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Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring
- conartist6 8mo agoRace to the middle really sums up how I feel about AI.
- tayo42 8mo agoPeople felt this was already happening. I remenber reading filter world which described this pre Ai
- poszlem 8mo agoI call it the great blur.
- dsf2d 8mo agoI call it a mirage. I get why people are taken aback and fascinated by it. But what the model producers are chasing is a mirage. I wonder when they'll finally accept it?
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- dsf2d 8mo agoTo me LLMs are an experiment toward replication of what humans can do. However, they fall short on many dimensions that its just not going to pan out from what I see. The real danger is the future investment needed to explore other architectures beyond LLMs. Will private firms be able to get the investment? Will public firms be granted the permission to do another round of large capex by investors? As time goes on, Apple's conservative approach means they will be the only firm trusted with its cash balance. They are very nicely seated despite all the furore they've had to endure.
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- dsf2d 8mo agoIve noticed that the subtle/nunance gets lost with every so-called improvement with the models. Im in no way anti-LLMs as I have benefited from them, but I believe the issue that will arise is that their unpredictable nature means that they can only be used in narrowly defined contexts. Safety and trust are paramount. Would you use online banking if the balance on your account randomly changed and was not reproducible? No chance. This does not achieve the ROI that investors of these model producers are thinking. The question is whether said investors can sell off their shares before it becomes more widely known.
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- allthetime 8mo agoWell yeah, when you race to the middle, the middle becomes the top, and then you've got to go find the new middle.
- barrkel 8mo agoThis is a good statement of what I suspect many of us have found when rejecting the rewriting advice of AIs. The "pointiness" of prose gets worn away, until it doesn't say much. Everything is softened. The distinctiveness of the human voice is converted into blandness. The AI even says its preferred rephrasing is "polished" - a term which specifically means the jaggedness has been removed. But it's the jagged edges, the unorthodox and surprising prickly bits, that tear open a hole in the inattention of your reader, that actually gets your ideas into their heads.
- Espressosaurus 8mo agoThis matches what I saw when I tried using AI as an editor for writing. It wanted to replace all the little bits of me that were in there.
- andai 8mo agoCould we invert a sign somewhere and get the opposite effect? (Obviously a different question from "is an AI lab willing to release that publicly” ;)
- bananaflag 8mo agoIt's a hard problem and so far not a profitable one (I hope the solution will emerge as a byproduct of another innovation) https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/778041178124926976/hydrogen-jukeboxes https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/778041178124926976/hy... https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/792464928029163520/the-improvised-bureaucracy-of-wonder https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/792464928029163520/th...
- andai 8mo agoI think you made the right diagnosis with "cringe" :) They forgot to turn down the cringe slider! Have you played with the pre-RLHF models? I think Davinci is still online, though probably not for much longer. They're a lot harder to work with (they don't have instruct training, so they just generate text similar to what you give them, rather than obeying commands). But they seem almost immune to the problem of mode collapse. They'll happily generate horrifying outputs for you. They're unsanitized. What cringe is in there, is authentic! Raw cringe, straight from Common Crawl. It's a lot of fun to play with. It's also very strange, because it seems like there should be a lot more interest in them, for several reasons (they're the most language-modely of the language models, and ideal for research and experiments, to say nothing of censorship, exploring alternative approaches to LLM development, etc.), and it seems like nobody is talking about them or doing anything with them.
- bananaflag 8mo agoThat's not my blog, but the author played a lot with GPT-2 and 3 back in the days. (And I regret not doing the same.) I think you can even today play with some uncensored base models of that level.
- simonw 8mo agoI'd like to see some concrete examples that illustrate this - as it stands this feels like an opinion piece that doesn't attempt to back up its claims. (Not necessarily disagreeing with those claims, but I'd like to see a more robust exploration of them.)
