5 ms·

Honestly, I can't fathom thinking that LLM writing is even remotely passable. People that think this should honestly read more. One book a month is hardly an as

• xienze 4mo ago
  > I can't fathom thinking that LLM writing is even remotely passable. People that think this should honestly read more. This makes me think you're only exposing yourself to high quality writing online and from an intelligent circle of friends and coworkers. The average person's reading and writing abilities are _atrocious_ and only getting worse. We're almost at the point where kids are communicating through abbreviations and emojis exclusively. LLM prose is significantly better than what the average person can produce.
  • sublinear 4mo ago
    Are we also saying it's acceptable to feed people junk because it's better than what they would cook? At some point you're just making bad excuses for false scarcity.
    • cryzinger 4mo ago
      I think it's both true that most LLM writing ("writing") sucks and that it's better than what a lot of people can produce unassisted. Which to me doesn't mean that we should roll over and accept LLM output as a lesser evil... it just means that the bar is so low it might as well be in hell, and rapidly getting lower :')
      • TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago
        It's nowhere close to good writing, but it's better than the dreck many self-published writers produce and sell - successfully. But that's the real problem with LLMs. Culture is aspirational. It has a consistent goal - find the best, highlight it and distribute it so others can build on it. LLMs are the opposite - produce as much of everything as possible at the lowest possible barely-acceptable-if-you're-lucky quality. This was already a problem before LLMs. Mass market content farms - Kindle Unlimited, Wattpad, Spotify, social media in general - give everyone an equal voice, with mass popularity and "likes" as the only metric. Now LLMs are automating the creation process, so everyone gets more of everything. Except inspiration. Not so much of the "That's astounding, I wonder if I can learn from that and reach for something in that league."
    • solumunus 4mo ago
      It’s acceptable for someone to buy a ready meal or takeout if it’s better than what they can cook. Why wouldn’t it be? Is that the greatest choice for their personal development? Probably not, but life is complex and folk have limited capability and bandwidth for acquiring skills.
    • xienze 4mo ago
      Tell me your thoughts on the quality of LLM-generated code. I've never understood this attitude where people are absolutely disgusted by the slightest whiff of AI prose but will happily slurp up AI-generated code by the bucketful and proudly proclaim that it's OK because it's better than the average developer can produce.
      • dvt 4mo ago
        The key difference is that code is not the end product, but writing is itself the product. (No one's doing "vibe-product-management" for example.) Tbh, I still think code can have a beauty and elegance to it (like a logical proof can, or like a mathematical theorem can), but there's a difference between the two and I'm way less forgiving of AI writing than I am of AI code, especially considering most code (by line count) is just boilerplate anyway.
        • ryandrake 4mo ago
          > The key difference is that code is not the end product I think this is open to debate. To me, the code has always been the goal, and the fact that writing it sometimes serves to produce a product is important to others (and what brings the paychecks in), but ultimately not something I've ever been excited about or interested in throughout my career. So I judge a developer based on the beauty and quality of the code he produces, just as I judge an LLM by the same sorts of things. The fact that AI can one-shot a working CRUD app is not really that interesting to me. If it could make the code beautiful, concise, maintainable, extensible, minimal, performant, readable, and bug-free: a work of art and love that a craftsman would be proud of... that would impress me.
          • dvt 4mo ago
            Imo, this is like saying "I judge a carpenter based on how straight they can cut a piece of plywood." Or like saying "I judge an artist on how accurately they can draw a circle by hand." I mean that's certainly one way of looking at it, and both can be impressive technical feats. But most people judge carpenters and artists on their end products, their overall vision, their motifs, their philosophy, and so on. On the other hand, as a trained logician, I definitely see proofs (which, by the Curry–Howard isomorphism, are computer programs) have some degree of beauty-within-themselves, but that's quite hard to achieve. Not everyone is a Gödel, after all. I also think programming languages, despite being Turing complete (which is frankly not saying much), are far too limiting to truly construct magnificent things with.
    • dspillett 4mo ago
      They weren't saying it is aceptable, or making excuses, just stating how things are. Average reading and writing abilities seem to be dropping noticeably in many circles. Probably as a consequence of falling attention spans rather than an issue in is own right.
  • xtracto 4mo ago
    Someone way more eloquent than me should write a column titled "Why do we read?" Way back in the past (around 30 years ago) I remember reading an article on "how to read a book" or a similar subject. They argued that, you should not skip the acknowledgments, preface and other "personal" related sections of a book, because it was there where you got a glimpse of the person that was writing the book. The idea being that, you should had in mind that the person writing was explaining something through you. Carl Sagan even has a video where he argues Books/Writing is some sort of communication through time. Now, this has been the case historically: A person writes some text (even in botched language like my writing, as English is not my first language) with thinking that someone else in the future will read the ideas and reason about them. But what about text written by an LLM? Does it have inherent intention? When reading LLM text, it feels like looking at those "this is not a person" photos. Yeah, they are words, yeah they form sentences and paragraphs but... they lack "soul".
    • devin 4mo ago
      It's not "Why do we read?" but something related that is coming up a lot in my thinking lately is Walter J. Ong's "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Human Thought".
