11 ms·

I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

• jeremie_strand 7mo ago
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• nareyko 7mo ago
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• pypt 7mo ago
  Yeah, now it's "Here's what nobody else talks about" and "Here's the kicker" all day long.
• radimm 7mo ago
  This is exactly same struggle for me. Writing technical content about PostgreSQL and balancing my voice without sounding like LLM written is genuinely difficult. As English is not my first language, I do run into problem where the line between fix my clumsy sentence and rewrite my thought is very thin. Same with writing "boring" technical explanation and more approachable content. I'm getting pushed back for both.
  • asdff 7mo ago
    Don't want to sound like an llm? Don't read llm content. Remove yourself from places where you might be liable to read it.
    • Arainach 7mo ago
      It's not that simple. LLMs were trained on lots of writing, and the "LLM voice" resembles in many ways good English prose, or at least effective public communications voice. For years, even before LLMs, there have been trends of varied popularity to, for lack of a better word, regress - intentionally omitting capitalization, punctuation, or other important details which convey meaning. I rejected those, and likewise I reject the call to omit the emdash or otherwise alter my own manner of speaking - a manner cultivated through 30+ years of reading and writing English text. If content is intellectually lacking, call that out, but I am absolutely sick of people calling out writing because they "think it's LLM-written". I'm sick of review tools giving false positives and calling students' work "AI written" because they used eloquent words instead of Up Goer Five[0] vocabulary. I am just as afraid of a society where we all dumb ourselves down to not appear as machines as I am of one where machine-generated spam overtakes all human messaging. [0] https://xkcd.com/1133/ https://xkcd.com/1133/
      • asdff 7mo ago
        Well that isn't what I am suggesting. I'm suggesting people ditch x. Reddit. Probably also ditch hn in the next couple months. If you can run a headless agent to post somewhere, just don't bother visiting that site, honestly a great rule of thumb right there. That should leave you with media sources like nyt and your local library, which seems healthier to me. And maybe it might encourage a new type of forum to emerge where there is some decentralized vetting that you are a human, like verifying by inputting the random hash posted outside the local maker space.
        • jcgrillo 7mo ago
          > like nyt I hope editorial departments everywhere are taking careful notes on the ars technica fiasco. Agree there's room for some kind of quick "verified human" checkmark. It would at least give readers the ability to quickly filter, and eliminate all the spurious "this sounds like vibeslop" accusations.
        • raincole 7mo ago
          On HN o Reddit you can occasionally read genuine opinions from real people. On newspaper 100% of text is trying to manipulate you.
          • asdff 7mo ago
            I'm not sure how you can accept the first point but believe the second point. If you believe there is nuance in reddit there is nuance in the news as well. You think a local sports column is manipulating me? The answer is of course no, unless you want to win a gold medal in mental gymnastics trying to equate a sports column to nation state sponsored agit prop.
      • watwut 7mo ago
        > "LLM voice" resembles in many ways good English prose, or at least effective public communications voice. It does not resembles that. It is usually grammatically correct writing, but it is also pretty ineffective writing bad writing with good gramar.
    • raincole 7mo ago
      If you strictly read printed books only and am never exposed to online content, you'd think em-dash is a signal for human writing.
      • KeplerBoy 7mo ago
        No you'd not think that. The thought of something not being human written didn't even occur to anyone before decent LLMs came around.
      • asdff 7mo ago
        No, you'd begin recognizing authors voices. Hemingway reads different than Hesse for example. You'd expect to have distinct authoring styles as you've read thus far. You'd come across slop after llm slop all writing in the same voice eventually you are going to say WTF is going on, is everyone using the same style guidelines? Not far off from what is actually happening.
  • rane 7mo ago
    In some specific work contexts, such as writing pull request descriptions, not sounding like AI is something I've given up on trying to optimize. It's simply not worth the effort for me being non-native and writing detailed PR descriptions being so arduous, and the agent already has full context anyway. Obviously any fluff or inaccuracies are aggressively weeded out but I don't care anymore about the AI voice.
    • kristjansson 7mo ago
      > any fluff or inaccuracies are aggressively weeded out this work is paramount. Without clear evidence of human filtering, a long, well formatted message/PR/doc is likely to reduce my estimate of the value/veracity/relevance of its content.
  • voxleone 7mo ago
    This. My personal style have always been llm-like, including the generous use of em-dashes, and "not-only-this-that" style mannerisms. It' increasingly difficult to retain reputation.
