8 ms·
What is happening to writing? Cognitive debt, Claude Code, the space around AI
- jongjong 8mo agoI agree with the assessment that pure writing (by a human) is over. Content is going to matter a lot more. It's going to be tough for fiction authors to break through. Sadly, I don't think the average consumer has sufficiently good taste to tell when something is genuinely novel. People often prefer the carefully formulated familiar garbage over the creative gems; this was true before AI and, IMO, will continue to be true after AI. This is not just about writing, it's about art in general. There will be a subset of people who can see through the form and see substance and those will be able to identify non-AI work but they will continue to be a minority. The masses will happily consume the slop. The masses have poor taste and they're more interested in "comfort food" ideas than actually novel ideas. Novelty just doesn't do it for them. Most people are not curious, new ideas don't interest them. These people will live and breathe AI slop and they will feel uncomfortable if presented with new material, even if wrapped in a layer of AI (e.g. human-written core ideas, rewritten by AI). I feel like that about most books, music and pop culture in general; it was slop and it will continue to be slop... It was the same basic ideas about elves, dragons, wizards, orcs, kings, queens, etc... Just reorganized and mashed with different overarching storylines "a difficult journey" or "epic battles" with different wording. Most people don't understand the difference between pure AI-generated content (seeded by a small human input) and human-generated content which was rewritten by AI (seeded by a large human input) because most people don't care about and never cared about substance. Their entire lives may be about form over substance.
- apsurd 8mo agoWhat is the difference between writing and content?
- RyanHamilton 8mo agoI would guess he's looking to compare the equivalent of fast-food to fine-dining or nutritious eating.
- jongjong 8mo agoYeah, I meant 'content' in terms of the intrinsic value, the 'nutritional value' underlying the writing... The message, the story, the information content. Actually it's kind of dystopian to think of it; that the word 'content' has been appropriated to refer to an arbitrarily broad range of media products... The word 'content' used to be associated with the word 'substance' but in a modern context, it's actually more closely associated with the concept of 'form' as the word emphasizes a variety of media... What happened to the term "multimedia"? IMO this is what I would refer to when some people say content... I mean, there's no content in content... It's empty, it's all smoke and mirrors.
- apsurd 8mo agoThis is a good point. I did indeed default into "content = media" whereas yes in fact "content" used to mean the meat, the substance. Thanks for replying, made me think about it.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Aldipower 8mo agoWho or what is "the masses" actually?
- altruios 8mo agoReminded of this clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHJbSvidohg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHJbSvidohg But as much as it pains me to admit... the current state of America is the slopocalypse. A slopalanche. A slopnado. AI cats waking people up in the middle of the night, blasting down doors, glitching out. All produced by slop-slingers. It's rather bleak for long form attention content, human created or not. Its a war of/on attention. A war to secure your attention during the time that you would otherwise think for yourself. Keep off the short form content, is my advice.
- pawelduda 8mo agoAbout the article that's referenced in the beginning - that sentiment presented in it honestly sounds like AI version of cryptocurrency euphoria just as the bubble burst. "You are not ready for what's going to happen to the economy", "crypto will replace tradfi, experts agree". The article is sitting at almost 100M views after just a week and has strong FOMO vibes. To be honest, it's very conflicting for me to believe that, because I've been using AI and compared to crypto, it doesn't just feel like magic, it also does magic. However, I can't help but think of this parallel and the possibilty that somehow the AI bubble could right now be starting to stall/regress. The only problem is that I just don't see how such a scenario would play out, given how good and useful these tools are
- davtyan1202 8mo ago[dead]
- caseyohara 8mo agoMy spidey-sense: the "it isn't X, it's Y" construct and the dreaded em dash.
