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Literacy is dying. I suspect that's part of the reason some people hate AI. To the semi-literate a few paragraphs of text represent a significant investment of

Literacy is dying. I suspect that's part of the reason some people hate AI. To the semi-literate a few paragraphs of text represent a significant investment of their time.

oldmanhorton 2mo ago
I think this is a pretty unfair takeaway when AI generated text is often so wordy, flowery, and full of jargon and abstract nouns. People are never going to read East of Eden or academic dissertations as quickly as direct, simple language either
- mapontosevenths 2mo ago
  It's hard to talk about it in a very general way without being wrong a significant percentage of the time. I suspect we're both right, just on different occasions.
- ragequittah 2mo ago
  I always wonder why people generalize AI writing like this. If it's giving you responses like this that you don't like it's as simple as prompting it to give more succinct answers that aren't full of jargon and abstract nouns. I have chatgpt set to 'Efficient (concise and plain)' in the settings which works well to prevent this. And if efficient isn't enough some brief custom instructions will do wonders.
  - abustamam 2mo ago
    Because this is a thread about other people's usage of AI, so how I/you personally use it is irrelevant because we still have to deal with everyone else pasting AI, in which case it is generally long and wordy.
deleted 2mo ago
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NateEag 2mo ago
I am literate and hyperlexic - I read ~500 words a minute, and have read thousands of books for fun. I hate genAI deeply, for many reasons, but one of them is the way it bastardizes and ruins the written word. It writes incoherent, worthless prose, taking hundreds of words where two sentences would do. The signal-to-noise ratio in genAI writing is just wretched. Yes, I can read the thousand-word ball of muck you pasted from Claude in about thirty seconds, but it could have been one second had you used your mind instead of committing a worthless act that cost me time and gained both of us nothing.
- mapontosevenths 2mo ago
  > It writes incoherent, worthless prose, taking hundreds of words where two sentences would do. Either you haven't used GenAI in a few years, you've only used bad ones, you're really bad at using them, or all of the above. > I hate genAI deeply, for many reasons Probably explains the above issues. In my experience people who don't want things to be good: a) Always find them to be bad b) Are always bad at using them
  - NateEag 2mo ago
    > Either you haven't used GenAI in a few years, you've only used bad ones, you're really bad at using them, or all of the above. I use Claude every day, by corporate mandate, generally with Opus 4.8 or 5, but sometimes Sonnet 5 (per corporate demand to both use LLMs heavily and simultaneously keep the bills within a budget). I hate doing it, but I get results my coworkers, PMs, and end users are happy with. > Probably explains the above issues. In my experience people who don't want things to be good... I admit regularly that LLMs do amazing things. They're astonishingly good at breaking security, for instance. That doesn't mean I like them. And no, they really are not good at writing. When you feel the impulse to be defensive, that's often a sign that asking questions will be more worthwhile than leaping into the defensive posture.
    - mapontosevenths 2mo ago
      Claude might be the problem here. It really is bad at writing and ticks all the boxes you mentioned. It's much better at code. I don't mean to be defensive, just to point out that most of the statements you made are provably and obviously untrue... And given that you admit bias that's the most likely explanation. I hadn't considered that you have experience, but only with one that is legitimately bad at this particular thing because someone forced it onto you. Fair enough. We don't all have to like the same things.
AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
OK, but are you hiring semi-literate people to do jobs that involve writing at your company?
- mapontosevenths 2mo ago
  Everyone is. They just don't always know that.
jazzyjackson 2mo ago
ChatGPT can talk voice to voice to I don’t really get where you’re coming from. People are just afraid of billionaires becoming trillionaires and not having food and shelter
jeltz 2mo ago
In my experience it is the semi literate people who love generative AI the most. The people who struggled to form sentenced and hated reading.
- prepend 2mo ago
  I think some people suck (myself included) at writing and are amazed that they can finally generate text (fortunately not myself). So their output from an llm has the halo/ikea/endowment effect and they want to show off what they “wrote.” Writing is actually super easy. Editing and writing well is the hard part. It’s like co-workers who wrote a terrible book being excited just because they wrote a book.
markovs_gun 2mo ago
In my experience it is the semi-literate who are most impressed by AI writing and the ones who use it the most to write for them.

