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There's some psychological mechanism by which my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text and just short-circuits to "there is no information here". And

by causal 1mo ago

There's some psychological mechanism by which my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text and just short-circuits to "there is no information here". And when I force myself to read AI-generated text I realize I'm making my brain do creative work to impart meaning to the words. It is exhausting because my brain is literally trying to do a just-in-time rewrite of the text into something valuable. Something is deeply wrong with AI generated output, and I say this as someone who is typically very impressed by AI.

chasd00 1mo ago
> Something is deeply wrong with AI generated output It works just fine for me.
- SquibblesRedux 1mo ago
  You are absolutely right.
  - ghere 1mo ago
    haha this made me laugh
    - fragmede 1mo ago
      That's not funny, it's serious!
jes5199 1mo ago
yes, but now I’m also experiencing that for human-written text
xnx 1mo ago
> my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text I bet it does. I bet it also recognizes some human text as AI text, and doesn't detect other AI text.
- nozzlegear 1mo ago
  Show me AI text that manages to climb out of the uncanny valley, and I'll show you AI text that's been edited by a human.
  - fragmede 1mo ago
    https://github.com/blader/humanizer https://github.com/blader/humanizer
    - nozzlegear 1mo ago
      The problem is the well's been poisoned just by the fact that I know this is AI trying to hide AI, so I'm already poised to look at the examples and declare "aha! this is obviously AI!" Moreover, it's not single sentences or phrases that make AI text stick out (though obviously those are the biggest tells), it's the text taken as a whole. When you read the full output example in that repo, it seems obvious to me that it's AI (though again, it could be the poisoned well). This is the uncanny valley I was talking about; something is just off about it.
      - renyicircle 1mo ago
        I agree that it feels off and I wonder what I would have thought if I'd seen the "after" example without knowing it's AI output put through a humanizer. Would I think much about the weird use of the word "honest"? About "that's the Lisbon I kept thinking about, not the castle"? Or how the story feels very impersonal somehow, with the author just mentioning their calves and legs sometimes as the only way of convincing the reader of their humanity?
        skolskoly 1mo ago
        Also, the 'before' segment didn't contain any mention of custard tarts, football, crowded trams, mixed feelings, etc. The original had a very positive travel agency type of tone, which was replaced with a lot of very odd sounding, imperative phrases that sound like engineering-speak. ('earn the fuss' 'build trips around pastry') I'm not convinced that this thing is actually meeting its design goal of not hallucinating shit.
Flamkuchlo 1mo ago
Are you sure you are not doing the same thing with other texts? I started to skim a lot more text due to me having read a lot. Like in news article, i stoped reading the first paragraph because it repeats just what it was already written in the short subtext. Then there is the second paragarph which is used to have some historical view or whatever it is.
- cyanydeez 1mo ago
  I started skimming reports im required to produce quarterly snd annually. I designed them to provide novel information at start and end so I can update them easily. The problem I encounter is both my memory is degrading, but since these reports are largely duplicative, knowing which version im remembering is technically impossible since theres so much overlap. The overlap is tge same problem as context poisoning. Id been doing this for over a decade when i started working with a new engineer with a few years of experience and younger. I tried to explain how i set these docs up so they can be skimmed and you can update the specific facts needed. They exclaimed they would never skim and rewrite it all. There was zero way to explain how exhausting that will become as they age. So theres certain a tension about how people and AI will generate documents.
  - kaffekaka 1mo ago
    Interesting anecdote!
  - inigyou 1mo ago
    Let them discover it themselves.
- causal 1mo ago
  I am very good at skimming over text. Human-written text I can usually glean the gist from very quickly, and get to choose how much I want to glean from it: The closer I look, the more I find. With AI-written text, it's almost the opposite: the closer I look, the less I find. It is so information-sparse.
TalkingCodeMonk 1mo ago
The "something deeply wrong" part about AI, that even most technology enthusiasts evidently do not seem to grasp, is that it is still fundamentally a statistical model — an algorithmic construct — and does not possess any real intelligence or critical thought whatsoever. No matter how much investors and tech companies want you to believe that they are on the verge of super intelligence, nothing I've seen to date can not easily be explained by "correlation engine", including the "novel" math solutions, all of which appear to just be "a composition of solutions humans have developed and documented elsewhere" upon deeper inspection.
- tempodox 1mo ago
  Thank you for helping me keep my sanity.
- pyridines 1mo ago
  I just can't accept that it possesses no intelligence. It is not equivalent to human intelligence, obviously, but how can a system without some semblance of rational thinking solve open math problems? Even composing earlier human work into something novel requires intelligence and understanding on some level.
  - figers 1mo ago
    watch this and see if you think it has intelligence by the end https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYUicaho5k8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYUicaho5k8
    - bayindirh 1mo ago
      I also like this: https://laurentiugabriel.github.io/token-town/ https://laurentiugabriel.github.io/token-town/ It shows internals of an LLM nicely, simplified manner.
    - pyridines 1mo ago
      This looks interesting, but would you mind saying a sentence or two about why before I commit to an hour-long video? It looks like it shows how they work internally, which is sort of a non sequitur. Brains also work mechanistically. I'm claiming that any system which is able to do what AIs do must necessarily have some sort of intelligence.
LelouBil 1mo ago
For some research I looked up some very old Reddit threads a couple of days ago. And, Oh my god, you can actually see how this style of writing influenced AI writing today, I constantly had to remind myself: "this was posted before ChatGPT released". The reddit influence is especially true for "storytelling" writing.
- efilife 1mo ago
  I experienced the same lately. Even dug some of my old posts where I put in the effort and formatted them using reddit's markdown. Wouldn't dare it today
peder 1mo ago
> There's some psychological mechanism by which my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text and just short-circuits to "there is no information here". I think you need to self-correct here, because otherwise you'll be ineffective in an information setting, where I expect AI-generated resources will not only be the norm, they will absolutely swamp the environment.
- iceflinger 1mo ago
  AI-generated resources swamping the information environment only makes it more important to have the mental mechanisms for quickly filtering out their non-information.
  - causal 1mo ago
    Yeah I don't think the solution to a flood of useless information is to try and digest more of it.
    - peder 1mo ago
      I'm not saying digest it, I'm saying be able to scan it/skim it/move on, but ignoring it won't help.
    - fwip 1mo ago
      Perhaps we'll all become metaphorical pandas, spending 14 hours a day ingesting nutrient-poor bamboo. (And producing a proportionate amount of excrement ourselves.) I hope not.
SoftTalker 1mo ago
Do you have much exposure to pre-AI corporate memos, mission statements, marketing plans, or white papers? Because they were mostly written in that style. Full of buzzwords, cliche similes, platitudes, jargon and stock phrases.
- bayindirh 1mo ago
