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This 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
by barrkel 8mo ago
This 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.
- amelius 8mo agoI'm sure this can be corrected by AI companies.
- q3k 8mo agoJust let my work have a soul, please.
- amelius 8mo agoEh, it's not __that__ simple.
- ses1984 8mo agoIt is, just don’t use a thing with no soul like ai if soul is what you’re after.
- AreShoesFeet000 8mo agoThat is NOT possible.
- q3k 8mo agoWhy not?
- AreShoesFeet000 8mo agoBecause even though at work it looks like you’re tasked with creating use values, you’re only there as long as the use values you create can be exchanged in the market for a profit. So every humane drive to genuinely improve your work will clash with the external conditions of your existence within that setting. You’re not there to serve people, create beautiful things, solve problems, nu-uh. You’re there to keep capital flowing. It’s soulless.
- Angostura 8mo agoUnless you work in the public sector, non-profit or charity.
- AreShoesFeet000 8mo agoTo think that “non-profit” work is actually non-profit work is just to not have grasped the nature of labor. You have to ask yourself: Am I producing use values for the satisfaction of human needs or am I working on making sure the appropriation of value extraction from the production of use values continues happening? In some very extreme cases, such as in the Red Cross or reformist organizations, your job looks very clear, direct, and “soulful”. You’re directly helping desperate people. But why have people gotten into that situation? What is the downstream effect of having you helping them. It’s profit. It’s always profit. You’re salvaging humanity for parts to be bought and sold again. It doesn’t make a dishonest work. It’s just equally soulless.
- Angostura 8mo ago
- yoyohello13 8mo agoThe question is… why? What is the actual human benefit (not monetary).
- JamesBarney 8mo agoIf AI wrote and thought better by default then I wouldn't have to read the AI slop my co-workers send me.
- 8bitsrule 8mo agoIME, in prose writing, arguing with LLM can help a newer writer to gather 'the facts' (to help with research) and 'the objections to the facts' (same result) to anticipate an initial approach to the material. This can save a lot of organizational time. After which, newer writer can more confidently approach topics in their own voice.
- co_king_5 8mo ago[flagged]
- gdulli 8mo agoMediocrity as a Service
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- DuperPower 8mo agoartificial mediocrity
- devmor 8mo ago> 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. This brings to mind what I think is a great description of the process LLMs exert on prose: sanding. It's an algorithmic trend towards the median, thus they are sanding down your words until they're a smooth average of their approximate neighbors.
- svara 8mo agoI think that mostly depends on how good a writer you are. A lot of people aren't, and the AI legitimately writes better. As in, the prose is easier to understand, free of obvious errors or ambiguities. But then, the writing is also never great. I've tried a couple of times to get it to write in the style of a famous author, sometimes pasting in some example text to model the output on, but it never sounds right.
- Retric 8mo agoI find most people can write way better than AI, they simply don’t put in the effort. Which is the real issue, we’re flooding channels not designed for such low effort submissions. AI slop is just SPAM in a different context.
- andrewflnr 8mo agoYou may be in a bubble of smart, educated people. Either way, one of the key ways to "put in the effort" is practice. People who haven't practiced often don't write well even if they're trying hard in the moment. Not even in terms of beautiful writing, just pure comprehensibility.
- Retric 8mo agoI may be in a bubble of smart people, but IMO AI consistently far worse than many high school works I’ve read in terms of actual substance and coherent structure. Of course I’ve had arguments where people praise AI output then I’ve literally pointed out dozens of mistakes and they just kind of shrug saying it’s not important. So I acknowledge people judge writing very differently than I do. It just feels weird when I’d give something a 15% and someone else would happily slap on a B+.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- JamesBarney 8mo agoMy experience has been (ordered from best to worst) 1. Author using AI well 2. Author not using AI 3. Author using AI poorly With the gap between 1 and 2 being driven by the underlying quality of the writer and how well they use AI. A really good writer sees marginal improvements and a really poor one can see vast improvements.
- folbec 8mo agoI think it is also fairly similar to the kind of discourse a manager in pretty much any domain will produce. He lacks (or lost thru disuse) technical expertise on the subject, so he uses more and more fuzzy words, leaky analogies, buzzwords. This maybe why AI generated content has so much success among leaders and politicians.
- coke12 8mo agoEvery group want to label some outgroup as naively benefiting from AI. For programmers, apparently it's the pointy haired bosses. For normies, it's the programmers. Be careful of this kind of thinking, it's very satisfying but doesn't help you understand the world.
- baxtr 8mo agoI think it’s essential to realize that AI is a tool for mainstream tasks like composing a standard email and not for the edges. The edges are where interesting stuff happens. The boring part can be made more efficient. I don’t need to type boring emails, people who can’t articulate well will be elevated. It’s the efficient popularization of the boring stuff. Not much else.
- layer8 8mo agoIt contributes to making “standard” emails boring. I rather enjoy reading emails in each sender’s original voice. People who can’t articulate well aren’t elevated, instead they are perceived to be sending bland slop if they use LLMs to conceal that they can’t express themselves well.
- dingnuts 8mo ago[dead]
- anon-3988 8mo ago> The edges are where interesting stuff happens. The boring part can be made more efficient. I don’t need to type boring emails, people who can’t articulate well will be elevated. I think that boring emails should not be written. What kind of boring emails do you NEED to be written, but not WANT to write? Those are exactly the kind of email that SHOULD NOT be passed through an LLM. If you need to say yes/no. You don't want to take the whole email conversation and let LLM generate a story about why you said yes/no. If you want to apply for a leave, just make it optimal "Hi <X>, I want to take leave from Y to Z. Thanks". You don't want to create 2 pages of justification for why you want to take this leave to see your family and friends. In fact, for every LLM output, I want to see the input instead. What did they have in mind? If I have the input, I can ask LLM to generate 1 million outputs if I really want to read an elaboration. The input is what matters. If I have the input, I can always generate an output. If I have the output, I don't know what was the input (i.e. the original intention).
- lucyjojo 8mo agowhen i pass my writings through ai the output is generally only marginally bigger than the input, and it derisks things a lot making my prose a nice beige.
- piker 8mo agoBryan Cantrill referred to it as "normcore" on a podcast, and that's the perfect description.
- DuperPower 8mo agono but its bad writing It repeats information, It adds superfluous stuff, doesnt produce more specific forms of saying things, you are making It sounds like its "too perfect" when its bland because its artificial dumbness not artificial intelligence
- johnnienaked 8mo agoWell said. In music, it's very similar. The jarring, often out of key tones are the ones that are the most memorable, the signatures that give a musical piece its uniqueness and sometimes even its emotional points. I don't think it's possible for AI to ever figure this out, because there's something about being human that is necessary to experiencing or even describing it. You cannot "algorithmize" the unspoken.