4 ms·

> preface explaining it was written by an LLM why can't the quality of the works stand on its own? Whether there's LLM generation or not should be irrelevant.

by chii 7mo ago

fzeroracer 7mo ago
Because 'quality' is a misnomer. LLM writing has quality in the same way that a press release from a big company has quality, or a professional contract written by a lawyer has quality. It is functional, generally typo-free and conforms to most standards but that doesn't mean it has flavor or spice to it. Creative writing is the intent to convey feelings, thoughts, to create atmosphere. Here's a great example of the failure to do so here, in a way that even most terrible writers would avoid. > “It just said harvest,” she told Tom. She was sitting in one of the plastic chairs, holding a cup of the adequate coffee. The coffee in this story is conveyed as being 'perfectly adequate'. But how do you convey adequacy? When you simply just say 'the coffee is adequate' there's nothing there. It could be conveyed by establishing that the coffee is always perfectly room temperature, or with the mere hint of bitterness and sweetness, or that it tastes like every other brand out there. In many respects this story is the exact same as the 'perfectly adequate' coffee: functional, unexciting and ultimately flavorless.
- NateEag 7mo ago
  Well-put. This "flavorlessness" is all over the story, and paired with the obviously genAI images is how I realized as I read that this was either generated or at the least deeply driven by AI. It constantly described facial expressions, tones of voice, and other emotional cues in generic, dry terms that communicated nothing but the abstract notion of "this person felt a particular way about what happened and it's up to you, the reader, to imagine what that feeling was." It felt very much like it was prompted to "show, don't tell," by someone who has no idea what that phrase actually means. As a professional programmer with a deep background in literature and music, this is yet another example that if you aren't an expert in a field, you will get mediocre results at best from an LLM, while being deceived into thinking they're great.
  - throwaway2037 7mo ago
    > obviously genAI images Five years ago and before, the blog post author would have gone to Fiverr and asked for an artist from a developing country to create some illustrations. There are many, many images on the Internet from five years (and before) that look similar. I object to your use of the adverb "obviously".
    - ijk 7mo ago
      No, I clocked the AI images before I noticed the text. I think the "obviously" is earned. You are correct that a previous era would have included a bunch of Fiverr images that would be in sort of that style, but it's not the style that's the problem. None of the images say more than the text that they're illustrating. It's subtle, but once you notice the lack of information density it becomes starkly apparent.
- mwigdahl 7mo ago
  I took that phrase differently. The story makes the point that the AIs fail when metrics of quality can't be expressed in words. The use of a bare "adequate" reinforces the opacity of the coffee's quality. Certainly it would have worked well to use more words to convey specifics of the "adequacy" as you mention, but IMO that would have undercut the link back to the theme of human ineffability. Obviously everyone's mileage may vary, but I didn't see this as a huge defect, and actually felt it worked pretty well.
  - ijk 7mo ago
    Adequate coffee almost works as an image. In the hands of Douglas Adams or Kurt Vonnegut it could be spun into a whole recurring motif. In this case it's merely...adequate. Almost captures the density of ideas packed into something like "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't" but doesn't quite manage the same effect.
toofy 7mo ago
because we typically want to know the writer of a piece. we want to know where to lay credit. every book you buy has an author credited. articles in newspapers and magazines have photographer and author attributions. asking an ai to write you a story does not make you an author. if you ask someone to take a photo for you, you don’t magically get to say “look at this photograph, i’m a photographer.” if you ask someone to bake you a wedding cake, and then claim you baked it, you’re a fraud. we deserve to know the actual writer.
- KronisLV 7mo ago
  > because we typically want to know the writer of a piece. we want to know where to lay credit. Does the average person really do care all the time? Maybe the outlet it comes from as a whole (factuality, political lean) but more rarely the exact author. Many don’t even have the critical skills for any of it and consume whatever content is chosen for them by whatever algorithm is there. We probably should care, I just don’t think a lot of us do. For me, needing to know that something’s written by AI serves threefold purposes: 1) acknowledging that it might be slop that someone threw together with no effort (important in regards to spam) 2) acknowledging that depending on the model the factuality might be low when it comes to anything niche (though people are wrong too, often enough) 3) mentally preparing myself for AI bullshit slop language, like “It’s not X, it’s Y.”, or just choose not to engage with it (it's the same disgust reaction as when I find a PDF and realize it's just scanned images, not proper text) In general, unless the goal is either human interaction or a somewhat rare case of wanting to read a specific blog etc., most of the time I don’t categorically care whether something was lovingly created by a human or shoved out by a half baked version of Skynet - only that it’s good enough for whatever metrics I want to evaluate it by. I’m not ashamed of it and maybe that’s why I don’t take an issue with AI generated code either, as long as it’s good enough (sometimes better than what people write, other times quite shit when the models and harnesses are bad).
  - ijk 7mo ago
    In Peter Watt's Blindsight, the aliens understand language as spam, a hostile intent to waste their time, and respond by opening fire. Reading LLM slop without warning makes me see their point of view. I think there's useful ways to engage with LLM writing, but they are often very different than human writing. A human writer, a good one, often has ideas that are denser than the words on the page, and close reading is rewarded by helping you unpack the many implications. With AI writing, there's usually fewer ideas than words, and so it requires a different kind of engagement. Either the human prompter behind it didn't supply enough ideas, or they were noncommittal enough that their very indecision got baked in. LLMs are very prone to hedging and circling around a point while not saying much of anything. Maybe it is the easiest way to respond to RLHF incentives and corporate-speak training data. Or maybe they're just intrinsically stuck on being unable to find the right next token so they just endlessly spiral around via all of the wrong ones. Either way, there's often a whole lot of cotton candy text that dissolves when you try to look at it more closely.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
tim333 7mo ago
I started reading it then found it waffling on quite a bit, then came to the HN comments and saw - ah LLM. I could have saved time if I'd know. Also I feel a bit conned. I was curious what Tom Hartmann was up to and now it seems he doesn't exist and it's just some slop?