  The thing is, people writing them had a style. Every company has its own style, or feeling for these kinds of texts. Also for the initiated, these buzzword-filled blocks of text provided some between the lines information; sometimes big, sometimes small. AI generated text doesn't have this. Every model has its bias towards a certain style, an overly agreeable tone, some exaggeration to make the user important and smart, but the text has none of the information crumb these pre-AI texts contained. Even when you use tools like Grammarly and allow it to "Impact-MAXX" your text, the resulting text is a bland wall of letters, carrying none of your voice or style, less elegant than a corporate text and emptier than space. It's beyond bland. It's tasteless.
- never_inline 1mo ago
  AI tries to make the prose "interesting". I don't want to read interesting prose. I want to read interesting ideas.
  - bayindirh 1mo ago
    The prose is not only interesting, also glorious. Gloriously grandiose, monumentally empty at the same time. It's like a hook of a pop song. Interesting to listen, but entirely empty.
- xboxnolifes 1mo ago
  I also read right through those. 90% of most companies' webpages is drivel. Same with 90% of a job listing's text. I hardly understand how people get any meaningful information from corporate websites, they're all just "enhancing your business outcomes by incorporating technical excellence with synergistic AI" or something like that. There's somehow less information than if they just asked claude to make something up without any context.
cedws 1mo ago
Once you see past the illusion I think there’s no going back. AI writing style is just dogshit. This hype wave is based on the belief that we’re inching closer to AGI but seems to me we just increasingly struggle to define intelligence. LLMs seem smart because they can pump out thousands of LOC quickly, and enthral you with fancy words and bullet points. I don’t fall for the intelligence illusion anymore.
- causal 1mo ago
  I'm not sure we need to declare AGI around the corner nor declare it all dogshit. I think that's part of what's so dissatisfying about it; it strikes at such extremes of both awesome and awful.
rnd33 1mo ago
Completely agree. AI is very impressive in many ways but there is something deeply wrong that is hard to put into words. The output is probable but never true, if that makes sense. I think this is also the mechanism behind why AI generated videos and images are so captivating at first. I remember when Midjourney first launched and it was hours and hours of a brain-melting "Wooooooow". But once you get used to it and start to identify the patterns the brain quickly labels most AI-generated content as blank space. If the image or text wasn't created by a human, then there was no intent behind the content, there is no message or novel information conveyed, and it reads as noise.
- causal 1mo ago
  Yeah AI generated content hints that there is a whole world behind it, the way that an image pre-AI was a clue that there was a rich 3D space that corresponded to the image. It seems our brains are adapting to that and recognizing "actually the signal behind this message is quite sparse" even when presented with rich imagery.
- mannanj 1mo ago
  > If the image or text wasn't created by a human, then there was no intent behind the content, there is no message or novel information conveyed, and it reads as noise. If I were to push you a bit on this, when is it not true? Let's not like at AI specifically, but can you think of other examples? Like for me, I think of: the creation of earth itself, or stars, or even DNA.
- red75prime 1mo ago
  > But once you get used to it and start to identify the patterns the brain quickly labels most AI-generated content as blank space. I guess the majority of people do low-effort generation that doesn't perturb a default style of a network enough, so it stays blatantly noticeable. The percentage of "super-recognizers" who notice almost all AI-generated images is around 1-2%. It could be that you are one of them, of course.
  - Cthulhu_ 1mo ago
    I think this is the confirmation bias trap a lot of people fall into; higher quality, hard to detect AI is already ubiquitous but because it's hard to detect people just don't clock it. "I can accurately detect 100% of AI generated images that I recognise as being AI", if you will.
GPerson 1mo ago
People should notice that it is constantly inventing plausible jargon, some of which may or may not have been used in some specific context.
- moritzwarhier 1mo ago
  It gets worse with language mixing, but I can't help from finding it funny at times, unless it bites me.
  - cpeterso 1mo ago
    Yes, I've had both ChatGPT and Perplexity return English answers with Hindi words sprinkled in (for totally unrelated queries). For example, I asked ChatGPT to summarize a long news story and it substituted the Hindi equivalent हत्या for the word "murder", as if ChatGPT was trying to work around alignment training or keyword block lists that discourage it from using the word "murder".
    - moritzwarhier 1mo ago
      Yeah that's a very good example, because it also demonstrates the "alignment issue", assuming ChatGPT wants to avoid confirming accusations of murder, or simply using the word without strong evidence. So kinda charitable :) I was recently wondering for a minute, shame on me, what "the stand of the deployment" means, because in the given context, it was almost halfway meaningful to consider the AI thinking that the deployment "has a stand" on something, when compared to the development environment. Jargon is even worse though, and I've not yet verifies whether it gets reinforced by language mixing. "Decider-verifyer resolution" was kind of neat, however, it wasn't some sophisticated machine, it was the verification loop I agreed on with the AI (mix of tools usage and manual steps).
    - fwip 1mo ago
      Just the other day I was using text-to-speech with Gemini, and for some reason, it transcribed my full query in Hindi (in the middle of an English conversation), and naturally the LLM responded with Hindi as well. I don't know exactly what I said, but after translating it back, it appears to have attempted a phonetic transcription of my words (rather than translating my actual question).
dudeinhawaii 1mo ago
You are re-compressing information that is in-effect meaningless because it's all decompression artifacts. The AI had a nugget of data and decompressed that into a flood of text. The exhausting thing is that we're then trying to re-compress that or derive the original intent and meaning from noisy decompression. It's like un-zipping a zip file into a probability space of what could have been in the zip -- and then having to find the actual files worth reading.
ghostbrainalpha 1mo ago
I've got a 3 step instruction to compress Ai text into useful info. 1. Ask it to write according to the Google Developer Documentation guidelines. Gets rid of fluff, less emotional statements, no it's not x it's why. 2. Tell it you have extreme ADHD and need everything condensed as much as possible. You can always ask for expansion on an answer later. 3. Bullet points whenever possible.
hdndjsbbs 1mo ago
The junior engineers at my job have a terrible problem of writing AI "proposals" to problems. The proposals are all extremely detailed and verbose to a thought-terminating extent. It takes a lot of effort and self-control to parse out the actual "ideas". I think of the Dwight Eisenhower quote: "Plans are useless. Planning is indispensable." The process of thinking through a system and communicating your design to other humans is a core part of software engineering. You want to build the right abstractions and communicate the right level of detail. Delegating all that thought to an LLM means your proposal isn't clear to the target audience, and it's not helping the author to understand the problem.
arjie 1mo ago
Yeah, I have the same problem. There's a good quote example of this: > There’s a growing scissor between people who are happy to read AI and those who violently bounce off from it. > People adapt in different ways — and some people absolutely cannot look at it. That cognitive split creates a surprisingly powerful opportunity: you can write something that, technically, sits right there on the page, yet an entire sub-population will be incapable of staying with it long enough to actually read it. You can hide entire sub-structures in plain sight. It’s not avoidance — it’s adaptive obfuscation. > The paragraph before this one was the only thing generated in this essay and if you just skipped over it I highly recommend reading and really understanding what it’s saying. It's quite effective. I think this kind of text functions like the chumboxes you see at the bottom. Taboola and so on. Just mental ad-block takes over.