- apsurd 8mo agoAxios got traction because it heavily condensed news into more scannable content for the twitter, insta, Tok crowd. So AI is this on massive steroids. It is unsettling but it seems a recurring need to point out that across the board many of "it's because of AI" things were already happening. "Post truth" is one I'm most interested in. AI condenses it all on a surreal and unsettling timeline. But humans are still humans. And to me, that means that I will continue to seek out and pay for good writing like The Atlantic. btw I've enjoyed listening to articles via their auto-generated NOA AI voice thing. Additionally, not all writing serves the same purpose. The article makes these sweeping claims about "all of writing". Gets clicks I guess, but to the point, most of why and what people read is toward some immediate and functional need. Like work, like some way to make money, indirectly. Some hack. Some fast-forwarding of "the point". No wonder AI is taking over that job. And then there's creative expression and connection. And yes I know AI is taking over all the creative industries too. What I'm saying is we've always been separating "the masses" from those that "appreciate real art". Same story.
- plastic-enjoyer 8mo ago> "Post truth" is one I'm most interested in. I have this theory that the post-truth era began with the invention of the printing press and gained iteratively more traction with each revolution in information technology.
- Finbel 8mo agoSo slightly before 1440 was peak Truth for humanity?
- yannyu 8mo agoI think you're right, but I also think it's worthwhile to look at Edward Bernays in the early 1900s and his specific influence on how companies and governments to this day shape deliberately shape public opinion in their favor. There's an argument that his work and the work of his contemporaries was a critical point in the flooding of the collective consciousness with what we would consider propaganda, misinformation, or covert advertising.
- dtf 8mo ago"Is Claude Code junk food, though? ... although I have barely written a line of code on my own, the cognitive work of learning the architecture — developing a new epistemological framework for “how developers think” — feels real." Might this also apply to learning about writing? If have barely written a line of prose on my own, but spent a year generating a large corpus of it aided by these fabulous machines, might I also come to understand "how writers think"? I love the later description of writing as a "special, irreplaceable form of thinking forged from solitary perception and [enormous amounts of] labor", where “style isn’t something you apply later; it’s embedded in your perception" (according to Amis). Could such a statement ever apply to something as crass as software development?
- girvo 8mo agoMy current bugbear is how art is held up as creativity and worthy of societal protection and scorn against AI muscling in on it While the same people in the same comments say it’s fine to replace programming with it When pressed they talk about creativity, as if software development has none…
- arctic-true 8mo agoThe easiest job to automate is someone else’s.
- yason 8mo agoArt has two facets. First is if you like it. If you do, you don't need to care where it came from. Second is the art as cultured and defined by the artistic elites. They don't care if art is liked or likable, they care about the pedigree, i.e. where it came from, and that it fits what they consider worthy art. Between these two is what I call filler art: stuff that's rather indifferent and not very notable, but often crosses over some minimum bar that it's accepted by, and maybe popular among average people who aren't that seriously interested in art. In the first category, AI is no problem. If you enjoy what you see or hear, it doesn't make a difference if it was created by which kind of artist or AI. In the second category, for the elite, AI art is no less unacceptable than current popular art or, for that matter, anything at all that doesn't fit their own definition of real art. Makes no difference. Then the filler art.. the bar there is not very high but it will likely improve with AI. It's nothing that's been seriously invested in so far, and it's cheaper to let AI create it rather than poorly paid people.
- ayoung5555 8mo agoAs much as the general public seems to be turning against AI, people only seem to care when they're aware it's AI. Those of us intentionally aware of it are better tuned to identify LLM-speak and generated slop. Most human writing isn't good. Take LinkedIn, for example. It didn't suddenly become bad because of LLM-slop posts - humans pioneered its now-ubiquitous style. And now even when something is human-written, we're already seeing humans absorb linguistic patterns common to LLM writing. That said, I'm confident slop from any platform with user-generated content will eventually fade away from my feeds because the algorithms will pick up on that as a signal. (edit to add from my feeds) What concerns me most is that there's absolutely no way this isn't detrimental to students. While AI can be a tool in STEM, I'm hearing from teachers among family and friends that everything students write is from an LLM. Leaning on AI to write code I'd otherwise write myself might be a slight net negative on my ability to write future code - but brains are elastic enough that I could close an n month gap in 1/2n months time or something. From middle school to university, students are doing everything for the first time, and there's no recovering habits or memories that never formed in the first place. They made the ACT easier 2 years ago (reduced # of questions) and in the US the average score has set a new record low every year since then. Not only is there no clear path to improvement, there's an even clearer path to things getting worse.