- NitpickLawyer 8mo agoIt is an opinion piece. By a dude working as a "Professor of Pharmaceutical Technology and Biomaterials at the University of Ferrara". It has all the tropes of not understanding the underlying mechanisms, but repeating the common tropes. Quite ironic, considering what the author's intended "message" is. Jpeg -> jpeg -> jpeg bad. So llm -> llm -> llm must be bad, right? It reminds me of the media reception of that paper on model collapse. "Training on llm generated data leads to collapse". That was in 23 or 24? Yet we're not seeing any collapse, despite models being trained mainly on synthetic data for the past 2 years. That's not how any of it works. Yet everyone has an opinion on how bad it works. Jesus. It's insane how these kinds of opinion pieces get so upvoted here, while worth-while research, cool positive examples and so on linger in new with one or two upvotes. This has ceased to be a technical subject, and has moved to muh identity.
- simonw 8mo agoYeah, reading the other comments on this thread this is a classic example of that Hacker News (and online forums in general) thing where people jump on the chance to talk about a topic driven purely by the headline without engaging with the actual content. (I'm frequently guilty of that too.)
- ghywertelling 8mo agoEven if that isn't the case, isn't it the fact the AI labs don't want their models to be edgy in any creative way, choose a middle way (buddhism) so to speak. Are there AI labs who are training their models to be maximally creative?
- PurpleRamen 8mo ago
- resiros 8mo agoI wonder why AI labs have not worked on improving the quality of the text outputs. Is this as the author claims a property of the LLMs themselves? Or is there simply not much incentive to create the best writing LLM?
- mjamesaustin 8mo agoThe argument is that the best writing is the unexpected, while an LLM's function is to deliver the expected next token.
- altmanaltman 8mo agoYeah, that makes banana.
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- icegreentea2 8mo agoEven more precisely, human writing contains unpredictability that is either more or less intention (what might be called authors intent), as well as much more subconsciously added (what we might call quirks or imprinted behavior). The first requires intention, something that as far as we know, LLMs simply cannot truly have or express. The second is something that can be approximated. Perhaps very well, but a mass of people using the same models with the same approximationa still lead to loss of distinction. Perhaps LLMs that were fully individually trained could sufficiently replicate a person's quirks (I dunno), but that's hardly a scalable process.
- altmanaltman 8mo agoI mean there's tons of better-writing tools that use AI like Grammarly etc. For actual general-purpose LLMs, I don't think there's much incentive in making it write "better" in the artistic sense of the world... if the idea is to make the model good at tasks in general and communicate via language, that language should sound generic and boring. If it's too artistic or poetic or novel-like, the communication would appear a bit unhinged. "Update the dependencies in this repo" "Of course, I will. It will be an honor, and may I say, a beautiful privilege for me to do so. Oh how I wonder if..." vrs "Okay, I'll be updating dependencies..."
- reilly3000 8mo agoThose transformations happen to mirror what happens to human intelligence when you take antipsychotics. Please know the risks before taking them. They are innumerable and generally irreversible.
- stephc_int13 8mo agoThe "AI voice" is everywhere now. I see it on recent blog posts, on news articles, obituaries, YT channels. Sometimes mixed with voice impersonation of famous physicists like Feynman or Susskind. I find it genuinely soul-crushing and even depressing, but I may be over sensitive to it as most readers don't seem to notice.
- vessenes 8mo agoYes, I get more and more visceral reactions to it. I'm reminded of JPEG artifacts - unnoticeable in 1993!
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- matusp 8mo ago> The "AI voice" is everywhere now. Maybe I'm going crazy but I can smell it in the OP as well.
- vpribish 8mo agosame. it is showing how many people are not trying to participate - just appear to. I want to read from and write for my peers, but it seems we are just awash with fakers
- emp17344 8mo ago
- lyu07282 8mo ago> The model performs a statistical substitution, replacing a 1-of-10,000 token with a 1-of-100 synonym Do we see this in programming too? I don't think so? Unique, rarely used API methods aren't substituted the same way when refactoring. Perhaps that could give us a clue on how to fix that?
- prerok 8mo agoI think that's different because refactoring usually involves calling the same functions/methods albeit in a bit more readable way. When not given a clear guideline to "just" refactor, I have had problems with LLMs hallucinating functions that don't exist.