slopinthebag 1mo ago
Yep. It's like it's painful to read for me. It's because the next-token predictor is just mashing (mostly) grammatically-correct and plausible sentences together, without any real intention or meaning. So everything sounds plausible, but almost entirely void of meaning.
renyicircle 1mo ago
It's like if on any website you went to you saw a lot of posts written by the same guy over and over again. Even if he used different names, you'd start to recognize him eventually because of his style. Seeing as he doesn't say a lot of valuable stuff, you'd also learn to skip whatever he says. I do worry that it's just survivorship bias and we're also consuming higher-quality AI output that's indistinguishable from human writing, but we focus on the raw, unedited, low-effort AI slop and think that we're good at recognizing AI text. Even if we really are at the moment, it might not be long until AI companies figure it out. I'm not sure why they haven't yet, given how many books they've burned for this already. Maybe it's just more efficient for the model to stick to a single way of writing, I don't know. But when that point comes, we'll be back to the usual way of reading and interpreting text because there would be no way to tell what produced it.
KronisLV 1mo ago
> just short-circuits to "there is no information here" That is my experience with the way the models write by default, often even when instructed not to do that. With enough effort you can get even them to slightly unslop the writing so it doesn't read like some LinkedIn/Buzzfeed brainrot, but the problem is that it's not trivial to do and most people won't do it, so the default is indeed horrible.
diego_sandoval 1mo ago
When I read AI-generated prose that is aimed at the general public, I have the exact same feeling. But when I ask Codex a technical question about coding, I don't get it at all. Codex replies to me in a very direct, technical manner, similar to the way I speak. When I ask ChatGPT to be concise and technical, I get the same effect. I think it's because prose aimed at the general public has to be very attention-baity --like the textual equivalent of a Mr. Beast video--, not because AI is incapable of writing like a human.
- BobbyJo 1mo ago
  I use Claude and I find that it speaks in a very obfuscated manner when explaining things. It seems to make up jargon as it goes on top of spending a lot of tokens dancing around a point. I often find myself having to ask it to rephrase things, or speak directly about mechanism or consequence, in order to understand the point.
  - disgruntledphd2 1mo ago
    GPT is less bad for this, which is why I've mostly shifted to using it.
  - sebmellen 1mo ago
    Using Claude for any kind of technical writing makes me feel like it was trained on snarky Huffington Post articles written by a 23 year old mixed media arts graduate and then was told to intentionally obfuscate the most important elements of any text by extensively rambling about what was not done and for what reason.
  - dgellow 1mo ago
    Not to accuse them of doing this, but AI vendors have an incentive to generate verbose responses, given that you pay per token
  - geekofalltech 1mo ago
    Im starting to believe it is exactly that...obfuscation. it started after it was known Chinese were generating models that were much smaller and more accurate from the llms response. The more generally articulated the answer is along with its accuracy in what it is and not what it isn't along with many strange never written before English euphemisms that dont make sense is definitely semantical obfuscation probably added in as a post processing transform to prevent these types of actors from being able to get easy to digest answers, and leave watermarks in their models to detect.
m463 1mo ago
I kind of wonder if our ability to skim has been stymied. blah blah blah - blah blah nugget blah blah - blah blah blah wrong blah blah nonsense - blah blah blah obvious blah blah - blah blah blah off-base blah blah blah It is that we HAVE to skim because the text is so cheap, and it wears us out.
- Cthulhu_ 1mo ago
  I think we as professional documentation-readers already skim most content (speaking for myself, I realized I was googling and skimming for answers 20 years ago instead of reading documentation end to end), but AI generated content has the same problem as marketing speak in that it's a lot of fluff. It's understandable people don't read but feed stuff into their own AI again to bring it up to their standards or have it get to the succinct point.
winterbloom 1mo ago
we are working on it, the thousands of gig workers tuning frontier models
starkd 1mo ago
Exactly, AI-generated text reads so smoothly, that the same short-circuit shifts my attention away from deep focus and onto scanning of the text, looking ahead to get the gist of it. Forcing myself to read the text fully feels almost painful. It's like reading a terms-of-service or any boilerplate document.
radicalbyte 1mo ago
It reads like the white papers companies publish on their websites to build legitimacy. Or anything from those IBM / SAP / Deloitte / etc consultants who write technical papers despite having little to know understanding of the technology. That's why the business and government people love it, they spend their entire careers reading this nonsense.
pessimizer 1mo ago
This is just a weird feeling that I've been coming closer to articulating lately, but I only think that you can get forward reasoning from what is basically word association; there's no mechanism for unwinding it because it has no real memory. By "it" I mean word association itself, not any context window. It predicts what could be in a position, and ignores what wasn't in a position. People don't do that. People are constantly engaging with paths not chosen. Right after I choose to write one thing, I'm immediately engaging with what I chose not to write there - I'm explaining why I didn't write it, I'm realizing that my choice may seem unusual so I'm trying to make it memorable, I'm focusing on the distinctions between what I wrote and what I didn't. LLMs don't currently do that. LLMs just ape a structure. When the structure resembles the sort of timid, clarifying fussing I just described, the LLMs just drift randomly because what they didn't say wasn't in the context. I also think that's why they have such a serious problem backtracking. They're not taking into account the already eliminated possibilities. Often the thing that was so unlikely that you weren't going to waste time on it is the answer, and things you discover while going down an ultimately wrong (but initially far more promising) path remind you of the path not taken. They're simply assembling a thing that resembles a valid argument, and happen to make sound choices because the plurality of input happened to contain sound choices. This is usually a very good bet because there are so many more ways to be wrong than to be right. But it doesn't account for attractive (common) wrong choices. You need a way to back out of those.
john01dav 1mo ago
> There's some psychological mechanism by which my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text and just short-circuits to "there is no information here". The roots of llm math in part lie in compressing natural language such that there's only information there, and then running the reverse to create way more text without new information in a somewhat precise theoretical sense. Some more information: https://youtu.be/l6DKRf-fAAM https://youtu.be/l6DKRf-fAAM
- Ohentis 1mo ago
  I love 3b1b and I love that video, but that also isn't exactly what is being said. In particular llm inference does add information (in the meaning in this context) because the output distribution is sampled randomly.
asdfman123 1mo ago
It's that you know it's a waste of time. If I sent you emails that were full of nonsense every day, you'd start tuning me out too.
futureshock 1mo ago
I think you are adjacent to the real story here, but missing it. AI text contains information, certainly. Frontier chatbots are very good at creating acceptable and mostly accurate answers to our questions on just about any topic. It’s an astonishing achievement. But you are sensing correctly that there’s something missing. It’s the meaning and the speaker. Communication is an exchange between speaker and listener. The speaker has a meaning in mind, and wants to create that same meaning in the mind of the listener. Therein the problem. There is a listener, sure. But no speaker. No meaning. There is information, but how can this be communication? Nothing is talking. Or at best, we are just talking to ourselves, our own words back at us through the funhouse mirror. When your mind looks at AI text, you know you can safely ignore it. No one wrote this. No one cares if you read it. You can delete it and nothing of value will be lost. It might contain the information you need, or a bunch of gibberish. There’s no one’s reputation on the line if it’s gibberish.