  • nkrisc 7mo ago
    I’ll take a clumsy sentence written by a non-native speaker any day over LLM generated mush. At least I know you chose those words specifically so it gives me some insight into your state of mind and intended meaning. Any native English speaker who doesn’t live under a rock is very accustomed to reading and hearing English from non-native speakers and familiar with the common quirks and mistakes. English is quite forgiving as a language, we understand you. When in doubt, simplify it.
    • kristjansson 7mo ago
      > English is quite forgiving as a language it's a couple mutually-conflicting languages in a trenchcoat; forgiveness and flexibility are perhaps its defining properties. To the broader issue: "polish" (in any language) is only valuable insofar as it makes the ideas clearer, attests to innate qualities of the author and/or the investment of their time, or carries its own aesthetic value. As LLMs make (a certain kind of polish) cheap to produce, the value of the middle category attenuates to nothing.
• shyam47 7mo ago
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• thepasch 7mo ago
  I never use an LLM to paraphrase my own voice as a matter of principle, but I’ve still been repeatedly accused of doing so because I happen to always have written structured posts, used “smart quotes,” and done that negative comparison thing (it’s genuinely not just fluff, it’s a genuinely useful way to— ah god damn it). Sigh.
  • internet_points 7mo ago
    Same here, I've always used em dashes and have been called out on negative comparisons – I didn't even know they were an LLM thing. Should I read more LLM to know what phraseology to avoid, or will doing that nudge me towards sounding more LLM? :-(
  • Freak_NL 7mo ago
    I feel ya. I've never been accused of using an LLM, fortunately, but depending on the context I do use “smart quotes” (even in „Dutch” or »German«) and the em-dash obviously… (And that ellips fella there. It's just so simple to type with a compose key set up.)
    • shagie 7mo ago
      I thought the guillemet was French rather than German and the other way around. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Summary_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Summary_table
      • Freak_NL 7mo ago
        German uses both kinds depending on the style and writer's preference. French has the guillemets the other way around. (That Wikipedia table shows that too by the way.)
  • gjm11 7mo ago
    Right. The LLMs' quirks aren't bad in themselves, they're bad when they're in every damn paragraph. They're mostly things that in moderation actually improve writing, and that if you see them once (without the knowledge that they're things LLMs do) would rightly tend to make you think better of the author. And so, of course, in RLHF training they get rewarded, and unfortunately it's not so easy for an LLM to learn "it's good to do this thing a bit but not too much. The structured thing you mention is the one that bugs me most. I genuinely think that most human writing would be improved by having more of the "signposts" that LLMs overuse. Headings, context-setting sentences, bullet points where appropriate, etc. I was doing "list of bullet points with boldfaced intro for each one" before the LLMs were. But because the LLMs are saturating their writing with it, we'll all learn to take it as a sign of glib superficiality and inauthenticity, and typical good human writing will start avoiding everything of that kind, and therefore get that little bit harder to read. Alas.
• dude250711 7mo ago
  There is no grandiose "AI era". Or it started like in 1950s already. What it is going to be is a 'Slop Decade' - a much better label if you insist on having one.
  • nusl 7mo ago
    The slop decade will be a slop "rest of humanity." There's no going back from this.
    • missingdays 7mo ago
      No technology ever became obsolete?
    • netsharc 7mo ago
      Oh well, when the most powerful people on the planet manage to enshittify it enough, we'll be freed from AI... Or maybe there'll be the elite enjoying the world, while the rest of us have to work manual labor. But at least it'll be AI systems ensuring our compliance!
    • heavyset_go 7mo ago
      I think some spaces will try to retain their value by actively combating LLMs, in the same way they combat hackers and trolls, and if they don't, they'll naturally die. Several subreddits became AI slop submission repositories and their human engagement dwindled. Some subreddits that were inundated with AI slop implemented policies that ban it, and it seems to work well. Strict no slop policies work, and surprisingly, so do rules that require AI submissions to be tagged as AI. Forcing slop slingers to tag their slop does a good job at discouraging said slop, it turns out that admitting your slop is slop is embarrassing or something.
      • nusl 7mo ago
        Perhaps. What happens when we reach the point where slop is indistinguishable from typical human language?
  • 7mo ago
• andai 7mo ago
  > This post, is written without any tools assistance I just wrote what my brain is instructing to type (might not reread it before posting). How is the author complaining about the quality of their own writing while admitting to not even bothering reading what they wrote, let alone editing it? (Also, why would using a LLM based grammar checker trigger an AI writing detector? Did it end up rewriting substantial parts of the original submission?)