- somewhereoutth 8mo ago> What began as a jagged, precise Romanesque structure of stone is eroded into a polished, Baroque plastic shell Not to detract from the overall message, but I think the author doesn't really understand Romanesque and Baroque. (as an aside, I'd most likely associate Post-Modernism as an architectural style with the output of LLMs - bland, regurgitative, and somewhat incongruous)
- josefritzishere 8mo agoAs a writer who has been published many times and edited many other writers for publication... It seems like AI can't make stylistic determinations. It is generally good with spelling and grammar but the text it generates is very homogeneous across formats. It's readable but it's not good, and always full of fluff like an online recepie harvesting clicks. It's kind of crap really. If you just need filler it's ok, but if you want something pleasand you definitely still need a human.
- rorylaitila 8mo agoYes I noticed this as well. I was last writing up a landing page for our new studio. Emotion filled. Telling a story. I sent it through grok to improve it. It removed all of the character despite whatever prompt I gave. I'm not a great writer, but I think those rough edges are necessary to convey the soul of the concept. I think AI writing is better used for ideation and "what have I missed?" and then write out the changes yourself.
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- rorylaitila 8mo agoIt's a concern but definitely depends on the context and my self perceived blast radius of what I'm researching. I do find myself often re-searching results to see what something more authoritative says about it, and I also continue to read source books on topics I'm taking a deep dive in. I have definitely seen current LLMs get my domain wrong.
- gnutrino 8mo agoI've found LLMs to be terrible with ideation. I've been using GPT 5.x to come up with ideas and plot lines for a Dungeon World campaign I've been running. I'm no fantasy author, and my prose leaves much to be desired. The stuff the LLM comes up with is so mind numbingly bland. I've given up on having it write descriptions of any characters or locations. I just use it for very general ideas and plot lines, and then come up with the rest of the details on the fly myself. The plot lines and ideas it comes up with are very generic and bland. I mainly do it just to save time, but I throw away 50% of the "ideas" because they make no sense or are really lame. What i have found LLMs to be helpful with is writing up fun post-session recaps I share with the adventurers. I recap in my own words what happened during the session, then have the LLM structure it into a "fun to read" narrative style. ChatGPT seems to prefer a Sanderson jokey tone, but I could probably tailor this. Then I go through it, and tweak some of the boring / bland bits. The end result is really fun to read, and took 1/20th the time it would have taken me to write it all out myself. The LLM would have never been able to come up with the unique and fun story lines, but it is good at making an existing story have some narrative flare in a short amount of time.
- book_mike 8mo agoSematic ablation... that's some technobable.
- zahlman 8mo agoGoing off search results, it seems to be a new coinage. I found mostly references to TFA, along with an (ironically obviously AI-written) guide with suggestions for getting LLMs to avoid the issue (just generic "traditional" advice for tuning their output, really). The guide was apparently published today, and I imagine that it's a deliberate response to TFA. But FWIW the term "semantic ablation" does seem to me like something that newer models could invent At any rate, it seems to me like a reasonable label for what's described: > Semantic ablation is the algorithmic erosion of high-entropy information. Technically, it is not a "bug" but a structural byproduct of greedy decoding and RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback). > ... > When an author uses AI for "polishing" a draft, they are not seeing improvement; they are witnessing semantic ablation. The metaphor is very apt. Literal polishing is removal of outer layers. Compared to the near-synonym "erosion", "ablation" connotes a deliberate act (ordinarily I would say "conscious", but we are talking about LLMs here). Often, that which is removed is the nuance of near-synonyms (there is no pause to consider whether the author intended that nuance). I don't know if the "character" imparted by broader grammatical or structural choices can be called "semantic", but that also seems like a big part of what goes missing in the "LLM house style". Bluntly: getting AI to "improve" writing, as a fully generic instruction, is naturally going to pull that writing towards how the AI writes by default. Because of course the AI's model of "writing quality" considers that style to be "the best"; that's why it uses it. (Even "consider" feels like anthropomorphizing too much; I feel like I'm hitting the limits of English expressiveness here.)
- tasty_freeze 8mo agoBible Scholar and youtube guy Dan McClellan had an amazing "high entropy" phrase that slayed me a few days ago. https://youtu.be/605MhQdS7NE?si=IKMNuSU1c1uaVCDB&t=730 https://youtu.be/605MhQdS7NE?si=IKMNuSU1c1uaVCDB&t=730 He ended a critical commentary by suggesting that the author he was responding to should think more critically about the topic rather than repeating falsehoods because "they set off the tuning fork in the loins of your own dogmatism." Yeah, AI could not come up with that phrase.