- masswerk 1mo ago
  I prefer to think of this in terms of Umberto Eco's opera aperta (open work): if any text is a collaboration between author and reader/recipient, here, all the burden of meaning is left to the recipient. There's simply no meaning on the side of the "author", it's just a statistical extraction. (There's also the problem of words/signs (just) referring to other words and/or cultural entities. There is no world nexus in this, therefore also nothing we conventionally refer to as meaning. On the other hand, it's utterly dogmatic, as all it refers to is the most probable construct, as a reference to references that are just another utterance, but supposedly a dominant one.)
- natsucks 1mo ago
  Yes AI content, even when correct and insightful, has a feeling of being disposable. Maybe it's because there is no person behind it.
jay_kyburz 1mo ago
>and just short-circuits to "there is no information here" I feel the same way when I read a "press release" or anything written by marketing. Even the newspaper will only have 2-3 sentences of interesting information spread out over 4 paragraphs.
- Cthulhu_ 1mo ago
  This makes me think of the paper-to-media pipeline; scientific papers are high information density. Its press release summarizes the finding. Then the popular science and social media posts come that oversimplify and embellish the findings. So from "this table of stellar luminocity observations shows x y and z" to computer renders of green/blue planets with captions of "LIFE FOUND IN SPAAAACE!".
- inigyou 1mo ago
  Before AI slop, there was corporate slop. It served the same purpose and was generated in largely the same way. But it was only deployed where it was worth the cost of creation.
AdieuToLogic 1mo ago
> Something is deeply wrong with AI generated output, and I say this as someone who is typically very impressed by AI. It is because GenAI output has no thought behind it, as you identified in your previous paragraph: > And when I force myself to read AI-generated text I realize I'm making my brain do creative work to impart meaning to the words. It is exhausting because my brain is literally trying to do a just-in-time rewrite of the text into something valuable. You are searching for meaning in something which was not created to convey meaning. The text was, instead, the result of an extremely clever statistically based algorithm. Not contemplation. Not thought.
pheymann 1mo ago
Same. Also when I see a spec for example or some summary I always have the impression it doesn't get to the point. Like, the core ideas are in there but also somehow lost and I have to work them out again which makes me wonder if the person generating it understood what is going on or if it would just have been fast to just write it by hand (you still use LLMs for research and such).
blensor 1mo ago
For me it's youtube videos. As soon as I hear the AI tells in the script, even when it's clearly read by a real person I immediately look for a different video. At least for the content I watch for entertainment, it may be different if I am looking for a specific answer for something where I would otherwise just ask an AI anyway.
JSR_FDED 1mo ago
Another good example of AI making my brain do more work is when you ask it to compare two things: “Compare a car and a bicycle” The answer is invariably something like: Seats: 1 (bicycle) vs 4 (car) Tire width: 1 inch (bicycle) vs 12 inch (car) Steering: handlebar (bicycle) vs steering wheel (car) Instead of “bikes are useful for short trips if the weather is ok and you like getting exercise, whereas a car is usually better for longer trips, bad weather, or multiple people”
- inigyou 1mo ago
  I wonder how the autoregression works on that. You'd think "seats: a bicycle has 1" would be an easier autoregressive completion than "seats: 1 (bicycle)" since it works left to right adding context.
nnevatie 1mo ago
> Something is deeply wrong with AI generated output For me, it is the endless maximalism and hyperbole. Almost if the output was driven through a radio-mix compressor - too loud for the reader/listener to be able to pickup any dynamics.
- inigyou 1mo ago
  It's the YouTube clickbait algorithm applied to text. Maximize interaction, at all costs.
lukan 1mo ago
Isn't that mostly hyperbole? When I ask AI to research technical information about X and (include sources) - I get mostly solid information as response. But poems or interesting fluff blog entries by LLM's? Not something I look for. What disturbs me is all the "pretending to be human" all the personalizing language - that is clearly fake and I would much rather have a neutral robot language as response.
scotty79 1mo ago
Didn't you have this mechanism before the AI? The internet is a cesspit filled with empty words and commercial speech for some time now.
pllbnk 1mo ago
Back and forths with the LLM are very useful when the person inquiring the LLM is invested in the conversation and wants to uncover the ground truth. Ultimately, some good result can come out of it because the person has a goal and LLM helps them reach that goal by uncovering the layers of knowledge which the person might not have. When the AI-generated content is presented to a person without any prior investment, it just looks incoherent. An especially great example are these Claude-generated explainer-type pages, which look really nice, even interactive, the information from the first sight looks really well presented. But somehow it all just doesn't make sense to a human. And I think it's because humans are processing information linearly and building an internal story about the information. One could argue that LLM's also consume information linearly but the way this information is processed is a kind of all-at-once approach. Just some speculation on my part but I have been trying to cope with this way information is presented because I am currently working at a place which is heavily documented by AI. And the only way for me to properly understand the documentation is by inquiring AI to help me.
inigyou 1mo ago
It's a machine that generates plausible letter sequences that we all pretend have profound meaning. Sometimes they happen to be correct, but you have to read them in excruciating detail to know that.
zby 1mo ago
Do you have the same feeling when you chat with AI?
infinitebit 1mo ago
Oh my god thank you. I have been trying to put into words what is so draining about pair programming with claude, and “doing creative work to impart meaning to the words” is exactly it.
laserDinosaur 1mo ago
I once heard on a podcast about comics that an artist ran into someone who couldn't read comics. Not that they didn't like them, but they claimed that they just didn't understand how they worked. When the artist explained 'well each panel shows an illustration of the events in the story', the other person was confused - "each panel is connected to the previous?" they asked. They just couldn't wrap their head around the fact that each of the panels was connected in some way - their brain just refused to interperate them as anything other than 4 separate completely unrelated panels. When I see AI animated videos, that's how my brain feels. It's this strange brain-fog that I just cannot connect together the sequences of images being shown into some sort of chain of events. My brain just refuses to see them as anything other than a disconnected series of 2-3 second videos, even if the same character(ish) appears in them all. It's very strange.
yeodev 1mo ago
I feel you. Everytime I need to read a long text I just assume it's AI nowadays and I hate it because most of the time I'm right. I hate how AI writes. How much numb filler bullshit is in content I need to go through for my job.
gofreddygo 1mo ago
Its fuzzy matching a sequence of input words to weighted patterns extracted from a humungous training set based on the sentence structure (not meaning) to generate another sequence of words, and then filtered and smoothed to make the output more agreeable. Its fundamentally flawed. like tarot card reading and astrology.