  • whilenot-dev 7mo ago
    What makes you think that? I presume that's just the authors (sarcastic) way to say "beware: may contain typos and grammatical errors".
    • Freak_NL 7mo ago
      There are a bunch of typos in there which jar a bit ('deterioted'), but I guess that makes sense for this specific article. Personally, I would recommend them to simple use any old editor with spellchecking enabled. That suffices for most writing where you just want to keep your own voice. To me, the red crinkly line just means that I should edit that word myself. In the rare case where I'm stumped on the spelling I'll look at the suggested edit of course, but never as a matter of course.
      • roysting 7mo ago
        The problem here, the overarching issue is that the subject complaint about AI slop is actually a bigger issue that has been plaguing America in particular for many years now, and of which the AI slop era is only a current top. The qualities of American writing have clearly been on a precipitous decline for a very long time now, predating AI slop and even spell checkers and computers. Computers, digital text, and digital information distribution/transportation have made writing and thoughts cheap. Arguably due to what we are surely all aware of, humans rarely value that which is cheap, whether monetarily or in effort and consequential qualities. What people seem reluctant or maybe unable to acknowledge is that predating the current AI Slop, was what could be called Human Slop, low quality, low effort, careless output that was cheap; regardless of whether AI slop now outperforms. It is why you are justified in pointing out that even in the post complaining about AI Slop, the human has apparently abandoned what would have been common practice in just the recent past, using basic spellcheckers or simply reviewing what was written and also practicing with deliberation; the art and skill of writing, grammar, and sentence structure. No one is perfect and that is also what makes anything human, somewhat inexplicable and random variation. However, it takes a certain refinement before unique human character becomes a positive quality and is not just humans being sloppy ... human slop.
• amelius 7mo ago
  Are there any good writing LLMs out there? I get that the mainstream ones have been RLHF'd to death, but surely there must be others that are capable?
  • shaoner 7mo ago
    https://hemingwayapp.com/ https://hemingwayapp.com/ gives you advice about your writing. This is called Hemingway because he was apparently good at communicating efficiently which made him a popular author.
    • amelius 7mo ago
      What happens if you take the output of a mainstream LLM and send it through this app? Would that solve the issue of the original article?
    • Kye 7mo ago
      This is an interface, not an LLM. Do they say which LLM they use? Many of these are interfaces to one of the big three model providers. Others run through OpenRouter to use one of the better open models, all of which have their own quirks.
• keiferski 7mo ago
  I have been writing stuff for a long time; my first internet experience was posting on forums about a Gameboy Advance game. Then in other forums, for a philosophy degree, and professionally as a copywriter and technical writer. I’ve been meaning to write up a post of my thoughts on writing and AI, but there things I’ve been thinking recently are: 1. There was a lot of slop pre-AI. In fact I’d say the majority of published writing was bad, formulaic, and just written to manipulate your emotions. So in some sense, I don’t really think pre-AI slop had more value. It’s just cheaper to make now. 2. AI has prompted me to study more off-beat writers that followed the rules of language a little less frequently. This includes a lot of people from circa 1890-1970, when experimenting with form was really in vogue. 3. Which brings me to my third point, which is that no matter how much the AI actually knows about writing, the person prompting it is limited by their own education and knowledge of writers. You can’t say, “make me a post in the style of Burroughs” if you don’t know who Burroughs was, or what his writing style was. So in a sense there is an increased importance to being educated about writing itself. Without it you’re limited in your ability to use AIs to write stuff and in your awareness of how much your non-AI written work is influenced by AI writing.
• bananaflag 7mo ago
  Can't you just... not do this? I never passed any AI writing as my own. I would feel utterly awful. Also, I love tweaking words until they sound perfect. The number of people who just nonchalantly admit that AI writes their messages is honestly scaring me.
• aledevv 7mo ago
  I want to emphasize a thought you expressed: > "..but maybe it's a good thing that most of us don't allow this technology to reframe our thoughts." No, you're not the only one experiencing this: I too had the same concerns as you: with every new thought, every new creation, I had to ask the AI's opinion, as if I were no longer able to judge, to decide, without consulting the AI (...just to be safe, you never know...). The only way to regain your creative ability is to write down your thoughts yourself, read, reread, rewrite, correct, express your opinion... What AI can't do is convey emotions.
  • Amekedl 7mo ago
    depending how hard the "the brain is a muscle" saying applies, there is no way using LLMs/chatbot systems/AI is not going to deteriorate your brain immensely.