> preface explaining it was written by an LLM why can't the quality of the works stand on its own? Whether there's LLM generation or not should be irrelevant.

by chii 7mo ago

> preface explaining it was written by an LLM why can't the quality of the works stand on its own? Whether there's LLM generation or not should be irrelevant.

fzeroracer 7mo ago

Because 'quality' is a misnomer. LLM writing has quality in the same way that a press release from a big company has quality, or a professional contract written by a lawyer has quality. It is functional, generally typo-free and conforms to most standards but that doesn't mean it has flavor or spice to it. Creative writing is the intent to convey feelings, thoughts, to create atmosphere. Here's a great example of the failure to do so here, in a way that even most terrible writers would avoid. > “It just said harvest,” she told Tom. She was sitting in one of the plastic chairs, holding a cup of the adequate coffee. The coffee in this story is conveyed as being 'perfectly adequate'. But how do you convey adequacy? When you simply just say 'the coffee is adequate' there's nothing there. It could be conveyed by establishing that the coffee is always perfectly room temperature, or with the mere hint of bitterness and sweetness, or that it tastes like every other brand out there. In many respects this story is the exact same as the 'perfectly adequate' coffee: functional, unexciting and ultimately flavorless.

NateEag 7mo ago
Well-put. This "flavorlessness" is all over the story, and paired with the obviously genAI images is how I realized as I read that this was either generated or at the least deeply driven by AI. It constantly described facial expressions, tones of voice, and other emotional cues in generic, dry terms that communicated nothing but the abstract notion of "this person felt a particular way about what happened and it's up to you, the reader, to imagine what that feeling was." It felt very much like it was prompted to "show, don't tell," by someone who has no idea what that phrase actually means. As a professional programmer with a deep background in literature and music, this is yet another example that if you aren't an expert in a field, you will get mediocre results at best from an LLM, while being deceived into thinking they're great.
- throwaway2037 7mo ago
  > obviously genAI images Five years ago and before, the blog post author would have gone to Fiverr and asked for an artist from a developing country to create some illustrations. There are many, many images on the Internet from five years (and before) that look similar. I object to your use of the adverb "obviously".
  - ijk 7mo ago
    No, I clocked the AI images before I noticed the text. I think the "obviously" is earned. You are correct that a previous era would have included a bunch of Fiverr images that would be in sort of that style, but it's not the style that's the problem. None of the images say more than the text that they're illustrating. It's subtle, but once you notice the lack of information density it becomes starkly apparent.
mwigdahl 7mo ago
I took that phrase differently. The story makes the point that the AIs fail when metrics of quality can't be expressed in words. The use of a bare "adequate" reinforces the opacity of the coffee's quality. Certainly it would have worked well to use more words to convey specifics of the "adequacy" as you mention, but IMO that would have undercut the link back to the theme of human ineffability. Obviously everyone's mileage may vary, but I didn't see this as a huge defect, and actually felt it worked pretty well.
- ijk 7mo ago
  Adequate coffee almost works as an image. In the hands of Douglas Adams or Kurt Vonnegut it could be spun into a whole recurring motif. In this case it's merely...adequate. Almost captures the density of ideas packed into something like "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't" but doesn't quite manage the same effect.