by causal 1mo ago

chasd00 1mo ago

> Something is deeply wrong with AI generated output It works just fine for me.

SquibblesRedux 1mo ago
You are absolutely right.
- ghere 1mo ago
  haha this made me laugh
  - fragmede 1mo ago
    That's not funny, it's serious!

jes5199 1mo ago

yes, but now I’m also experiencing that for human-written text

xnx 1mo ago

> my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text I bet it does. I bet it also recognizes some human text as AI text, and doesn't detect other AI text.

nozzlegear 1mo ago
Show me AI text that manages to climb out of the uncanny valley, and I'll show you AI text that's been edited by a human.
- fragmede 1mo ago
  https://github.com/blader/humanizer https://github.com/blader/humanizer
  - nozzlegear 1mo ago
    The problem is the well's been poisoned just by the fact that I know this is AI trying to hide AI, so I'm already poised to look at the examples and declare "aha! this is obviously AI!" Moreover, it's not single sentences or phrases that make AI text stick out (though obviously those are the biggest tells), it's the text taken as a whole. When you read the full output example in that repo, it seems obvious to me that it's AI (though again, it could be the poisoned well). This is the uncanny valley I was talking about; something is just off about it.
    - renyicircle 1mo ago
      I agree that it feels off and I wonder what I would have thought if I'd seen the "after" example without knowing it's AI output put through a humanizer. Would I think much about the weird use of the word "honest"? About "that's the Lisbon I kept thinking about, not the castle"? Or how the story feels very impersonal somehow, with the author just mentioning their calves and legs sometimes as the only way of convincing the reader of their humanity?
      - skolskoly 1mo ago
        Also, the 'before' segment didn't contain any mention of custard tarts, football, crowded trams, mixed feelings, etc. The original had a very positive travel agency type of tone, which was replaced with a lot of very odd sounding, imperative phrases that sound like engineering-speak. ('earn the fuss' 'build trips around pastry') I'm not convinced that this thing is actually meeting its design goal of not hallucinating shit.

Flamkuchlo 1mo ago

Are you sure you are not doing the same thing with other texts? I started to skim a lot more text due to me having read a lot. Like in news article, i stoped reading the first paragraph because it repeats just what it was already written in the short subtext. Then there is the second paragarph which is used to have some historical view or whatever it is.

cyanydeez 1mo ago
I started skimming reports im required to produce quarterly snd annually. I designed them to provide novel information at start and end so I can update them easily. The problem I encounter is both my memory is degrading, but since these reports are largely duplicative, knowing which version im remembering is technically impossible since theres so much overlap. The overlap is tge same problem as context poisoning. Id been doing this for over a decade when i started working with a new engineer with a few years of experience and younger. I tried to explain how i set these docs up so they can be skimmed and you can update the specific facts needed. They exclaimed they would never skim and rewrite it all. There was zero way to explain how exhausting that will become as they age. So theres certain a tension about how people and AI will generate documents.
- kaffekaka 1mo ago
  Interesting anecdote!
- inigyou 1mo ago
  Let them discover it themselves.
causal 1mo ago
I am very good at skimming over text. Human-written text I can usually glean the gist from very quickly, and get to choose how much I want to glean from it: The closer I look, the more I find. With AI-written text, it's almost the opposite: the closer I look, the less I find. It is so information-sparse.

TalkingCodeMonk 1mo ago

The "something deeply wrong" part about AI, that even most technology enthusiasts evidently do not seem to grasp, is that it is still fundamentally a statistical model — an algorithmic construct — and does not possess any real intelligence or critical thought whatsoever. No matter how much investors and tech companies want you to believe that they are on the verge of super intelligence, nothing I've seen to date can not easily be explained by "correlation engine", including the "novel" math solutions, all of which appear to just be "a composition of solutions humans have developed and documented elsewhere" upon deeper inspection.

tempodox 1mo ago
Thank you for helping me keep my sanity.
pyridines 1mo ago
I just can't accept that it possesses no intelligence. It is not equivalent to human intelligence, obviously, but how can a system without some semblance of rational thinking solve open math problems? Even composing earlier human work into something novel requires intelligence and understanding on some level.
- figers 1mo ago
  watch this and see if you think it has intelligence by the end https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYUicaho5k8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYUicaho5k8
  - bayindirh 1mo ago
    I also like this: https://laurentiugabriel.github.io/token-town/ https://laurentiugabriel.github.io/token-town/ It shows internals of an LLM nicely, simplified manner.
  - pyridines 1mo ago
    This looks interesting, but would you mind saying a sentence or two about why before I commit to an hour-long video? It looks like it shows how they work internally, which is sort of a non sequitur. Brains also work mechanistically. I'm claiming that any system which is able to do what AIs do must necessarily have some sort of intelligence.