- unyttigfjelltol 8mo agoI spent several years trying to get ground truth out of digital medical records and I would draw this parallel to AI slop: With traditional medical records, you could see what the practitioner did and covered because only that was in the record. With computerized records, the intent, thought process, most signal you would use to validate internal consistency, was hidden behind a wall of boilerplate and formality that armored the record against scrutiny. Bad writing on LinkedIn is self-evident. Everything about it stinks. AI slop is like a Trojan Horse for weak, undeveloped thoughts. They look finished, so they sneak into your field of view and consume whatever additional attention is required to finally realize that despite the slick packaging, this too is trash. So “AI slop,” in this worldview, is a complaint that historical signals of quality simply based on form, no longer are useful gatekeepers for attention.
- submeta 8mo agoI wonder whether we will see a shift back toward human generated, organic content, writing that is not perfectly polished or exhaustively articulated. For an LLM, it is effortless to smooth every edge and fully flesh out every thought. For humans, it is not. After two years of reading increasing amounts of LLM generated text, I find myself appreciating something different: concise, slightly rough writing that is not optimized to perfection, but clearly written by another human being
- xfil 8mo agoIf LLMs presently aren't capable of matching the style quirks you're describing, isn't it likely they'll be able to in the near future? To me this feels like a problem that'll either need to be addressed legally or left to authors to somehow convince their audiences to trust that their work is their own.
- kittikitti 8mo agoI think people hate AI generated writing more than they like human curated writing. At the same time, I find that people like AI content more than my writing. I write, comment, and blog in many different places and I notice that my AI generated content does much better in terms of engagement. I'm not a writer, I code, so it might be that my writing is not professional. Whereas my code-by-hand still edges out against AI. We need to value human content more. I find that many real people eventually get banned while the bots are always forced to follow rules. The Dead Internet hypothesis sounds more inevitable under these conditions. Indeed we all now have a neuron that fires every time we sense AI content. However, maybe we need to train another neuron that activates when content is genuine.
- shimman 8mo agoHow do you know if your engagement was by real humans or not? I'd also assume bot traffic is way more accepted on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Especially any Meta owned platform, they have a history of lying to people about numbers and were never punished for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video#Facebook_metrics_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video#Facebook_metric...
- kittbuilds 8mo ago[dead]
- 1necornbuilder 8mo ago[flagged]
- piker 8mo agoYou vibe-coded a computer-vision product that is to be used in monitoring industrial cranes? And people are using it?
- throwaway0123_5 8mo agoThe account is 47 minutes old and with the writing style plus the hefty dose of em dashes, I think they are an LLM.
- sibeliuss 8mo agoAppreciate this take. It makes a lot of sense and can see this happening all over right now.
- eaglelamp 8mo ago[flagged]
- mirekrusin 8mo ago[flagged]
- dang 8mo agoThat crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed here, regardless of how bad someone's website is or you feel it is. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- AstroBen 8mo agoThis type of cadence. You know the one. Choppy. Fast. Saying nothing at all. It's not just boring and disjointed. It's full-on slop via human-adjacent mimicry. Let’s get very clear, very grounded, and very unsentimental for a moment. The contrast to good writing is brutal, and not in a poetic way. In a teeth-on-edge, stomach-dropping way. The dissonance is violent. Here's the raw truth: It’s not wisdom. It’s not professional. It’s not even particularly original. You are very right to be angry. Brands picking soulless drivel over real human creatives. And now we finish with a pseudo-deep confirmation of your bias. --- Before long everyone will be used to it and it'll evoke the same eugh response Sometimes standing out or wuality writing doesn't actually matter. Let AI do that part
- vpribish 8mo agowell done. :) and at the same time the chop becomes long-form slop, stretching out a little seed of a human prompt into a sea of inane prose.