    • barbazoo 7mo ago
      If your body is in good shape, stopping exercise won't make you deteriorate that quickly. What I wonder is, will people get in good shape in the first place. What I mean is as someone with lots of experience, I don't care about me not learning about the basics anymore as much as someone in their 20s and 30s maybe should.
      • recursive 7mo ago
        I think this is backwards. Not sure what you mean by quickly. Back when I was in racing shape, if I stopped my training plan for as little as two weeks, (probably less actually, but I'm being conservative here) I would have a measurable drop in fitness. Now, as someone who regularly walks the dog and bikes to work, I've got "less to lose" and probably wouldn't deteriorate as much.
        • justonceokay 7mo ago
          Aerobic fitness is hard to shake, but neuromuscular changes can be lost very quickly
• stabbles 7mo ago
  Are grammatical errors and typos fashionable now? Reading this post it seems the anti-thesis in the LLM era is not to edit at all, but rather write down a stream of consciousness to make it "personal".
  • simianwords 7mo ago
    Definitely think it is. It will be glorious. We will focus more on content than on just aesthetic as people try to signal that they are not llm
    • nslsm 7mo ago
      Oh no, I have had enough of people with quirky (i.e. cringey) writing on the internet. It started with those who refused to use their shift key and it's quickly devolving into something that makes you shiver when you read it. (Not to mention how easy it is to use a system prompt to make an AI write in whatever style you like.)
    • fleebee 7mo ago
      I feel like having to signal that you're a human detracts from the content side of things. Proper spelling and grammar, good style etc. are there to help you convey your ideas more accurately. Resorting to a stream of consciousness style of unrefined writing makes it apparent that you're a human, but the downside is that your text is bad.
      • ikr678 7mo ago
        Style is entirely subjective, and not every text is looking for a refined reader.
    • rozab 7mo ago
      I see loads of LLM articles where it's been prompted to never capitalise, avoid full stops, pepper in spelling mistakes, etc. it sucks.
    • mandolingual 7mo ago
• everdrive 7mo ago
  Not joking, buy and read books. Old books are only written by people. (and the help of an editor)
  • shafyy 7mo ago
    Fun fact: Editors are usually also people. Except for that one dog I met during a cold winter's day in 1987 in a run-down London pub.
    • incognito124 7mo ago
      On the internet, no one knows you're an editor
    • taneliv 7mo ago
      No way, bro! I'm no longer an editor, though.
    • scorpionfeet 7mo ago
      Can you explain the reference? It whooshed me.
      • shafyy 7mo ago
        Haha, no reference. I just made something up and tried to be funny.
        • Mentlo 7mo ago
          I tried figuring out the reference with Gemini, and it said this: The immediate reply to that comment is: "On the internet, no one knows you're an editor." This is a direct play on the famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." By setting the anecdote in 1987 (a few years before the World Wide Web was publicly available), the commenter is implying that back in the analog days, if a dog wanted to be a writer or an editor, they couldn't hide behind a screen—they had to sit in a smoky London pub and do business face-to-face. Which makes a lot of sense actually. I would imagine that's what the replier to you thought you meant.
• skywhopper 7mo ago
  It’s largely a problem of how these tools are packaged, but while it’s certainly nice to have an LLM check your spelling, or review your grammar or style or usage, you should never allow them to actually edit your document directly. First of all, they will make substantive changes you didn’t intend. The meaning will get changed, errors will be introduced. Tone will be off, and as the author says, your voice will disappear. There is no single “correct” way to write something. And voice and tone are conveyed with grammatical and usage variation. Don’t give that up to a robotic average. Secondly, you will never improve, or even maintain, your own writing skills if you don’t actively engage with the suggested changes. You also won’t fully realize half the purpose of writing, which is to understand the topic better yourself. Doing the work of editing your piece will help you understand the subject even better. If you just let the machine “fix” your errors, you’ll become a worse writer and less of an expert over time.
• heavyset_go 7mo ago
  If you outsource your thinking and skills, your ability to do either atrophies. You'll become dependent on outsourcing for both. You're trading ability and competence for convenience.
  • tonyedgecombe 7mo ago
    For some reason I read that as "If you outsource your thinking and skills, your ability to do apostrophes."
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
• epolanski 7mo ago
  I think that AI will accelerate an already existing trend that pre dates AI meaning the global regression to the mean we're seeing in any creative field, from design to videogames, from cars to fashion.
  • beej71 7mo ago
    Agree. This also ties into the hypothesis that we're hitting a local maximum in terms of the state of the art in creativity as we offload that work.
    • MyHonestOpinon 7mo ago
      I find this similar to when photography was invented and painters moved away from realism trying to find originality and creativity and they produced modern art which for many of us just looks silly.
