophisticated agent!). I've found it to be a little unsettling, though, having your rewrites and false starts available for all to see, so I'm not sure if I like it.

onionisafruit 8mo ago
I like the idea, but personally I would rather be thought a bot than show that I’m a human idiot who takes three tries to spell basic words.
benob 8mo ago
You could totally make a believable timing generation model from a few (hundreds) recordings of human writing. Detecting AI is hard...
mikestew 8mo ago
Years ago I wrote something similar to test a biometric security piece that used keystroke timings (dwell and stroke) to determine if the person typing the password is the same person who owns the account. Short version of a long story is that it would be trivial to get data for AI to reproduce human typing. Because I did it years ago using something only slightly more sophisticated than urandom.
- riknos314 8mo ago
  Man failing that device's check because I'm sleep deprived or drunk would be a world of pain lol
usefulposter 8mo ago
LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (Cantrill) ≈ The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. (Brandolini) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law
ssiddharth 8mo ago
My biggest sorrow right now is the fact that my beloved emdash is a major signal for AI generated content. I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second.
- archagon 8mo ago
  To quote Office Space, “Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.”
  - parsimo2010 8mo ago
    Mostly because when I see an em dash now, I assume that it was written by AI, not that the author is one of the people who puts enough effort into their product that they intentionally use specific sized dashes. AI might suck, but if the author doesn't change, they get categorized as a lazy AI user, unless the rest of their writing is so spectacular that it's obvious an AI didn't write it. My personal situation is fine though. AI writing usually has better sentence structure, so it's pretty easy (to me at least) to distinguish my own writing from AI because I have run-on sentences and too many commas. Nobody will ever confuse me with a lazy AI user, I'm just plain bad at writing.
    - wrs 8mo ago
      If you’re judging my writing so shallowly, I don’t think I’m writing for you.
      - lelanthran 8mo ago
        > If you’re judging my writing so shallowly, I don’t think I’m writing for you. No, you are writing for people who see LLM-signals and read on anyway. Not sure that that's a win for you.
        wrs 8mo ago
        "Seeing LLM-signals" == "reading shallowly", so I think I covered that case.
woopwoop 8mo ago
I like the idea that various communications media have implicit social contracts that can be broken. In my opinion, power point presentations break an implicit social contract that is held in handwritten talks: if it's worth you displaying a piece of information, so that I the listener feel the need to take it in or even copy it down, it has to be worth your time to actually physically write it on the board. With power point talks this is not honored, and the average power point talk is much, much worse than the average chalk talk. I bet there are lots of other examples.
- smithza 8mo ago
  Go thee to the land of government contracting and see thou how well thine ideas hold up.
  - woopwoop 8mo ago
    I actually have worked in this space and it, uh, has not shaken my belief that powerpoint talks are bad.
- account42 8mo ago
  Well the thing with powerpoint presentations is that the listener doesn't have to write them down and can instead use the copy you share with them if they need a future reference. And it should still be worth for them to listen if you don't suck at presenting and don't just read the text from the slides.
hinkley 8mo ago
Based on the programs I was nudged to as a child, it was a surprise to no one but me that I scored higher verbal on the SATs than I did math, which I would have told you was my favorite subject. Despite the fact that French was my easiest subject. I can still picture the look on my french teacher’s face if I’d have mentioned this in front of him. There are a lot of people like me in software. I’m tempted to say we are “shouted down”, but honestly it’s hard to be shouted down when you can talk circles around some people. But we are definitely in a minority. There are actually a lot of parallels between creative writing and software and a few things that are more than parallel. Like refactoring. If you’re actually present when writing docs instead of monologuing in your head about how you hate doing “this shit”, then there’s a lot of rubber ducking that can be done while writing documentation. And while I can’t say that “let the AI do it” will wipe out 100% of this value, because the AI will document what you wrote instead of what you meant to write, I do think you will lose at least 80% of that value by skipping out on these steps.
steveBK123 8mo ago
The problem with Ai writing is that its a waste of everyones time. It’s literal content expansion, the opposite of gzip’ing a file. It’s like a kid who has a 500 word essay due tomorrow who needs to pad their actual message up to spec.
- AnimalMuppet 8mo ago
  Well, LLMs can be either side of that. They can also be used to turn something verbose into a series of bullet points. I agree that reading an LLM-produced essay is a waste of time and (human) attention. But in the case of overly-verbose human writing, it's the human that's wasting my time[1], and the LLM is gzip'ing the spew. [1] Looking at you, New Yorker magazine.
  - steveBK123 8mo ago
    Right we are headed towards LLM generated slop summarized by another LLM. Wire format is expanded slop.
  - account42 8mo ago
    > I agree that reading an LLM-produced essay is a waste of time and (human) attention. But in the case of overly-verbose human writing, it's the human that's wasting my time[1], and the LLM is gzip'ing the spew. gzip is lossless, LLM summaries are not.
  - jfengel 8mo ago
    We can run each LLM-produced essay through an LLM to reduce it to bullet points. We can then run it through another LLM to reduce it to a single bullet point. Then we can run it through a final filter, which reduces it to "ai;dr".
comboy 8mo ago
> https://seeitwritten.com https://seeitwritten.com Fun, I'd make playback speed something like 5x or whatever feels appropriate, I think nobody truly wants to watch those at 1x.
- miniatureape 8mo ago
  I had a take on this same thing a number of years ago. Much simpler, but the idea was just to see it at a glance. https://miniatureape.github.io/sprezzatura/ https://miniatureape.github.io/sprezzatura/
  - comboy 8mo ago
    yeah the idea is not new at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557191 I can't believe etherpad lost this item... edit: oh, I found the one I was looking for: https://byronm.com/13sentences.html https://byronm.com/13sentences.html
mystraline 8mo ago
To be fair, Oxide is a joke. They want all this artisnal hand written prose under the candle light with the moon in the background. And you are a horrible person for using AI, blablabla. But ask for feedback? And you get Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde. Aka ghosted. But boy, do they tell a good story. Just ain't fucking true. Counter: companies deserve the same amount of time invested in their application as they spend on your response.
unglaublich 8mo ago
This can only be fixed by authors paying humans to read instead of the other way around.
jimkleiber 8mo ago
In 2020 at the start of covid, I did an experiment I called Project 35 where, for 35 days straight before my 35th birthday, I wrote 3 times per day, for 10 minutes each, I livestreamed it and whatever I wrote I would put directly into a book with no edits. While I didn't invite many people to join the calls (maybe fear, maybe just not wanting to coordinate it all), I found the process to be more raw, more human, and less perfect than 10x edited writing. It also helped me get better at typing in the moment and not rewriting everything, especially for social media, HN, and other places. Anyway, it's at https://www.jimkleiber.com/p35/ https://www.jimkleiber.com/p35/ if you wanna check it out, all sessions posted as blog posts, I think there's a link to the ebook (pay-what-you-want) and there may be audio (I recorded myself reading the writing right after each session). If you check it out, please let me know :-)
hidden80 8mo ago
I respect Oxide a lot. And here, too, with their non adoption of the marketing term (AI) for LLMs, ML.
cnees 8mo ago
Re: unsettling Perhaps it could replace any characters that will go on to be deleted with astrisks.
etler 8mo ago
I don't like AI writing because it's bad writing. It's convoluted and inefficient and doesn't get to the point. If someone writes something that feels like AI, it doesn't matter if it was or not because it's still bad writing. I'm not talking about having a cliche here and there, but rather when the text is just incredibly inefficient.
michaelcampbell 8mo ago
ai;dr is the new "looks shopped, I can tell by the pixels".