Literacy is dying. I suspect that's part of the reason some people hate AI. To the semi-literate a few paragraphs of text represent a significant investment of their time.

oldmanhorton 2mo ago

I think this is a pretty unfair takeaway when AI generated text is often so wordy, flowery, and full of jargon and abstract nouns. People are never going to read East of Eden or academic dissertations as quickly as direct, simple language either

mapontosevenths 2mo ago
It's hard to talk about it in a very general way without being wrong a significant percentage of the time. I suspect we're both right, just on different occasions.
ragequittah 2mo ago
I always wonder why people generalize AI writing like this. If it's giving you responses like this that you don't like it's as simple as prompting it to give more succinct answers that aren't full of jargon and abstract nouns. I have chatgpt set to 'Efficient (concise and plain)' in the settings which works well to prevent this. And if efficient isn't enough some brief custom instructions will do wonders.
- abustamam 2mo ago
  Because this is a thread about other people's usage of AI, so how I/you personally use it is irrelevant because we still have to deal with everyone else pasting AI, in which case it is generally long and wordy.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

NateEag 2mo ago

I am literate and hyperlexic - I read ~500 words a minute, and have read thousands of books for fun. I hate genAI deeply, for many reasons, but one of them is the way it bastardizes and ruins the written word. It writes incoherent, worthless prose, taking hundreds of words where two sentences would do. The signal-to-noise ratio in genAI writing is just wretched. Yes, I can read the thousand-word ball of muck you pasted from Claude in about thirty seconds, but it could have been one second had you used your mind instead of committing a worthless act that cost me time and gained both of us nothing.

mapontosevenths 2mo ago
> It writes incoherent, worthless prose, taking hundreds of words where two sentences would do. Either you haven't used GenAI in a few years, you've only used bad ones, you're really bad at using them, or all of the above. > I hate genAI deeply, for many reasons Probably explains the above issues. In my experience people who don't want things to be good: a) Always find them to be bad b) Are always bad at using them
- NateEag 2mo ago
  > Either you haven't used GenAI in a few years, you've only used bad ones, you're really bad at using them, or all of the above. I use Claude every day, by corporate mandate, generally with Opus 4.8 or 5, but sometimes Sonnet 5 (per corporate demand to both use LLMs heavily and simultaneously keep the bills within a budget). I hate doing it, but I get results my coworkers, PMs, and end users are happy with. > Probably explains the above issues. In my experience people who don't want things to be good... I admit regularly that LLMs do amazing things. They're astonishingly good at breaking security, for instance. That doesn't mean I like them. And no, they really are not good at writing. When you feel the impulse to be defensive, that's often a sign that asking questions will be more worthwhile than leaping into the defensive posture.
  - mapontosevenths 2mo ago
    Claude might be the problem here. It really is bad at writing and ticks all the boxes you mentioned. It's much better at code. I don't mean to be defensive, just to point out that most of the statements you made are provably and obviously untrue... And given that you admit bias that's the most likely explanation. I hadn't considered that you have experience, but only with one that is legitimately bad at this particular thing because someone forced it onto you. Fair enough. We don't all have to like the same things.

AnimalMuppet 2mo ago

OK, but are you hiring semi-literate people to do jobs that involve writing at your company?

mapontosevenths 2mo ago
Everyone is. They just don't always know that.

jazzyjackson 2mo ago

ChatGPT can talk voice to voice to I don’t really get where you’re coming from. People are just afraid of billionaires becoming trillionaires and not having food and shelter

jeltz 2mo ago

In my experience it is the semi literate people who love generative AI the most. The people who struggled to form sentenced and hated reading.

prepend 2mo ago
I think some people suck (myself included) at writing and are amazed that they can finally generate text (fortunately not myself). So their output from an llm has the halo/ikea/endowment effect and they want to show off what they “wrote.” Writing is actually super easy. Editing and writing well is the hard part. It’s like co-workers who wrote a terrible book being excited just because they wrote a book.

markovs_gun 2mo ago

In my experience it is the semi-literate who are most impressed by AI writing and the ones who use it the most to write for them.