• ghywertelling 7mo ago
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• beej71 7mo ago
  I feel like asking it to polish or rewrite is going too far. Using it for a grammar/spell checker or thesaurus is fine, though. At least that preserves ones voice. And I've definitely used it when I can't remember that one stinking word that I know exists and is perfect for this occasion.
  • kristjansson 7mo ago
    > one stinking word "hey robot give me every word even mildly related to $SOME_SENSE_ON_THE_TIP_OF_MY_TOUNGE" is a wildly satisfying and underrated experience.
• CrzyLngPwd 7mo ago
  I've been a Grammarly customer for quite some time, and I have tried the AI suggestions, but it always loses something and ends up with a whiny, apologetic tone. AI always seems so verbose and wordy.
• josefritzishere 7mo ago
  For the most part, AI writing is pretty bad. It reads like a highschool kid trying to hit a minimum word requirement.
• sjdv1982 7mo ago
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• solomonb 7mo ago
  I actually find Gmail a better editor/grammar check then LLMs. It makes isolated simplifications/corrections that imo have minimal style impact and just focus on clarifying phrasing.
  • sixhobbits 7mo ago
    Yeah Gmail got crazy good in the last 3 months, pretty sure it's LLM driven too but it went from 90s MS Word to better than Grammarly recently IMO
• kerblang 7mo ago
  > It means, I passed the text. Ha. Well I guess you did, _this time_. Can we not just ask an AI to correct our spelling mistakes and leave the rest alone?
• aidenn0 7mo ago
  What does it say about me that when I run my writing through one of those "detect if AI" tools I seldom see a value of less than 70% confidence that the writing was AI generated?
  • rogerrogerr 7mo ago
    It probably means that your writing stylistically is close to the vector-space average of "good" writing, which is what AI produces. FWIW, your comment history here does not look like AI at all to me, and I think I have a very (maybe too?) high sensitivity to AI slop.
    • aidenn0 7mo ago
      I haven't tried my HN comments; I've only tried things spanning more than a few sentences and that I've put more effort into. I only discovered this when my son put an e-mail I wrote to his teacher that he was CC'd on into the tool on his school iPad.
  • ilogik 7mo ago
    try it with something published before 2022. do you still get the same results? I really doubt those tools are good for anything
  • spoiler 7mo ago
    I know this is a spicy take, but it probably just means you're more eloquent in your writing than most netizens... And that's not really a hard bar to clear if you look at how people write comments online (including places like GitHub). Anyone that uses punctuation, and capitalises words, probably automatically gets past the 70% confidence line.
    • podgietaru 7mo ago
      It baffles me when I see ostensibly smart people refusing to click shift. Especially programmers. I know you can do it! I've seen you use curly brackets!
  • 7mo ago
• piker 7mo ago
  AI for editing is garbage. Chat to it to get ideas maybe, but in its current incarnation it’s just going to degrade anything you filter through it.
  • ArcHound 7mo ago
    I thought it's quite good. Of course, I'm not taking 100% of output, but it takes care of my grammar blindspots (damn you commas and a/an/the articles!). Can you please share what and how gets degraded? Sometimes I don't like a phrase it selects, but it's not common
    • piker 7mo ago
      Well, for one example, it inhibits your desire to improve against those very blind spots. In exchange for that your audience gets 3-4x length normalized bullshit to read instead.
      • unyttigfjelltol 7mo ago
        AI can take a rough draft, clean it up and shorten it as much as you want. The suggestions very often expose ambiguities in the original text. If you think the LLM got it wrong, it’s nearly often the LLM overreading some feature of the original that you failed to catch, which is precisely what you’d want out of your proofreader. Yes, LLMs reduce the individual charm of prose, but the critique itself carries a romantic notion that we all loved the idiosyncratic failures of convention and meaning which went into highly identifiable personal styles, and which often go missing from LLM-edited work.
      • shagie 7mo ago
        > Well, for one example, it inhibits your desire to improve against those very blind spots. I'd contend this is not true. Even professional authors go to an editor who identifies things that need to be fixed. As the author of the text and knowing what it should be, it can be difficult to read what you wrote to find those mistakes. > In exchange for that your audience gets 3-4x length normalized bullshit to read instead. This is not at all what is implied by having an AI act as an editor. Identifying misplaced commas, incorrect subject verb agreement (e.g. counts), and incomplete ideas left in as sentence fragments. You appear to be implying that the author is giving agency to create the content to the AI rather than using it as a tool to act as a super-charged grammerly.
