3 ms·
It's frustrating to see all the tells of AI-generated or AI-edited writing (such as phrases like this: Kevin Hochman took over Chili’s in 2022 and did the op
by trollbridge 9mo ago
It's frustrating to see all the tells of AI-generated or AI-edited writing (such as phrases like this:
Kevin Hochman took over Chili’s in 2022 and did the opposite of what Red Robin did. He simplified the menu. Invested in operations. Launched a $10.99 deal that went viral on TikTok. Let the food speak for itself.
(Multiple sentences that don't start with a subject and just start with a verb,) and:
I wrote about this in Boil the Oceans. We’re at an inflection point where the old playbook, eking out 5% efficiency gains, increasing profit margins 2% by lowering cost and firing people, isn’t just insufficient. It’s suicide.
("Thing isn't just X. It's Y.", another LLM tell.)
I had to double-check who the author was to make sure it was worth reading, since Garry Tan's stuff normally is, but I generally have a habit of avoiding spending much time reading LLM output, particularly that claims to have amazing business insight but suspiciously is telling me what I want to hear.
- chuckadams 9mo ago"Not just" is apparently the new emdash.
- DougN7 9mo agoMaybe I’m too naive but I can never tell when something is written by AI. If it works with next most likely token, doesn’t that mean it has encountered the patterns you’re picking out in lots and lots of text written by humans? Please educate me if I’m wrong.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- jinushaun 9mo agoSame. Feels like “AI slop” was trained on my personal writing style. The quoted text from the article writes with the same voice as mine.
- matwood 9mo agoSame. Everyone wants to feel smart by trying to point out that every piece of writing is AI generated now, but most of us (myself included) are just average writers. All of the LLMs generate phrasing I often use.
- hyperhello 9mo agoAverage isn’t median. LLM writes like it has one testicle.
- DougN7 8mo agoLol - I’m not even sure what that means.
- hyperhello 8mo agoOkay, it means that since men have two and women have zero, the average person has one testicle. But if you use “average” as a meaningful guideline, you’re going to have trouble because very few people have one testicle; nearly all have two or zero. Here I am making commentary on the quality of AI writing with an analogy to how AI writes like the average person.
- JCharante 9mo ago> it has encountered the patterns you’re picking out in lots and lots of text written by humans? In pre-training data, yes There are post-training datasets, where the weights are changed to conform to human preference. These datasets are created by groups of thousands of people all following a 40-page guide, and these guides have example. People over-index on these examples and so sample sentences with these structures are over represented in these datasets and used for post-training.
- DangitBobby 9mo agoAlso the intro paragraph is basically nonsense, unsupported by the body of the story. > The fear of the future is directly proportional to how small your ambitions are. If your plan is to keep doing exactly what you’re doing, any change is terrifying. If your plan is dramatically bigger, change is the best news you’ve ever gotten. Red Robin's problem wasn't "not adapting" to change. The opposite, in fact. They tried to capitalize on change at the cost of very obvious fundamentals and fumbled the ball. Greedy and incompetent.
- protimewaster 9mo agoIt just doesn't seem super well written. It presents a story from 2018 as if it's the impetus for the decline, and then talks about a decade long decline. If it's been declining for a decade, how is a decision from 8 years ago responsible for it? I mean, it does sound like it was a bad decision, but not so bad that it could retroactively be responsible for 10 years of decline.
- plorkyeran 9mo agoIt’s not LLM-generated, just simple plagiarism and bad editing. Click through to the quoted tweet at the start of the article and you’ll get the article with less awkward English and without the bolted-on conclusion. In the original tweet that sentence is: Kevin Hochman took over Chili’s in 2022 and did the opposite of what Red Robin did. He simplified the menu, invested in operations, launched a $10.99 “3 for Me” deal that went viral on TikTok, and let the food speak for itself. Garry’s contribution was to replace the commas with periods.
- helpfulfrond 9mo agoWow you're right, it really is plagiarism. The original tweet: https://xcancel.com/aakashgupta/status/2024365923856240790 https://xcancel.com/aakashgupta/status/2024365923856240790
- deafpolygon 9mo agoThe original tweet is heavily AI-assisted.
- rdiddly 9mo agoYou're probably right but I no longer try to guess what's AI-written. LLMs learned all their bad habits from humans in the first place after all. But for sure I can still tell good writing from shit, so that's how I still look at it. I'd venture very little truly good writing is AI-written, and a lot of shit writing is. So maybe I'm rejecting roughly the same set of things, but just the fact that a thing intrinsically sucks, is enough information for me to act on. I dunno if I'm making sense or why I'm even commenting. Thanks for reading.