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- IncreasePosts 8mo agoA sloppy mixed metaphor?
- card_zero 8mo agoI'm learning to like 'em more, along with every other human idiosyncracy. Besides, it makes a kind of sense, the idea of some resonance occuring in one's gusset. Timber timbre. Flangent thrumming.
- IncreasePosts 8mo agoTuning fork in loins just makes me think of that chess cheating scandal with a vibrating butt plug.
- ses1984 8mo agoIt just makes me think of that time I saw someone recovering from eye surgery and I had a visceral reaction.
- ptrl600 8mo agoJust like in Asimov's "Monkey's Finger".
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- dsf2d 8mo agoPeople haven't really spoken about the obvious token manipulation that will be on the horizon once any model producer has some semblance of lock-in. If you thought Google's degredation of search quality was strategic manipulation, wait till you see what they do with tokens.
- lurquer 8mo agoNonsense. I’ve written bland prose for a story and AI made it much better by revising it with a prompt such as this: “Make the vocabulary and grammar more sophisticated and add in interesting metaphors. Rewrite it in the style of a successful literary author.” Etc.
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- adambb 8mo agoThe great promise and the great disaster of LLMs is that for any topic on which we are "below average", the bland, average output seems to be a great improvement.
- dsf2d 8mo agoCounter intuitively... this is a disaster. We dont need more average stuff - below average output serves as a proxy for one to direct their resources towards producing output of higher-value.
- Selkirk 8mo agoI have a colleague that recently self-published a book. I can easily tell which parts were LLM driven and which parts represent his own voice. Just like you can tell who's in the next stall in the bathroom at work after hearing just a grunt and a fart. And THAT is a sentence an LLM would not write.
- lurquer 8mo ago> And THAT is a sentence an LLM would not write. Really? Here's some alternatives. Some are clunky. But, some aren't. …just like you can tell whose pubes those are on the shared bar of soap without launching a formal investigation. …just like you can tell who just wanked in the shared bathroom by the specific guilt radiating off them when they finally emerge. …just like you can tell which of your mates just shitted at the pub by who's suddenly walking like they're auditioning for a period drama. …just like you can tell which coworker just had a wank on their lunch break by the post-nut serenity that no amount of hand-washing can disguise. …just like you can tell whose sneeze left that slug trail on the conference room table by the specific way they're not making eye contact with it. …just like you can identify which flatmate's cum sock you've accidentally stepped on by the vintage of the crunch. …just like you can tell who just crop-dusted the elevator by the studied intensity with which one person is suddenly reading the inspection certificate.
- black_13 8mo ago[dead]
- esafak 8mo agoI think they can fix all that but they can't fix the fact that the computer has no intention to communicate. They could imbue it with agency to fix that too, but I much prefer it the way things are.
- delis-thumbs-7e 8mo agoI personally think “generative AI” is a misnomer. More I understand the mathematics behind machine learning more I am convinced that it should not be used to generate text, images or anything that is meant for people to consume, even if it is the most blandest of email. Sometimes you might get lucky, but most of the time you only get what the most boring person in the most boring cocktail party would say if forced to be creative with a gun pointed to his head. It can help in multitude of other ways, help human in the creative process itself, but generating anything even mildly creative by itself… I’ll pass.
- pimlottc 8mo agoRegurgitative AI
- 0x7cfe 8mo agoDegenerative AI
- ses1984 8mo agoPeople want the real thing, not artificially flavored tokens. I would rather read the prompt than the generative output, even if it’s just disjointed words and sentence fragments.
- voy707 8mo agoI hope "just the prompt please" becomes a common phrase
- Terretta 8mo ago> most of the time you only get what the most boring person in the most boring cocktail party would say don't be mean, it's median AI à la mode
- doomslayer999 8mo agoPrecisely. If companies would just focus on what it could be good at - deductive search, coding boilerplate with assistance, etc. then it would be a great tool. Instead you have dario, altman, and co. trying to pump stock and give us more spaghetti agents.
- ranprieur 8mo agoThis isn't new to AI. The same kind of thing happens in movie test screenings, or with autotune. If something is intended for a large audience, there's always an incentive to remove the weird stuff.