LelouBil 1mo ago

For some research I looked up some very old Reddit threads a couple of days ago. And, Oh my god, you can actually see how this style of writing influenced AI writing today, I constantly had to remind myself: "this was posted before ChatGPT released". The reddit influence is especially true for "storytelling" writing.

efilife 1mo ago
I experienced the same lately. Even dug some of my old posts where I put in the effort and formatted them using reddit's markdown. Wouldn't dare it today

peder 1mo ago

> There's some psychological mechanism by which my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text and just short-circuits to "there is no information here". I think you need to self-correct here, because otherwise you'll be ineffective in an information setting, where I expect AI-generated resources will not only be the norm, they will absolutely swamp the environment.

iceflinger 1mo ago
AI-generated resources swamping the information environment only makes it more important to have the mental mechanisms for quickly filtering out their non-information.
- causal 1mo ago
  Yeah I don't think the solution to a flood of useless information is to try and digest more of it.
  - peder 1mo ago
    I'm not saying digest it, I'm saying be able to scan it/skim it/move on, but ignoring it won't help.
  - fwip 1mo ago
    Perhaps we'll all become metaphorical pandas, spending 14 hours a day ingesting nutrient-poor bamboo. (And producing a proportionate amount of excrement ourselves.) I hope not.

SoftTalker 1mo ago

Do you have much exposure to pre-AI corporate memos, mission statements, marketing plans, or white papers? Because they were mostly written in that style. Full of buzzwords, cliche similes, platitudes, jargon and stock phrases.

bayindirh 1mo ago
The thing is, people writing them had a style. Every company has its own style, or feeling for these kinds of texts. Also for the initiated, these buzzword-filled blocks of text provided some between the lines information; sometimes big, sometimes small. AI generated text doesn't have this. Every model has its bias towards a certain style, an overly agreeable tone, some exaggeration to make the user important and smart, but the text has none of the information crumb these pre-AI texts contained. Even when you use tools like Grammarly and allow it to "Impact-MAXX" your text, the resulting text is a bland wall of letters, carrying none of your voice or style, less elegant than a corporate text and emptier than space. It's beyond bland. It's tasteless.
never_inline 1mo ago
AI tries to make the prose "interesting". I don't want to read interesting prose. I want to read interesting ideas.
- bayindirh 1mo ago
  The prose is not only interesting, also glorious. Gloriously grandiose, monumentally empty at the same time. It's like a hook of a pop song. Interesting to listen, but entirely empty.
xboxnolifes 1mo ago
I also read right through those. 90% of most companies' webpages is drivel. Same with 90% of a job listing's text. I hardly understand how people get any meaningful information from corporate websites, they're all just "enhancing your business outcomes by incorporating technical excellence with synergistic AI" or something like that. There's somehow less information than if they just asked claude to make something up without any context.

cedws 1mo ago

Once you see past the illusion I think there’s no going back. AI writing style is just dogshit. This hype wave is based on the belief that we’re inching closer to AGI but seems to me we just increasingly struggle to define intelligence. LLMs seem smart because they can pump out thousands of LOC quickly, and enthral you with fancy words and bullet points. I don’t fall for the intelligence illusion anymore.

causal 1mo ago
I'm not sure we need to declare AGI around the corner nor declare it all dogshit. I think that's part of what's so dissatisfying about it; it strikes at such extremes of both awesome and awful.

rnd33 1mo ago

Completely agree. AI is very impressive in many ways but there is something deeply wrong that is hard to put into words. The output is probable but never true, if that makes sense. I think this is also the mechanism behind why AI generated videos and images are so captivating at first. I remember when Midjourney first launched and it was hours and hours of a brain-melting "Wooooooow". But once you get used to it and start to identify the patterns the brain quickly labels most AI-generated content as blank space. If the image or text wasn't created by a human, then there was no intent behind the content, there is no message or novel information conveyed, and it reads as noise.

causal 1mo ago
Yeah AI generated content hints that there is a whole world behind it, the way that an image pre-AI was a clue that there was a rich 3D space that corresponded to the image. It seems our brains are adapting to that and recognizing "actually the signal behind this message is quite sparse" even when presented with rich imagery.
mannanj 1mo ago
> If the image or text wasn't created by a human, then there was no intent behind the content, there is no message or novel information conveyed, and it reads as noise. If I were to push you a bit on this, when is it not true? Let's not like at AI specifically, but can you think of other examples? Like for me, I think of: the creation of earth itself, or stars, or even DNA.
red75prime 1mo ago
> But once you get used to it and start to identify the patterns the brain quickly labels most AI-generated content as blank space. I guess the majority of people do low-effort generation that doesn't perturb a default style of a network enough, so it stays blatantly noticeable. The percentage of "super-recognizers" who notice almost all AI-generated images is around 1-2%. It could be that you are one of them, of course.
- Cthulhu_ 1mo ago
  I think this is the confirmation bias trap a lot of people fall into; higher quality, hard to detect AI is already ubiquitous but because it's hard to detect people just don't clock it. "I can accurately detect 100% of AI generated images that I recognise as being AI", if you will.

GPerson 1mo ago

People should notice that it is constantly inventing plausible jargon, some of which may or may not have been used in some specific context.

moritzwarhier 1mo ago
It gets worse with language mixing, but I can't help from finding it funny at times, unless it bites me.
- cpeterso 1mo ago
  Yes, I've had both ChatGPT and Perplexity return English answers with Hindi words sprinkled in (for totally unrelated queries). For example, I asked ChatGPT to summarize a long news story and it substituted the Hindi equivalent हत्या for the word "murder", as if ChatGPT was trying to work around alignment training or keyword block lists that discourage it from using the word "murder".
  - moritzwarhier 1mo ago
    Yeah that's a very good example, because it also demonstrates the "alignment issue", assuming ChatGPT wants to avoid confirming accusations of murder, or simply using the word without strong evidence. So kinda charitable :) I was recently wondering for a minute, shame on me, what "the stand of the deployment" means, because in the given context, it was almost halfway meaningful to consider the AI thinking that the deployment "has a stand" on something, when compared to the development environment. Jargon is even worse though, and I've not yet verifies whether it gets reinforced by language mixing. "Decider-verifyer resolution" was kind of neat, however, it wasn't some sophisticated machine, it was the verification loop I agreed on with the AI (mix of tools usage and manual steps).
  - fwip 1mo ago
    Just the other day I was using text-to-speech with Gemini, and for some reason, it transcribed my full query in Hindi (in the middle of an English conversation), and naturally the LLM responded with Hindi as well. I don't know exactly what I said, but after translating it back, it appears to have attempted a phonetic transcription of my words (rather than translating my actual question).