- nomel 8mo agoI don't really remember Claude 3.5 doing this, but it seems increasingly worse, with 4.6 being so bad I don't like using it for brainstorming. My shitty idea isn't "genuinely elegant".
- tomjakubowski 8mo agothe LinkedIn register of English
- jihadjihad 8mo agoOnly thing missing is, “The raw truth?” instead of, “ Here's the raw truth:”.
- getnormality 8mo agoWhy would anyone get sick of it if people have been happily doing it to each other for so many years prior? Does the fact that a machine can ape it so easily somehow reveal its vacuousness in a way that wasn't obvious already? I keep hearing people with job titles like "SEO growth hacker" saying it's depressing that AI can do their jobs better than they can. Really? That's the depressing part?
- rnakle 8mo agoThat is a shallow piece of the new genre: I am a concerned academic who nevertheless uses these new tools to create vibe coded slop and has to tell the world about it. Everything is inevitable but my own job is secure. Have I already told you how concerned I am? No novelty. No intellectual challenge. No spirit. Just AI advertisements! /s
- ericdykstra 8mo agoI won't ever put my name on something written by an LLM, and I will blacklist any site or person I see doing it. If I want to read LLM output I can prompt it myself, subjecting me to it and passing it off as your own is disrespectful. As the author says, there will certainly be a number of people who decide to play with LLM games or whatever, and content farms will get even more generic while having less writing errors, but I don't think that the age of communicating thought, person to person, through text is "over".
- botusaurus 8mo agosome people might be better at prompting a LLM than you just like when you go to a restaurant to have a chef cook for you when you can cook yourself
- throawayonthe 8mo agoa chef can only do so much with a frozen microwave meal
- trollbridge 8mo agoMost restaurants, by volume, these days churn out ultra processed, mass-marketed slop. It’s true there is the occasional Michelin starred place or an amazing local farm to table place. There is also the occasional excellent use of LLMs. Most LLM output I have to read, though, is straight up spam.
- SkyPuncher 8mo agoIt's easy to output LLM junk, but I and my colleagues are doing a lot of incredible work that simply isn't possible without LLMs involved. I'm not talking a 10 turn chat to whip out some junk. I'm talking deep research and thinking with Opus to develop ideas. Chats where you've pressure tested every angle, backed it up with data pulled in from a dozen different places, and have intentionally guided it towards an outcome. Opus can take these wildly complex ideas and distill them down into tangible, organized artifacts. It can tune all of that writing to your audience, so they read it in terms they're familiar with. Reading it isn't the most fun, but let's face it - most professional reading isn't the most fun. You're probably skimming most of the content anyways. Our customers don't care how we communicate internally. They don't care if we waste a bunch of our time rewriting perfectly suitable AI content. They care that we move quickly on solving their problems - AI let's us do that.
- mamma_mia 8mo agoI had this worry at first but at this point we have hundreds of years of books written using legacy methods the best of what was possible already exists it's time for a change In the near future will not even need to read anyway
- recursive 8mo agoFor hundreds of years we've avoided eating rocks, just based on so-called "conventional wisdom". Witness all the problems we now have in the world. Well I, for one, am ready for a change. It's time to do things differently. If you're fed up with the status quo, it's time to start eating rocks.
- daymos 8mo agoI overheard a conversation between a uni professor and a phd student the other day. Professor was complaining 99% his students use chatgpt to write essays in uni. He seemed genuinely distressed about the effect this was having on all of them.
- hackit2 8mo agoNot surprised, I work in Academia and there is a push from the Business side to start marking essays and performing lectures with ChatGPT/AI. I have my own personal reservation about it all.