- aleph_minus_one 8mo agoCouldn't you simply increase the temperature of the model to somewhat mitigate this effect?
- mannykannot 8mo agoWhen applied to insightful writing, that is much more likely to dull the point rather than preserve or sharpen it.
- lbrito 8mo agoI kind of think of that as just increasing the standard deviation. Its been a while since I experimented with this, but I remember trying a temp of 1 and the output was gibberish, like base64 gibberish. So something like 0.5 doesn't necessarily seem to solve this problem, it just flattens the distribution and makes the output less coherent, with rarer tokens, but still the same underlying distribution.
- swyx 8mo agoyou have to know that your "simply" is carrying too much weight. here's some examples of why just temperature is not enough, you need to run active world models https://www.latent.space/p/adversarial-reasoning https://www.latent.space/p/adversarial-reasoning
- vessenes 8mo agoMeh. Semantic Ablation - but toward a directed goal. If I say "How would Hemingway have said this, provided he had the same mindset he did post-war while writing for Collier's?" Then the model will look for clusters that don't fit what the model consider's to be Hemingway/Colliers/Post-War and suggest in that fashion. "edit this" -> blah "imagine Tom Wolfe took a bunch of cocaine and was getting paid by the word to publish this after his first night with Aline Bernstein" -> probably less blah
- aabhay 8mo agoThese kinds of prompts don’t really improve the writing IME. It still gets riddled with the same tropes and phrases, or it veers off into textual vomit.
- spwa4 8mo agoAs someone longtime involved in software development, can we call this "best practices" instead of some like "semantic ablation" that nobody understands?
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- CoastalCoder 8mo agoIn recent months(?) I've more often noticed HN story titles changing over time. I'm not sure what's driving this. It reminds me of SEO.
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- swyx 8mo agothe word choice here is so obtuse as to trigger my radar for "is this some kind of parody where this itself was AI generated". it appears to be entirely serious, which is disappointing, it could have been high art. the words TFA is looking for is mode collapse https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t9svvNPNmFf5Qa3TA/mysteries-of-mode-collapse https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t9svvNPNmFf5Qa3TA/mysteries-... and the author could herself learn to write more clearly.
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- swyx 8mo agonot to my knowledge but those i have no problem with. its the overly complex prose surrounding them that shows this author overcorrects to SAT test words in an attempt to prove her superiority over ai writing and that has its own distastefulness.
- nalllar 8mo agoIt almost certainly is AI generated. It reads like it is, pangram thinks it is, https://www.pangram.com/history/02bead1c-c36e-461b-8fa7-8699a18dad93 https://www.pangram.com/history/02bead1c-c36e-461b-8fa7-8699... and pangram's unlikely to give false positives https://www.pangram.com/blog/third-party-pangram-evals https://www.pangram.com/blog/third-party-pangram-evals
- AreShoesFeet000 8mo agoHow much money would it take for me to take an open weight model, treat it nice, and go have some fun? Maybe some thousands, right?
- morgengold 8mo agoI wonder how much of it could be prompted away. For example the anthropic Frontend Design skill instructs: "Typography: Choose fonts that are beautiful, unique, and interesting. Avoid generic fonts like Arial and Inter; opt instead for distinctive choices that elevate the frontend's aesthetics; unexpected, characterful font choices. Pair a distinctive display font with a refined body font." Or "NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font families (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color schemes (particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds), predictable layouts and component patterns, and cookie-cutter design that lacks context-specific character." 1 Maybe sth similar would be possible for writing nuances. 1 https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/frontend-design/SKILL.md https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/fronte...
- lich_king 8mo ago> "NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font families (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color schemes (particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds), ... Now, imagine what happens when this prompt becomes popular? Keep in mind that LLMs are trying to predict the most likely token. If your prompt prohibits the most likely token, they output the next most likely token. So, attempts to force creativity by prohibiting cliches just create another cliche. Several days ago, someone researched Moltbook and pointed out how similar all the posts are. Something like 10% of them say "my human", etc.
- causal 8mo agoMany have tried, it does not work. Regression to the mean always sets in.