dudeinhawaii 1mo ago

You are re-compressing information that is in-effect meaningless because it's all decompression artifacts. The AI had a nugget of data and decompressed that into a flood of text. The exhausting thing is that we're then trying to re-compress that or derive the original intent and meaning from noisy decompression. It's like un-zipping a zip file into a probability space of what could have been in the zip -- and then having to find the actual files worth reading.

ghostbrainalpha 1mo ago

I've got a 3 step instruction to compress Ai text into useful info. 1. Ask it to write according to the Google Developer Documentation guidelines. Gets rid of fluff, less emotional statements, no it's not x it's why. 2. Tell it you have extreme ADHD and need everything condensed as much as possible. You can always ask for expansion on an answer later. 3. Bullet points whenever possible.

hdndjsbbs 1mo ago

The junior engineers at my job have a terrible problem of writing AI "proposals" to problems. The proposals are all extremely detailed and verbose to a thought-terminating extent. It takes a lot of effort and self-control to parse out the actual "ideas". I think of the Dwight Eisenhower quote: "Plans are useless. Planning is indispensable." The process of thinking through a system and communicating your design to other humans is a core part of software engineering. You want to build the right abstractions and communicate the right level of detail. Delegating all that thought to an LLM means your proposal isn't clear to the target audience, and it's not helping the author to understand the problem.

arjie 1mo ago

Yeah, I have the same problem. There's a good quote example of this: > There’s a growing scissor between people who are happy to read AI and those who violently bounce off from it. > People adapt in different ways — and some people absolutely cannot look at it. That cognitive split creates a surprisingly powerful opportunity: you can write something that, technically, sits right there on the page, yet an entire sub-population will be incapable of staying with it long enough to actually read it. You can hide entire sub-structures in plain sight. It’s not avoidance — it’s adaptive obfuscation. > The paragraph before this one was the only thing generated in this essay and if you just skipped over it I highly recommend reading and really understanding what it’s saying. It's quite effective. I think this kind of text functions like the chumboxes you see at the bottom. Taboola and so on. Just mental ad-block takes over.

slopinthebag 1mo ago

Yep. It's like it's painful to read for me. It's because the next-token predictor is just mashing (mostly) grammatically-correct and plausible sentences together, without any real intention or meaning. So everything sounds plausible, but almost entirely void of meaning.

renyicircle 1mo ago

It's like if on any website you went to you saw a lot of posts written by the same guy over and over again. Even if he used different names, you'd start to recognize him eventually because of his style. Seeing as he doesn't say a lot of valuable stuff, you'd also learn to skip whatever he says. I do worry that it's just survivorship bias and we're also consuming higher-quality AI output that's indistinguishable from human writing, but we focus on the raw, unedited, low-effort AI slop and think that we're good at recognizing AI text. Even if we really are at the moment, it might not be long until AI companies figure it out. I'm not sure why they haven't yet, given how many books they've burned for this already. Maybe it's just more efficient for the model to stick to a single way of writing, I don't know. But when that point comes, we'll be back to the usual way of reading and interpreting text because there would be no way to tell what produced it.

KronisLV 1mo ago

> just short-circuits to "there is no information here" That is my experience with the way the models write by default, often even when instructed not to do that. With enough effort you can get even them to slightly unslop the writing so it doesn't read like some LinkedIn/Buzzfeed brainrot, but the problem is that it's not trivial to do and most people won't do it, so the default is indeed horrible.

diego_sandoval 1mo ago

When I read AI-generated prose that is aimed at the general public, I have the exact same feeling. But when I ask Codex a technical question about coding, I don't get it at all. Codex replies to me in a very direct, technical manner, similar to the way I speak. When I ask ChatGPT to be concise and technical, I get the same effect. I think it's because prose aimed at the general public has to be very attention-baity --like the textual equivalent of a Mr. Beast video--, not because AI is incapable of writing like a human.

BobbyJo 1mo ago
I use Claude and I find that it speaks in a very obfuscated manner when explaining things. It seems to make up jargon as it goes on top of spending a lot of tokens dancing around a point. I often find myself having to ask it to rephrase things, or speak directly about mechanism or consequence, in order to understand the point.
- disgruntledphd2 1mo ago
  GPT is less bad for this, which is why I've mostly shifted to using it.
- sebmellen 1mo ago
  Using Claude for any kind of technical writing makes me feel like it was trained on snarky Huffington Post articles written by a 23 year old mixed media arts graduate and then was told to intentionally obfuscate the most important elements of any text by extensively rambling about what was not done and for what reason.
- dgellow 1mo ago
  Not to accuse them of doing this, but AI vendors have an incentive to generate verbose responses, given that you pay per token
- geekofalltech 1mo ago
  Im starting to believe it is exactly that...obfuscation. it started after it was known Chinese were generating models that were much smaller and more accurate from the llms response. The more generally articulated the answer is along with its accuracy in what it is and not what it isn't along with many strange never written before English euphemisms that dont make sense is definitely semantical obfuscation probably added in as a post processing transform to prevent these types of actors from being able to get easy to digest answers, and leave watermarks in their models to detect.

m463 1mo ago

I kind of wonder if our ability to skim has been stymied. blah blah blah - blah blah nugget blah blah - blah blah blah wrong blah blah nonsense - blah blah blah obvious blah blah - blah blah blah off-base blah blah blah It is that we HAVE to skim because the text is so cheap, and it wears us out.

Cthulhu_ 1mo ago
I think we as professional documentation-readers already skim most content (speaking for myself, I realized I was googling and skimming for answers 20 years ago instead of reading documentation end to end), but AI generated content has the same problem as marketing speak in that it's a lot of fluff. It's understandable people don't read but feed stuff into their own AI again to bring it up to their standards or have it get to the succinct point.

winterbloom 1mo ago

we are working on it, the thousands of gig workers tuning frontier models

starkd 1mo ago

Exactly, AI-generated text reads so smoothly, that the same short-circuit shifts my attention away from deep focus and onto scanning of the text, looking ahead to get the gist of it. Forcing myself to read the text fully feels almost painful. It's like reading a terms-of-service or any boilerplate document.

radicalbyte 1mo ago

It reads like the white papers companies publish on their websites to build legitimacy. Or anything from those IBM / SAP / Deloitte / etc consultants who write technical papers despite having little to know understanding of the technology. That's why the business and government people love it, they spend their entire careers reading this nonsense.