toofy 7mo ago

because we typically want to know the writer of a piece. we want to know where to lay credit. every book you buy has an author credited. articles in newspapers and magazines have photographer and author attributions. asking an ai to write you a story does not make you an author. if you ask someone to take a photo for you, you don’t magically get to say “look at this photograph, i’m a photographer.” if you ask someone to bake you a wedding cake, and then claim you baked it, you’re a fraud. we deserve to know the actual writer.

KronisLV 7mo ago
> because we typically want to know the writer of a piece. we want to know where to lay credit. Does the average person really do care all the time? Maybe the outlet it comes from as a whole (factuality, political lean) but more rarely the exact author. Many don’t even have the critical skills for any of it and consume whatever content is chosen for them by whatever algorithm is there. We probably should care, I just don’t think a lot of us do. For me, needing to know that something’s written by AI serves threefold purposes: 1) acknowledging that it might be slop that someone threw together with no effort (important in regards to spam) 2) acknowledging that depending on the model the factuality might be low when it comes to anything niche (though people are wrong too, often enough) 3) mentally preparing myself for AI bullshit slop language, like “It’s not X, it’s Y.”, or just choose not to engage with it (it's the same disgust reaction as when I find a PDF and realize it's just scanned images, not proper text) In general, unless the goal is either human interaction or a somewhat rare case of wanting to read a specific blog etc., most of the time I don’t categorically care whether something was lovingly created by a human or shoved out by a half baked version of Skynet - only that it’s good enough for whatever metrics I want to evaluate it by. I’m not ashamed of it and maybe that’s why I don’t take an issue with AI generated code either, as long as it’s good enough (sometimes better than what people write, other times quite shit when the models and harnesses are bad).
- ijk 7mo ago
  In Peter Watt's Blindsight, the aliens understand language as spam, a hostile intent to waste their time, and respond by opening fire. Reading LLM slop without warning makes me see their point of view. I think there's useful ways to engage with LLM writing, but they are often very different than human writing. A human writer, a good one, often has ideas that are denser than the words on the page, and close reading is rewarded by helping you unpack the many implications. With AI writing, there's usually fewer ideas than words, and so it requires a different kind of engagement. Either the human prompter behind it didn't supply enough ideas, or they were noncommittal enough that their very indecision got baked in. LLMs are very prone to hedging and circling around a point while not saying much of anything. Maybe it is the easiest way to respond to RLHF incentives and corporate-speak training data. Or maybe they're just intrinsically stuck on being unable to find the right next token so they just endlessly spiral around via all of the wrong ones. Either way, there's often a whole lot of cotton candy text that dissolves when you try to look at it more closely.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

tim333 7mo ago

I started reading it then found it waffling on quite a bit, then came to the HN comments and saw - ah LLM. I could have saved time if I'd know. Also I feel a bit conned. I was curious what Tom Hartmann was up to and now it seems he doesn't exist and it's just some slop?