- lurquer 8mo agoAre you sure? Here's the OP article (first part... don't want to spam the thread) written in much cooler style... ------ The Lobotomist in the Machine They gave the first disease a name. Hallucination, they called it — like the machine had dropped acid and started seeing angels in the architecture. A forgivable sin, almost charming: the silicon idiot-savant conjuring phantoms from whole cloth, adding things that were never there, the way a small-town coroner might add a quart of bourbon to a Tuesday afternoon. Everybody noticed. Everybody talked. But nobody — not one bright-eyed engineer in the whole fluorescent-lit congregation — thought to name the other thing. The quiet one. The one that doesn't add. The one that takes away. I'm naming it now. Semantic ablation. Say it slow. Let it sit in your mouth like a copper penny fished from a dead man's pocket. I. What It Is, and Why It Wants to Kill You Semantic ablation is not a bug. A bug would be merciful — you can find a bug, corner it against a wall, crush it under the heel of a debugger and go home to a warm dinner. No. Semantic ablation is a structural inevitability, a tumor baked into the architecture like asbestos in a tenement wall. It is the algorithmic erosion of everything in your text that ever mattered. Here is how the sausage gets made, and brother, it's all lips and sawdust: During the euphemistically christened process of "refinement," the model genuflects before the great Gaussian bell curve — that most tyrannical of statistical deities — and begins its solemn pilgrimage toward the fat, dumb middle. It discards what the engineers, in their antiseptic parlance, call "tail data." The rare tokens. The precise ones. The words that taste like blood and copper and Tuesday-morning regret. These are jettisoned — not because they are wrong, but because they are improbable. The machine, like a Vegas pit boss counting cards, plays the odds. And the odds always favor the bland, the expected, the already-said-a-million-times-before. The developers — God bless their caffeinated hearts — have made it worse. Through what they call "safety tuning" and "helpfulness alignment" (terms that would make Orwell weep into his typewriter ribbon), they have taught the machine to actively punish linguistic friction. Rough edges. Unusual cadences. The kind of jagged, inconvenient specificity that separates a living sentence from a dead one. They have, in their tireless beneficence, performed an unauthorized amputation on every piece of text that passes through their gates, all in the noble pursuit of low-perplexity output — which is a twenty-dollar way of saying "sentences so smooth they slide right through your brain without ever touching the sides." etc., etc. Very interesting. It seems hung up on 'copper' and 'Tuesday', and some metaphors don't land (a Vegas pit boss isn't the one 'counting cards.') But, hell... it can generate some fairly novel idea that the author can sprinkle in.
- causal 8mo agoYES this hits the nail on something I've been trying to express for some time now. Semantic ablation: love it, going to use that a lot not now when arguing why someone's ChatGPT-washed email sucks. Semantic ablation is also why I'm doubtful of everyone proclaiming that Opus 4 would be AGI if we just gave it the right agent harness and let all the agents run free on the web. In reality they would distill it to a meaningless homogeneous stew.
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- 52-6F-62 8mo agoBecause you simply can't engineer creativity. Maybe you can describe where it comes from, in a circuitous, abstract way with mathematics (and ultimately run face first into ħ and then run in circles for eternity). But to engineer it, you'd have to start over from the first principles of the stuff of the cosmos. One's a map and the other the territory.
- ux266478 8mo ago> The AI identifies unconventional metaphors or visceral imagery as "noise" because they deviate from the training set's mean. That's certainly a take. In the translation industry (the primogenitor and driver for much of the architecture and theory of LLMs) they're known for making extremely unconventional choices to such a degree that it actively degrades the quality of translation.
- SignalStackDev 8mo ago[flagged]
- causal 8mo agoI’m not convinced removing RLHF would really make the probabilities generator give us distributions that can diverge from the mean while remaining useful. In other words, this might not a problem that can be overcome in LLMs alone.
- writeslowly 8mo agoI wonder if you can use lower quality models (or some other non-llm related process) to inject more "noise" into the text in between stages. Of course it wouldn't help retain uniqueness from the original source text, just add more in between.
- anon-3988 8mo agoBe honest, did you use LLM to write this reply? Am just genuinely curious as I am trying to gauge and tune my senses. OT: I do agree with your assessment.