• nikitadotla 7mo ago
  I am not a native speaker, for anything like HN comments I don't use AI, but I see no harm in using AI in correcting grammar and maybe some wording, but the ultimate change shouldn't be a copy-paste replacement, it should be well thought through by the author.
• ChaitanyaSai 7mo ago
  I am sorry but perhaps some use of AI or grammar-check would help? A lawn that's not overly manicured has its charm, but if it has one too many barren patches of clumps of overgrown grass, it doesn't appeal as much? This essay feels a bit like that.
• boca_honey 7mo ago
  >I just wrote what my brain is instructing to type (might not reread it before posting) Why would I put effort into reading something that had no effort put in by the author? This guy needs an editor, AI or otherwise.
  • ianseyer 7mo ago
    "I think that is the beauty of writing, the raw , unedited emotions of the person behind every words either for entertainment or educational purposes, is what makes it special" - the article, clearly expressing the intent of its own mistakes and contextualizing them in the era of LLM-borne "perfect" text
    • boca_honey 7mo ago
      I appreciate the sentiment, and good for him. However, from an audience perspective, why choose to watch a guy filming himself eating cereal with a shaky phone camera when you could watch The Sopranos? (or the latest MrBeast extravaganza, to avoid being pedantic). I guess it's OK if you enjoy reading someone expressing himself without communicating anything valuable and well produced. It's kind of like people who enjoy stream-of-consciousness poetry or unhinged personal blog posts. It's fine. But most of us (I think) read for our own gain, expecting substantial / stimulating text that is ideally well researched and serves a clear purpose. Something like that needs an editor, effective proofreading, and quite some time of work and rework.
      • tadfisher 7mo ago
        At this point, it is far more distracting to see LLM-isms and get completely thrown out of the reading-understanding process than to see some typos or grammatical errors. I actually feel reassured when I see something like a "they're/their" swap, because I know I am reading the author's thoughts instead of some linear algebra vaguely influenced by the author's thoughts. Five years ago, I probably would have been annoyed by the same.
        • 7mo ago
• nsxwolf 7mo ago
  Once I think something is AI I just can’t read it anymore. It isn’t out of principle or anything, I just become so distracted by the idea that I can’t focus or derive any benefit or pleasure from continuing.
• viccis 7mo ago
  >Although 80 % of the content was my own writing, the fact that it was run in a LLM enginee for grammar and vocabulary cross-check, made it failed the "probable written by AI " metric; and it was rejected. should be: >Although 80% of the content was my own writing, the fact that it was run through an LLM engine for grammar and vocabulary cross-checking meant that it failed the "probably written by AI" metric, and it was rejected. 1. 80 % -> 80% 2. in -> through 3. a LLM -> an LLM 4. enginee -> engine 5. cross-check -> cross-checking 6. cross-checking, -> cross-checking (removed the comma) 7. made it failed -> meant that it failed, (or "made it fail" depending on whether you want to preserve the past tense or preserve the word "made") 8. probable -> probably 9. by AI " -> by AI" 10. ; and it was -> , and it was (no need for a semicolon when linking with a conjunction like "and", and I would consider another word or phrase such as ", and, as a result, it was rejected" to emphasize the causal relationship between the clauses) That's ten corrections that are fixing straightforward typos and/or grammar and vocab mistakes in one sentence. Most are fairly objective, though I can understand different opinions on 2, 7, or maybe 10. Relying on AI for editing seems to have atrophied the author's writing if that is what he or she thinks is worth publishing on a blog like this. I would suggest practicing editing your own work and not even thinking about passing it through AI (especially when you were told not to use any AI!) to edit for a while. Given that English is not your first (or even second or third) language, I would also suggest having a native speaker with some demonstrable writing skill review your writing and give feedback on how to make it more idiomatic. For example, writing being "run through an LLM" rather than "run in an LLM" is a relatively subtle difference compared to the others, and it's very very common for preposition mistakes like this to show up when writing in another language than your first. I am still hopeless with French prepositions.
  • levocardia 7mo ago
    Typos and minor grammatical errors within a well-reasoned piece are aesthetic now, means you didn't run it through an LLM...
    • viccis 7mo ago
      This is 2000s era middle school level English or below. I get not stressing things like judicious use of parentheticals and comma splicing, but if it's just stream of consciousness motor mouthing run on sentences, it gets fatiguing to read.