      • avador 4mo ago
        Isn’t “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Human Thought” another way of saying that “feedback has an effect”? If so, this seems to be a trivial (still worthy) assertion. For example, I intend to, say, construct a shed. I make mistakes that I only see because I actually constructed. I revise future endeavours involving sheds. I admit to not having read this piece, and am merely reacting to the title. —- Okay, I got through the first paragraph of Walter’s writings. While I nod to the bitterness (I assent to the existence of it), I do not bow.
        • fcarraldo 4mo ago
          Do you think the first paragraph is enough of a basis to form an opinion from?
  • ryandrake 4mo ago
    ...or read. At least in the USA: 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024. 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level [1]. 1: https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...
    • torginus 4mo ago
      Hasn't this always been an intelligence thing? I think across all societies and eras we find that generally a a rather alarmingly large section of population is unable to grasp basic written instructions - and that section usually increases to the majority of people, when we start getting into things like an employment contract, or mortgage document.
    • watwut 4mo ago
      In an international comparisons, USA comes out somewhere in the middled of developed countries - as it always did. And the differences between countries are not that large. 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level is simply not a some kind of catastrophe and it does not mean those people cant read. There is this idea that 6th-grade level is almost like not knowing how to read, but that is simply not the case at all.
• gchamonlive 4mo ago
  Really hard to take your comment serious when the only post on dvt.name is a hello world page, because at least OP is trying to publish and you are lacking moral high ground to judge him thinking LLM writing is good.
  • dvt 4mo ago
    Lol my blog was hacked recently and I've been lazy about moving my backed-up mySQL DB to the new WP installation. Not sure where moral high ground enters the picture. If I really wanted to be an asshole, I'd cite a book I co-wrote and another I edited.
    • gchamonlive 4mo ago
      > Honestly, I can't fathom thinking that LLM writing is even remotely passable. People that think this should honestly read more. How do you think the author of the page would read this? That sounded pretty asshole-like for me. If it's not for you I'm really sorry for you, you must have to endure really screwed up people.
      • dvt 4mo ago
        Maybe you're right and I was a bit too snarky, apologies to the author if he/she was offended. Writing anything implies some vulnerability, and criticism should be constructive.
        • gchamonlive 4mo ago
          I know, and we've all been there. It's comfortable to criticize, only when I had a very divisive publication hit front page that I've seen how hurtful dismissive or sarcastic comments can be (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45277346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45277346) And sorry about your blog :/ didn't know it was hacked. Looking at the comment section of the hello world though it gets pretty obvious LOL. You should consider removing it from your HN about though.
  • 4mo ago
• torginus 4mo ago
  I haven't used these things for writing recreationally for a while (since the Claude 3.X days), so my opinions might be outdated - but they definitely weren't bad - after all they had a huge library of witticisms to pull from, and like Stable Diffusion that pulls from master artists, so do LLMs from skilled writers. Pro writers did come up with an absolute dearth of interesting ideas, and there are mountains of skillfully written prose out there - and its all in the training data, and AI is quite good at pulling from it. The advantage of the writing vs images, is that it takes longer to absorb the whole with text, so its less apparent that the whole thing doesn't quite come together. My problems was with Claude's prose and ideas is that it kept recycling the tropes and phrases after a while - something that has been observed that these models have very strong statistical biases - when asking for a random number for example, LLMs are far more predictable than even humans, this shows up in unguided writing exercises. But as for actually crafting text that is both terse and to the point - such as oneliner explanations, or writing summaries - these models are quite bad. The best I have seen is they could turn a given length of prose into an even longer version - with generally some loss in the tonal accuracy or the points made in there. As such they are a terrible tool for professional communication, but unfortunately, lots of people have started using them for exactly that.
  • Applejinx 4mo ago
    Um. Perhaps 'pro writers did come up with an absolute crapload of interesting ideas' would be better writing than 'dearth', which means scarcity and famine? I get that it sounds clever but that's the damn problem!
    • torginus 4mo ago
      Sorry, not a native speaker, so I guess I had that word misfiled, thanks for correcting me. It does sting a bit but that's a hell of a lot better than going through life mixing up words.
• lurquer 4mo ago
  Depends on the type of writing. Blogs and the like? LLM generates prose that, to me anyway. is unbearable. However, in fiction I’ve found it a useful collaborator. There have been more than a few occasions when, given some notes of how I want a character’s arc to develop in a particular scene, that the LLM gives some excellent pointers and ‘new’ ideas I hadn’t considered. As far as editing my prose, I use it as a ‘thesaurus of phrases.’ When lazy, I can give it a rough sketch of the paragraph, giving it the gist of what I want, and have it generate a dozen or so versions. I usually can find nuggets of good phrases therein that are useable… much as I would refer to Roget’s to find a more precise word. That said, one has to resist tbe temptation of using a chunk of generated text verbatim; no matter how good it sounds in isolation, the repetitive grammatical structure and other LLM-smells add up quick and become nauseatingly obvious if used frequently. In any case, I think LLM’s get a bad wrap for writing… when used correctly, it is incredibly useful. And, it’s tiresome to hear pretentious snobs assume that an author who uses LLM simply lacks the taste to appreciate how bad the prose sounds. Not true in all cases.
• chungusamongus 4mo ago
  This is just the last domain people can desperately cling to because style is totally subjective.