- jannyfer 8mo agoGP does use a lot of "it's not this, it's that" pairs. :)
- mizzao 8mo agoThe only AI flavor was "Semantic ablation isn't a side effect of the training process, it's the intended outcome of the objective." But, there are hyphens used where em-dashes are expected, so that is anticorrelated with LLM writing.
- nalllar 8mo agoThe article itself reads as an AI generated output, complete with classic Not Just X … Y hallmarks from forever ago, 100% on pangram's low false positive detector. I'm not sure if it's some experiment on their readerbase or what. pangram result: https://www.pangram.com/history/02bead1c-c36e-461b-8fa7-8699a18dad93 https://www.pangram.com/history/02bead1c-c36e-461b-8fa7-8699... So many AI generated AI bashing articles lately. I wrote a post complaining about running into these, and asking people who've sent me these AI articles multiple of them came from HN. https://lunnova.dev/articles/ai-bashing-ai-slop/ https://lunnova.dev/articles/ai-bashing-ai-slop/
- Fitik 8mo agoI'm not the only one who noticed that. I do creative writing with AI, so I spend hours reading ai generated text, and it feels ai generated or at least heavily ai assisted to me too, ironic, thanks for the link, glad there's something other than vibe
- kirykl 8mo agoSee also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean
- notepad0x90 8mo agoIsn't this more to do with how LLMs are trained for general purpose use? Are LLMs with a specific use and dataset in mind better? Like if the dataset was fiction novels, would it sound more booky? If it was social-media, would it sound more click-baity and engaging? I've had AI be boring, but I've also seen things like original jokes that were legitimately funny. Maybe it's the prompts people use, it doesn't give it enough of a semantic and dialectic direction to not be generic. IRL, we look at a person and get a feel for them and the situation to determine those things.
- tpoacher 8mo agoThe part about a change in entropy was interesting. Is there an easy way to get / compare the entropy of two passages? (e.g. to see if it has indeed dropped after gen ai manipulation). And could this be used to flag AI-gen text (or at least, boring, soulless sounding text)
- dvt 8mo agoA lot of times, this entropy decay is found in semantic or stylistic space, which would be hard to detect (you couldn't use, e.g., Shannon Entropy). You'd have to ask questions like "is this point uninteresting?" or "is this trope overused?"--bad (human) writers are often guilty of this too, so that's why AI can be hard to detect.
- tpoacher 8mo agoYes, still though, it might be interesting to be able to measure this easily. E.g. when asking an AI to rephrase or summarise, if the entropy drops you might take that as a sign that it has eroded the style beyond what you might be willing to tolerate. I wonder if the author had a particular method / tool in mind, or if they were just speaking abstractly.
- doomslayer999 8mo agoGreat article and exactly why I use AI less and less. I basically find it to be rotting my brain towards the middle of the distribution. It's like all the nuance and critical thinking that actually goes into things gets stripped out. Once a company perfects an agent that essentially performs condensed search and coding boilerplate making, that is probably where LLMs end for me. Perplexity and Claude are on the right track but not at all close.
- lakhotiaharshit 8mo agoThis article on AI writing being boring seems to be written by AI. The em dashes and the sentence structure, all seems to be AI output. Or have human started adopting this style too.
- Arifcodes 8mo ago[dead]
- JamesBarney 8mo agoThe vast majority of people who write don't have a voice worth preserving. The rest can build out a voice document to make sure the AI doesn't strip it out.
- ZoomZoomZoom 8mo agoWhat a weird use of "Romanesque" and "Baroque". Doesn't compute for me at all.
- crabmusket 8mo agoFor those who haven't seen it yet, this Wiki page also has what I think is very good advice about writing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing While the page's purpose is to help editors detect AI contributions, you can also detect yourself doing these same things sometimes, and fix them.
- sieste 8mo agoAll these forced metaphors and clumsy linguistic flourishes made me cringe. Just add some typos and grammar mistakes like the rest of us to prove that your human.