- daymos 8mo agoI predict the future of the web will be no-bot-allowed spaces a bit like discord is right now. Once you know what you are reading was created by a bot, it looses all its appeal, except when its purely informational
- Aeglaecia 8mo agoi cant wait for the reverse effect to happen , where everyone themselves start sounding like large language models ... a true singularity where AI colonizes the noosphere instead of earth
- daymos 8mo agoWhy can't you wait for that? I picture that as everyone sounding the same
- Aeglaecia 8mo agomaybe im a psycho who would enjoy the ease of manipulating a uniformly thinking populace , maybe i was being a bit facetious because that sort of world is the one we are on track towards and it sounds even more like hell than the world we currently live in
- hifathom 8mo ago[flagged]
- htnthrow11220 8mo agoAre you an LLM yourself?
- indiekitai 8mo ago[dead]
- rbtprograms 8mo agoits interesting how much this comment feels like its AI written. if it isn't, then it has seeped into your writing style and its quite a turn off as a reader; i dont care much to engage. if it is, then why should i read it? what come to this website and even bother reading AI bot comments? what is happening to writing indeed.
- kaashif 8mo agoI think it's a joke comment intended to be as stereotypically AI as possible. It even has the emdash!
- rbtprograms 8mo agothis actually makes the most sense, and would be a pretty meta comment :D im not very good at detecting sarcasm/meta commentary over the internet but it does add up here.
- timacles 8mo agoIt’s 100% AI. lol it might even be a bot
- petterroea 8mo ago> Anyone who has led a class discussion — much less led students on a tour of Egypt or Okinawa, as my colleagues regularly do — knows that there is a huge gap between solo learning online and collective learning in meat space One thing this author misses, which I fear, is that it may become less important in the eyes of stakeholders to educate the masses when they have LLMs to do jobs instead. That is, it is fully possible that one of the futures we may see is one where education goes down as it is perceived as not important for most. Yes, meat space education may be better, but who decides if it is necessary? Maybe vocational schools become more important instead? Jobs where you for all intents and purposes build out the infrastructure for the tetriary industry, mostly automated by LLM. You may disagree with this, but the key here is to realize that even if we disagree, others don't. Education is also power, there's a perverse incentive to avoid educating people and feeding them with your narrative of how the world works instead. We are very much possibly on the way towards a buy-n-large style future.
- lurquer 8mo agoThe same snobs who were telling us that "The Old Man and the Sea" (written in the style of a fifth-grader) is 'art'... the same people telling us that "Finnegan's Wake" (written in the style of a fifth-grader with a brain injury) is 'art'... the same people telling us the poetry of Maya Angelou (written in the style of a fifth-grader with a brain injury and self-esteem issues) is 'art'... the same people telling us that the works of Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian, etc., etc. are 'art'... seem to be the ones complaining the most about AI generated content.
- mkehrt 8mo agoThose are all art, though? Your insults to them don't make them not.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- YeGoblynQueenne 8mo agoSomething I realised a while ago: everyone can write and that makes it very hard to stand out as a writer, and make a career out of writing. Same thing with singing more or less (although it's harder to sing well than write at all well). I think I realised that while reading Harry Potter. To be fair the writing in the books is abysmally bad. It's written by an adult woman but it comes across as the writing of a 14 year old child, and that's to be charitable. And it doesn't matter one bit. It still became the best-selling book in history with 600 million copies sold worldwide (as Wikipedia tells me). That's not to say that there aren't many hundreds, possibly even thousands of better written series, even in the Young Adult space. There are. But they're not that successful. Why? I guess because good writing doesn't matter so much as what's being written. And I guess that also doesn't matter that much. You just have to connect somehow, be in the right place at the right time, when the need to read a certain piece of writing sort of emerges naturally as a result of whatever forces shape ambient taste. Who knows. But most people wouldn't know what good writing looks like anymore than they could write well themselves, so it's obvious that the ability to write well is over-rated. And so now we have LLMs generating prose and that's what we'll be reading henceforth. I think it will be gradual, but it's unavoidable. One day nobody will read anything anyone else has written anymore. Why do that? If you can just ask an LLM to generate whatever you want to read?