3 ms·
> Prose? Don't care, I'm not writing literature, I'm delivering a message. If AI helps that be more clear and faster, great. What you've probably just never no
by swatcoder 2mo ago
> Prose? Don't care, I'm not writing literature, I'm delivering a message. If AI helps that be more clear and faster, great.
What you've probably just never noticed is that voice is a critical part of communication in written form just as much as in speech. And this is especially true when communicating in a crowded public environment like the internet.
Voice helps the receiver cohere your message as a distinct signal to pay attention to and draws it out from the noise of competing communication in their day, on their screen, etc. It helps them hear you -- and what you mean to say -- in your prose. It also gives the receiver subtle but meaningful insight into where you're thoughts are coming from culturally, experientially, and ideologically as your voice leaks that background information about you as subtext.
Because LLM's are a compression/decompression technology, letting you draw a lot of content out from a small leading prompt, they infill that output content with a voice that has characteristic and common phrasing, characteristic and common tics, characteristic and common structures, etc. So output from any given LLM, and from most LLM's trained in similar ways, ends up tending towards the same voice. i.e. they just to contribute to the noise.
It's deceptive, because your English teacher probably would grade their prose more highly than yours and so of course there's a part of you that thinks that's what you want. But impressing your English teacher is only part of communicating. The other part is making yourself heard.
LLM's make your prose easier to analyze or evaluate but much harder to hear.
- budsniffer952 2mo ago[flagged]