• mlsu 7mo ago
  Every now and then when I'm reading something, the writer will use a turn of phrase, a specific word, a metaphor, etc, that is unusually clever, or allows me to see the concept in some obtuse light. Or even, they are just able to choose the right words to make something sound musical or rhythmic in some pleasant way. It's intellectually delightful to come across these in writing. I've never been surprised at AI writing. Emotion the biggest part of communication and these grey boxes have none.
• metalman 7mo ago
  wrong, or at least, slightlywrong, but not, lesswrong you are missing the writing era, which is gone. whatever we have now will slowly congeal into cold grue that will get a name or names the madness of bieng chastised for speakerphoning and disturbing people gulping the slop what do we call that?
• zwischenzug 7mo ago
  The first sentence makes no sense.
• jhhh 7mo ago
  I miss the text only reading era. This is a blog and should not need to have JavaScript enabled to render text to a page. I would rather not have to be annoyed by flavor of the month duplicate scroll bars, cookie banners, newsletter pop-ups 5 seconds in, scroll to the top pop-ups, idle overlays, highlight helper bars that break copy paste, etc. This blog didn't have all of those but had some. I'm sure the metrics look great because I had to load this page four times. First initially, and then disabling JavaScript and realizing it doesn't load anything at all. A third time re-enabling JavaScript and then deleting all the annoying elements, and then a fourth time to make sure my cosmetic filter is applied correctly. 4x the interactions! Must be doing something right.
  • lelandfe 7mo ago
    > I had to load this page four times. First initially, and then disabling JavaScript Had to?
    • burnished 7mo ago
      They gave enough detail that its clear from context what 'had to' meant.
  • gwern 7mo ago
    You'll love GreaterWrong, then: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BJ4pnropWdnzzgeJc/i-am-definitely-missing-the-pre-ai-writing-era https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BJ4pnropWdnzzgeJc/i-am-de...
    • kogasa240p 7mo ago
      Thanks, I keep JS disabled on most sites and am continually baffled on why simple text and image blogs are web apps now.
  • kohllision 7mo ago
    I appreciate the sentiment, but this remark is far too common here. It does not address the content of the post and could apply to any submission from LessWrong. The author of the post has made none of those technical choices.
• joemazerino 7mo ago
  I'd push back on the author and ask him really if his writing is getting worse or his standards have increased, leading to undue stress that might throw the flow state off.
• i18nagentai 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• Ancalagon 7mo ago
  I am definitely missing the pre-AI w̶r̶i̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ era
• time0ut 7mo ago
  I certainly miss the pre-AI reading era. So much content is just straight copy/pasted from the LLM now. Articles, blog posts, linked in posts, reddit comments, etc. Even just using the LLM for 'editing' tends to shift the voice to an obvious LLM voice when used naively. It is getting worse too. Last week a co-worker sent me a screenshot of Claude for me to review their "work", which was just whatever Claude made up. Usually, if something is very obviously unfiltered LLM output, I just stop reading. I do use LLMs for writing myself. They are useful, but are poor authors.
• malwrar 7mo ago
  > And for people who successfully taken back their creative writing skills, how did you do it? “AI is one possible reference for my actual writing”. Generate info and perspectives, but only ever write stuff yourself. Something about this for me forces me to stay in my own “”writing voice”, at least personally, for the various places I use AI tech in. I think of the tech as a chess engine; they are better than any human player but I use them to help me gain perspective rather than cheat. Otherwise, why bother playing chess?
• globular-toast 7mo ago
  This writing is terrible. I can't read it. But are people really unable to write without wanting to put it into an LLM? I haven't done a single piece of natural language writing with an LLM. The thought has never even crossed my mind. Why would I? Surely to give the LLM context of whatever I want to write about would amount to, you know, writing it down? Just write that "prompt" in your blog and send it. No need for LLMs.
• dhosek 7mo ago
  I’ve completely avoided using AI for writing (although it looks like my coding avoidance is coming to an end). As someone who kind of views using a thesaurus as “cheating”¹, using AI to do the writing is way beyond the pale. A lot of what writing is about for me is about discovering and distilling and figuring out what I think. Take that away and I might as well just the spend the day watching television and playing video games and getting dumber by the minute. I would go a step further, in fact, and when I’m writing something creative, I may choose to avoid whatever the autocomplete is suggesting as the next word (although I have it disabled in most contexts). People have a tendency to fall into grooves in their writing/speaking and this kind of acts as a reminder to not do that,³ although I’m far from immune myself (looking at my comment history, it’s upsetting to see the same verbal tics repeated when I have something to say). ⸻ 1. If you don’t know a word well enough for it to come to mind when you’re looking for a word for something, you may not know it well enough to use it in your writing.² 2. Cue the people who will disagree. Suffice it to say that I occasionally will use a thesaurus to pull up a word that’s just out of reach, especially as my brain gets older and weaker, but even that I try to avoid. 3. When I got my MFA, there was a visiting writer who had published a creative writing book which was largely based on his former students’ transcriptions of his lectures. During the lecture he gave, even though he was speaking extemporaneously, he would speak word-for-word whole paragraphs from the book.