onionisafruit 8mo ago

I like the idea, but personally I would rather be thought a bot than show that I’m a human idiot who takes three tries to spell basic words.

benob 8mo ago

You could totally make a believable timing generation model from a few (hundreds) recordings of human writing. Detecting AI is hard...

mikestew 8mo ago

Years ago I wrote something similar to test a biometric security piece that used keystroke timings (dwell and stroke) to determine if the person typing the password is the same person who owns the account. Short version of a long story is that it would be trivial to get data for AI to reproduce human typing. Because I did it years ago using something only slightly more sophisticated than urandom.

riknos314 8mo ago
Man failing that device's check because I'm sleep deprived or drunk would be a world of pain lol

usefulposter 8mo ago

LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (Cantrill) ≈ The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. (Brandolini) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law

ssiddharth 8mo ago

My biggest sorrow right now is the fact that my beloved emdash is a major signal for AI generated content. I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second.

archagon 8mo ago
To quote Office Space, “Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.”
- parsimo2010 8mo ago
  Mostly because when I see an em dash now, I assume that it was written by AI, not that the author is one of the people who puts enough effort into their product that they intentionally use specific sized dashes. AI might suck, but if the author doesn't change, they get categorized as a lazy AI user, unless the rest of their writing is so spectacular that it's obvious an AI didn't write it. My personal situation is fine though. AI writing usually has better sentence structure, so it's pretty easy (to me at least) to distinguish my own writing from AI because I have run-on sentences and too many commas. Nobody will ever confuse me with a lazy AI user, I'm just plain bad at writing.
  - wrs 8mo ago
    If you’re judging my writing so shallowly, I don’t think I’m writing for you.
    - lelanthran 8mo ago
      > If you’re judging my writing so shallowly, I don’t think I’m writing for you. No, you are writing for people who see LLM-signals and read on anyway. Not sure that that's a win for you.
      - wrs 8mo ago
        "Seeing LLM-signals" == "reading shallowly", so I think I covered that case.

woopwoop 8mo ago

I like the idea that various communications media have implicit social contracts that can be broken. In my opinion, power point presentations break an implicit social contract that is held in handwritten talks: if it's worth you displaying a piece of information, so that I the listener feel the need to take it in or even copy it down, it has to be worth your time to actually physically write it on the board. With power point talks this is not honored, and the average power point talk is much, much worse than the average chalk talk. I bet there are lots of other examples.

