4 ms·
I don't really think that good writing and LLM writing looks all that similar. It's not always easy to spot (and maybe HN users aren't always doing a great job
by tyg13 7mo ago
I don't really think that good writing and LLM writing looks all that similar. It's not always easy to spot (and maybe HN users aren't always doing a great job at it), but even the best LLM output tends to have an "LLM smell" to it that's hard to avoid.
Like, sure, LLM writing is almost always grammatically correct, spelled correctly, formatted correctly, etc., which tends to be true of good writing. But there's a certain style that it just can't get away from. It's not just the em-dashes, the semi-colons, or the bulleted lists. It's the short, punchy sentences, with few-to-no asides or digressions. Often using idiom, but only in a stale, trite, and homogenized manner. Real humans, are each different -- which lends a certain unpredictability to our writing, even if trying to write to a semi-formal standard, the way "good" writers often do -- but LLMs are all so painfully the same, and the output shows it.
- xboxnolifes 7mo agoLLMs have good writing in the same way that technical manuals can have good writing. It might all be correct, but it's usually not a good read.
- 0______0 7mo agoExcuse me. I consider the writing within technical manuals strictly superior and meticulously written. It's fairly enjoyable to read what engineers/subject matter experts write about their own creations. Comparing those to LLM generated patronizing word vomit is a shame.
- quietsegfault 7mo agoDepends on the technical manual and their culture. Red Hat had a culture of excellent writers, and their stuff is usually readable if not always enjoyable.
- girvo 7mo agoAI driven web design has the same smell, it’s quite fascinating to see the different tells in different media. Then it’s also quite fascinating to see those same tells change and evolve over time.
- kl33 7mo agoLol love the use of 'smell', that's a great way to characterise it.
- jedberg 7mo agoThose sentence constructions that are "tells" were also learned from good writers though. But here, I'll let you be the judge. This was a comment I wrote 100% myself on reddit, which was both downvoted and I got multiple DMs referencing it and telling me to "stop posting this AI slop": https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1pyjkuf/i_find_the_conversation_around_ai_and_software/nwkvbsz/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1pyjkuf/i_... Granted, it was in a thread about AI and maybe people were on edge, but I was still accused, which to be honest hurt a bit after the effort I put into writing it.
- nonameiguess 7mo agoI get that it's possibly contrary to the point if people are looking to truly have conversations here, but at least 99% of the time, I post a comment and never come back. I said what I had to say and don't particularly feel like getting sucked into an argument if someone disagrees, and frankly, if I'm wrong I think I'll realize it eventually anyway. I'm more likely to dig in my heels and ossify in a wrong position if someone shits on me and I immediately feel the need to defend myself. It can mesmerize you into believing things you might not have if it didn't hit your ego. I could be deluded but think I'm good at making arguments, but that at least means I'm good at making arguments that convince myself, which can be dangerous because you can convince yourself of things that are wrong. The upside is if anyone is out there accusing me of being an LLM, I don't even know so it can't insult me. It is amusing to witness this happening to others when it's someone like you who is a semi-public figure who should probably be well known on Reddit of all places.
- jedberg 7mo ago> It is amusing to witness this happening to others when it's someone like you who is a semi-public figure who should probably be well known on Reddit of all places. One of our key tenants on reddit for a long time was "upvote the content, not the author". Which is why we made the usernames so small. It actually makes me happy when people judge the merit of what I write for what I said, not who I am. But yes, it is sometimes tempting to say "do you know who I am??". :)
- 7mo ago
- ordersofmag 7mo agoSeems like the ability to distinguish LLM versus 'good human' writing depends on the size of the writing sample you have to look at (assuming you think it can be done). And that HN-scale posts are unlikely to be a long enough for useful discernment.