  • Liftyee 7mo ago
    Why is it upsetting to see the same patterns repeated when you have something to say?
    • dhosek 7mo ago
      Because I’d like to think that I am a more creative writer than that.
  • cortesoft 7mo ago
    > As someone who kind of views using a thesaurus as “cheating” I don't think cheating is the right word here (ironically), which I think you are kind of acknowledging by putting it in quotes. Based on your footnote, it sounds like you are more concerned that using a thesaurus is more likely to end with a worse result, since you are likely to use the incorrect word, or to use the word incorrectly. This sounds more like the opposite of cheating; cheating is about unfairly getting a better result, but this concern is more about accidentally getting a worse result.
• Copperline-Labs 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• syngrog66 7mo ago
  bad English, bad writing, stopped reading fast.
• ahhhok 7mo ago
  Also the pre-video audio era
• apparent 7mo ago
  Relevant to the headline, though less relevant to the actual article, I miss the pre-AI youtube era. I search for educational videos for my kids and videos that are from the last couple years are likely AI slop. Some are pure slop, just terrible. Others are also slop (no visible narrator, pronunciation mistakes an AI would make, repeating stock footage) but are actually well done enough to be educational. However, I don't want my kids watching these even if they are educational because it could lead them to think that the style of video is not bad. I want them to have an attuned radar to that kind of junk. For now, I just keep scrolling until I find something from before 2020, which is much more likely to be purely human-made and edited.
• syntheticmind 7mo ago
  [dead]
• epolanski 7mo ago
  I start feeling this for coding. I didn't expect AI to write 95%+ of my code, but here we are. I can't say whether I feel worried or not. I am trying now to gamify manual coding by having to review and edit a random file from my work codebases a day and still do occasional leetcodes and katas. But overall I enjoy coding less for sure. I can't think of the last time I spent heavy time focusing on a refactor or lower level design abstractions. I don't think I will be still coding 5 years from now. The joy is just not there.
• mystraline 7mo ago
  I am and I'm not. Making idiotic churn documents (resumes tailored to job) is perfect LLM churn. They use onerous AI on their side. Dealing with that dumbass cow-orker? Theyre getting LLM tone. But writing for HN and Masto? Thats more fun. I'll do it myself.
• xianshou 7mo ago
  I appreciate not having to read this guy again.
• boxedemp 7mo ago
  mood
• vicchenai 7mo ago
  the typos-as-authenticity thing is kind of funny because AI can just be told to write with typos. the real signal was never the errors, it was always whether the ideas feel like someone actually thought them.
• maneprajakta 7mo ago
  same here , the thought process required while coding is getting dead
• ForgotMyUUID 7mo ago
  After COVID six years ago I kind of lost my ability to write concisely and clear. I always loved to compose, to fantasize, but now I feel like an impared one. Now writing any text is a painful process to me: I grab one paper, do freewriting (when one writes w/o stop everything that comes to ones mind) , then mark the bulletpoints and nice formulations (if present, of course). Sometimes, when I want to sharpen the text, I ask questions to it, I critisize it violently. Then I close the original, and rewrite everything from scratch by hand. Handwriting enforces human, naturally lazy creatures, to be concise in their formulations. After 3-4 iterations, I get a text of asatisfactory quality. It is very unfortunate that we start value creativity and imagination only when we lose them. Although a good pill for creativity in my case is ... boredom and routine. I cant stand doing the same thing again and again in the same fashion. Maybe you might give it a try :)
• _the_inflator 7mo ago
  The funny thing I recognized is that I don’t care posting what AI created. It is something someone did and if it meets certain criteria I post it - but extremely rarely and not on HN. On the other hand I am way stricter and harder on myself when writing. This is something I observed for example. I don’t use AI for writing. Since I mainly read classics regarding belletristic I don’t fear being served AI generated content. I still don’t see why or even how to write with AI creating large bodies of text like a book for example. It is like ghost writing. In the best case it is good one, but style changes due to LLM model changes can kill a book because the tone suddenly is a totally different one.
• noritaka88 7mo ago
  [flagged]