smithza 8mo ago
Go thee to the land of government contracting and see thou how well thine ideas hold up.
- woopwoop 8mo ago
  I actually have worked in this space and it, uh, has not shaken my belief that powerpoint talks are bad.
account42 8mo ago
Well the thing with powerpoint presentations is that the listener doesn't have to write them down and can instead use the copy you share with them if they need a future reference. And it should still be worth for them to listen if you don't suck at presenting and don't just read the text from the slides.

hinkley 8mo ago

Based on the programs I was nudged to as a child, it was a surprise to no one but me that I scored higher verbal on the SATs than I did math, which I would have told you was my favorite subject. Despite the fact that French was my easiest subject. I can still picture the look on my french teacher’s face if I’d have mentioned this in front of him. There are a lot of people like me in software. I’m tempted to say we are “shouted down”, but honestly it’s hard to be shouted down when you can talk circles around some people. But we are definitely in a minority. There are actually a lot of parallels between creative writing and software and a few things that are more than parallel. Like refactoring. If you’re actually present when writing docs instead of monologuing in your head about how you hate doing “this shit”, then there’s a lot of rubber ducking that can be done while writing documentation. And while I can’t say that “let the AI do it” will wipe out 100% of this value, because the AI will document what you wrote instead of what you meant to write, I do think you will lose at least 80% of that value by skipping out on these steps.

steveBK123 8mo ago

The problem with Ai writing is that its a waste of everyones time. It’s literal content expansion, the opposite of gzip’ing a file. It’s like a kid who has a 500 word essay due tomorrow who needs to pad their actual message up to spec.

AnimalMuppet 8mo ago
Well, LLMs can be either side of that. They can also be used to turn something verbose into a series of bullet points. I agree that reading an LLM-produced essay is a waste of time and (human) attention. But in the case of overly-verbose human writing, it's the human that's wasting my time[1], and the LLM is gzip'ing the spew. [1] Looking at you, New Yorker magazine.
- steveBK123 8mo ago
  Right we are headed towards LLM generated slop summarized by another LLM. Wire format is expanded slop.
- account42 8mo ago
  > I agree that reading an LLM-produced essay is a waste of time and (human) attention. But in the case of overly-verbose human writing, it's the human that's wasting my time[1], and the LLM is gzip'ing the spew. gzip is lossless, LLM summaries are not.
- jfengel 8mo ago
  We can run each LLM-produced essay through an LLM to reduce it to bullet points. We can then run it through another LLM to reduce it to a single bullet point. Then we can run it through a final filter, which reduces it to "ai;dr".

comboy 8mo ago

> https://seeitwritten.com https://seeitwritten.com Fun, I'd make playback speed something like 5x or whatever feels appropriate, I think nobody truly wants to watch those at 1x.

miniatureape 8mo ago
I had a take on this same thing a number of years ago. Much simpler, but the idea was just to see it at a glance. https://miniatureape.github.io/sprezzatura/ https://miniatureape.github.io/sprezzatura/
- comboy 8mo ago
  yeah the idea is not new at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557191 I can't believe etherpad lost this item... edit: oh, I found the one I was looking for: https://byronm.com/13sentences.html https://byronm.com/13sentences.html

mystraline 8mo ago

To be fair, Oxide is a joke. They want all this artisnal hand written prose under the candle light with the moon in the background. And you are a horrible person for using AI, blablabla. But ask for feedback? And you get Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde. Aka ghosted. But boy, do they tell a good story. Just ain't fucking true. Counter: companies deserve the same amount of time invested in their application as they spend on your response.

unglaublich 8mo ago

This can only be fixed by authors paying humans to read instead of the other way around.

jimkleiber 8mo ago

In 2020 at the start of covid, I did an experiment I called Project 35 where, for 35 days straight before my 35th birthday, I wrote 3 times per day, for 10 minutes each, I livestreamed it and whatever I wrote I would put directly into a book with no edits. While I didn't invite many people to join the calls (maybe fear, maybe just not wanting to coordinate it all), I found the process to be more raw, more human, and less perfect than 10x edited writing. It also helped me get better at typing in the moment and not rewriting everything, especially for social media, HN, and other places. Anyway, it's at https://www.jimkleiber.com/p35/ https://www.jimkleiber.com/p35/ if you wanna check it out, all sessions posted as blog posts, I think there's a link to the ebook (pay-what-you-want) and there may be audio (I recorded myself reading the writing right after each session). If you check it out, please let me know :-)

hidden80 8mo ago

I respect Oxide a lot. And here, too, with their non adoption of the marketing term (AI) for LLMs, ML.

cnees 8mo ago

Re: unsettling Perhaps it could replace any characters that will go on to be deleted with astrisks.

etler 8mo ago

I don't like AI writing because it's bad writing. It's convoluted and inefficient and doesn't get to the point. If someone writes something that feels like AI, it doesn't matter if it was or not because it's still bad writing. I'm not talking about having a cliche here and there, but rather when the text is just incredibly inefficient.

michaelcampbell 8mo ago

ai;dr is the new "looks shopped, I can tell by the pixels".