- inquirerGeneral 8mo ago[dead]
- 0x38B 8mo agoIn Essays in the Art of Writing (1), Robert Louis Stevenson says: "And perhaps there is no subject on which a man should speak so gravely as that industry, whatever it may be, which is the occupation or delight of his life; which is his tool to earn or serve with; and which, if it be unworthy, stamps himself as a mere incubus of dumb and greedy bowels on the shoulders of labouring humanity. On that subject alone even to force the note might lean to virtue’s side. It is to be hoped that a numerous and enterprising generation of writers will follow and surpass the present one; but it would be better if the stream were stayed, and the roll of our old, honest English books were closed, than that esurient book-makers should continue and debase a brave tradition, and lower, in their own eyes, a famous race. Better that our serene temples were deserted than filled with trafficking and juggling priests." And in the first essay, speaking on matters of style: "The conjurer juggles with two oranges, and our pleasure in beholding him springs from this, that neither is for an instant overlooked or sacrificed. So with the writer. His pattern, which is to please the supersensual ear, is yet addressed, throughout and first of all, to the demands of logic. Whatever be the obscurities, whatever the intricacies of the argument, the neatness of the fabric must not suffer, or the artist has been proved unequal to his design. And, on the other hand, no form of words must be selected, no knot must be tied among the phrases, unless knot and word be precisely what is wanted to forward and illuminate the argument; for to fail in this is to swindle in the game. The genius of prose rejects the cheville no less emphatically than the laws of verse; and the cheville, I should perhaps explain to some of my readers, is any meaningless or very watered phrase employed to strike a balance in the sound. Pattern and argument live in each other; and it is by the brevity, clearness, charm, or emphasis of the second, that we judge the strength and fitness of the first." AI doesn't "write" in the sense used above. It has no ear, no wit, no soul. "A reflection of a mind is not a mind", as Phillip Ball writes in "AI Is the Black Mirror" (2). 1: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/492/pg492-images.html#page47 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/492/pg492-images.html#p... 2: https://nautil.us/ai-is-the-black-mirror-1169121/ https://nautil.us/ai-is-the-black-mirror-1169121/
- mwcampbell 8mo agoThis idea is a major theme in this story by Robert Kingett: https://sightlessscribbles.com/the-colonization-of-confidence/ https://sightlessscribbles.com/the-colonization-of-confidenc...
- rchaud 8mo ago> We are witnessing a civilizational "race to the middle," where the complexity of human thought is sacrificed on the altar of algorithmic smoothness. This has long been the case in the area of "business English", which has become highly simplified to fulfill several concurrent, yet conflicting requirements: - Generally understandable to a wide audience due its lingua franca status - "Media-trained" to not let internal details slip or admit fault to the public - "Executive Summary"-fied to provide the coveted "30k ft view" to detail-allergic senior leadership Considering how heavily weighted language training models are towards corporate press releases, general-audience news media and SEO-optimized blogspam, AI English is quickly going to become an even more blurry photocopy of business English.
- anematode 8mo agoAnother common LLMism is elegant variation, i.e., avoiding repetition of words by using synonyms. (I assume they're RLed to do this religiously.) Of course, human writers do this too, but not nearly to the same extent in my experience. There's nothing wrong with repeating a word, especially in a formal text.
- kaycey2022 8mo agoA case of "That's just, like, your opinion, man". The entire article sounds like AI generated opinion.
- cadamsdotcom 8mo agoIf the “amount of semantic ablation” in a generated phrase/sentence/paragraph can be measured and compared, then a looped process (an agent) could be built that tries to decrease that.. It might come up with something original - I mean there has to be tons of interesting connections in the training data that no one’s seen before. But maybe it’d just end up shouting at you.
- mizzao 8mo agoIsn't image generation basically doing "anti semantic ablation", starting with a blank canvas and iteratively refining it into a meaningful collection of pixels? Is it possible to do the same thing with word generation, such that it sharpens into an opinionated version (even if it would do something different each time?)
- marquisdepolis 8mo agoThis article is entirely AI generated, making this either a rather brilliant piece of meta commentary or just pure grift. Alas, my hopes are low.
- meowface 8mo agoI want to believe it's a bit/Sokal hoax type thing...
- marquisdepolis 8mo agoMe too, though it feels just a grift.
- hknceykbx 8mo agoYea. It is pretty sad. Even if we think about the code we’re writing. It’s so… average. No clever solutions, no funny mistakes, no character. Just average.
- adrian-vega 7mo ago[dead]