- b112 7mo agoWithin a few years, LLMs will be indistinguishable from human text. Think how easy it was to tell the differences a year or two ago. By 2030 there will be no way to ever tell. The same is true of all video, and all generated content. The death of the Internet comes not from spam, or Facebook nonsense, but instead from the fact that soon? You'll never know of you're interacting with a human or not. Why like a post? Reply to it? Interact online? Why read a "news" story? If I was X or Meta or Reddit, I would be looking at the end.
- mulmen 7mo agoLLMs won’t destroy social media any more than it already is. I don’t think I have ever had a meaningful human interaction with anyone on Twitter, Meta, or Reddit without already knowing them from somewhere else. Those sites are about interacting with information, not people. It’s purely transactional. Bots, spam, and bad actors are not new. Meta has been a dumpster fire of spam and bots for over 15 years, the overwhelming majority of its existence. Reddit has some pockets of meaningful interaction but you have to find them and the partitioned nature means that culture doesn’t spread across the site. It’s also full of bots and shills. Nobody tells stories about meeting people on Twitter. At best it’s a microblog platform and at worst it’s X.
- b112 7mo agoCommon people go to such sites for updates from friends, or to follow celebrities. Their friends will start using more and more AI, ans celebrities will become all AI. Why read a friend's page, if it's just AI drivel. Same for a celebrity. It doesn't even need tp be true. Burned once, people will never trust again. The humiliation of writing messages that your friend only has a bot summarize, and reply to, will kill it. Imagine you speak to your friend, and they haven't even read any measages you wrote, but their AI responded? And you in turn. Imagine you've had dozens of conversations, but it was with a bot instead of your friend. Your trust will be eroded. SPAM doesn't act like your friend. A bot does. And the inability to distinguish will be the clincher. And yes, you won't know the difference, not after the AI is trained on their sent mail folder.
- lordnacho 7mo agoYou're absolutely right!
- altairprime 7mo ago(For those who have avoided reading AI writing, this is a trope referring to the tendency of some AI sometime to always agree with the user when corrected, I think? Or at least that’s as much as I have worked out, being one of those avoiders.)
- jnwatson 7mo agoLLM writing is like AI-generated photos in that you don't notice the good instances of LLM writing, i.e. you don't know your false negative rate.
- lucumo 7mo agoI would say that you also don't know the false positive rate. The only person who truly knows is the one who wrote/generated the text. And they have every incentive to say it's not AI-generated, whether or not it truly is. Personally, when I see the number of accusations thrown around, I very much suspect that the false positive rate is pretty high.
- testing22321 7mo agoI can’t help thinking how ironic it would be if your comment is from an llm
- GreenWatermelon 7mo agoPoe's law strikes. Parent's last paragraph was definitely an ironic portray of LLM writing! Notice the double-dash emdash.
- testing22321 7mo agoOh I saw that. But was it really an ironic parody, or actually an llm?
- tyg13 7mo agoNo, I only use the finest, home-grown, naturally-produced Human Brain slop to make my comments.
- mulmen 7mo ago> I don't really think that good writing and LLM writing looks all that similar. How do you know?
- Cthulhu_ 7mo agoConfirmation bias; they don't know the LLM generated content they didn't recognize. They can't, because they didn't recognize it.
- GreenWatermelon 7mo agoPure AI slope os often extremely obvious, while for good AI writing that's indistinguishable from thoughtful human writing I'd say "Mission fucking accomplished"[0] [0] https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- crossroadsguy 7mo agoIt's not whether it "really" looks similar. It's what people think, most of the people, and most of the people are neither known for practising good writing nor consuming good writing.
- NiloCK 7mo agoI know the thing you are describing, but the real bitch is that you're actually just describing the lowest effort default outputs. The help-desk assistant persona. Sometimes speedbumps that deter the lowest effort infractions are sufficient but I don't think this is that time. On a per-prompt basis, or via a persistent system prompt or SKILL, or - god help us - via community-specific fine tuning, LLMs can convincingly affect insane variations in prose styling.
- ninjagoo 7mo ago> It's the short, punchy sentences, with few-to-no asides or digressions. Uhh, isn't that how senior management in larger corporations communicates ...