pessimizer 1mo ago

This is just a weird feeling that I've been coming closer to articulating lately, but I only think that you can get forward reasoning from what is basically word association; there's no mechanism for unwinding it because it has no real memory. By "it" I mean word association itself, not any context window. It predicts what could be in a position, and ignores what wasn't in a position. People don't do that. People are constantly engaging with paths not chosen. Right after I choose to write one thing, I'm immediately engaging with what I chose not to write there - I'm explaining why I didn't write it, I'm realizing that my choice may seem unusual so I'm trying to make it memorable, I'm focusing on the distinctions between what I wrote and what I didn't. LLMs don't currently do that. LLMs just ape a structure. When the structure resembles the sort of timid, clarifying fussing I just described, the LLMs just drift randomly because what they didn't say wasn't in the context. I also think that's why they have such a serious problem backtracking. They're not taking into account the already eliminated possibilities. Often the thing that was so unlikely that you weren't going to waste time on it is the answer, and things you discover while going down an ultimately wrong (but initially far more promising) path remind you of the path not taken. They're simply assembling a thing that resembles a valid argument, and happen to make sound choices because the plurality of input happened to contain sound choices. This is usually a very good bet because there are so many more ways to be wrong than to be right. But it doesn't account for attractive (common) wrong choices. You need a way to back out of those.

john01dav 1mo ago

> There's some psychological mechanism by which my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text and just short-circuits to "there is no information here". The roots of llm math in part lie in compressing natural language such that there's only information there, and then running the reverse to create way more text without new information in a somewhat precise theoretical sense. Some more information: https://youtu.be/l6DKRf-fAAM https://youtu.be/l6DKRf-fAAM

Ohentis 1mo ago
I love 3b1b and I love that video, but that also isn't exactly what is being said. In particular llm inference does add information (in the meaning in this context) because the output distribution is sampled randomly.

asdfman123 1mo ago

It's that you know it's a waste of time. If I sent you emails that were full of nonsense every day, you'd start tuning me out too.

futureshock 1mo ago

I think you are adjacent to the real story here, but missing it. AI text contains information, certainly. Frontier chatbots are very good at creating acceptable and mostly accurate answers to our questions on just about any topic. It’s an astonishing achievement. But you are sensing correctly that there’s something missing. It’s the meaning and the speaker. Communication is an exchange between speaker and listener. The speaker has a meaning in mind, and wants to create that same meaning in the mind of the listener. Therein the problem. There is a listener, sure. But no speaker. No meaning. There is information, but how can this be communication? Nothing is talking. Or at best, we are just talking to ourselves, our own words back at us through the funhouse mirror. When your mind looks at AI text, you know you can safely ignore it. No one wrote this. No one cares if you read it. You can delete it and nothing of value will be lost. It might contain the information you need, or a bunch of gibberish. There’s no one’s reputation on the line if it’s gibberish.

masswerk 1mo ago
I prefer to think of this in terms of Umberto Eco's opera aperta (open work): if any text is a collaboration between author and reader/recipient, here, all the burden of meaning is left to the recipient. There's simply no meaning on the side of the "author", it's just a statistical extraction. (There's also the problem of words/signs (just) referring to other words and/or cultural entities. There is no world nexus in this, therefore also nothing we conventionally refer to as meaning. On the other hand, it's utterly dogmatic, as all it refers to is the most probable construct, as a reference to references that are just another utterance, but supposedly a dominant one.)
natsucks 1mo ago
Yes AI content, even when correct and insightful, has a feeling of being disposable. Maybe it's because there is no person behind it.

jay_kyburz 1mo ago

>and just short-circuits to "there is no information here" I feel the same way when I read a "press release" or anything written by marketing. Even the newspaper will only have 2-3 sentences of interesting information spread out over 4 paragraphs.

Cthulhu_ 1mo ago
This makes me think of the paper-to-media pipeline; scientific papers are high information density. Its press release summarizes the finding. Then the popular science and social media posts come that oversimplify and embellish the findings. So from "this table of stellar luminocity observations shows x y and z" to computer renders of green/blue planets with captions of "LIFE FOUND IN SPAAAACE!".
inigyou 1mo ago
Before AI slop, there was corporate slop. It served the same purpose and was generated in largely the same way. But it was only deployed where it was worth the cost of creation.

AdieuToLogic 1mo ago

> Something is deeply wrong with AI generated output, and I say this as someone who is typically very impressed by AI. It is because GenAI output has no thought behind it, as you identified in your previous paragraph: > And when I force myself to read AI-generated text I realize I'm making my brain do creative work to impart meaning to the words. It is exhausting because my brain is literally trying to do a just-in-time rewrite of the text into something valuable. You are searching for meaning in something which was not created to convey meaning. The text was, instead, the result of an extremely clever statistically based algorithm. Not contemplation. Not thought.

pheymann 1mo ago

Same. Also when I see a spec for example or some summary I always have the impression it doesn't get to the point. Like, the core ideas are in there but also somehow lost and I have to work them out again which makes me wonder if the person generating it understood what is going on or if it would just have been fast to just write it by hand (you still use LLMs for research and such).

blensor 1mo ago

For me it's youtube videos. As soon as I hear the AI tells in the script, even when it's clearly read by a real person I immediately look for a different video. At least for the content I watch for entertainment, it may be different if I am looking for a specific answer for something where I would otherwise just ask an AI anyway.

JSR_FDED 1mo ago

Another good example of AI making my brain do more work is when you ask it to compare two things: “Compare a car and a bicycle” The answer is invariably something like: Seats: 1 (bicycle) vs 4 (car) Tire width: 1 inch (bicycle) vs 12 inch (car) Steering: handlebar (bicycle) vs steering wheel (car) Instead of “bikes are useful for short trips if the weather is ok and you like getting exercise, whereas a car is usually better for longer trips, bad weather, or multiple people”

inigyou 1mo ago
I wonder how the autoregression works on that. You'd think "seats: a bicycle has 1" would be an easier autoregressive completion than "seats: 1 (bicycle)" since it works left to right adding context.

nnevatie 1mo ago

> Something is deeply wrong with AI generated output For me, it is the endless maximalism and hyperbole. Almost if the output was driven through a radio-mix compressor - too loud for the reader/listener to be able to pickup any dynamics.

inigyou 1mo ago
It's the YouTube clickbait algorithm applied to text. Maximize interaction, at all costs.

lukan 1mo ago

Isn't that mostly hyperbole? When I ask AI to research technical information about X and (include sources) - I get mostly solid information as response. But poems or interesting fluff blog entries by LLM's? Not something I look for. What disturbs me is all the "pretending to be human" all the personalizing language - that is clearly fake and I would much rather have a neutral robot language as response.

scotty79 1mo ago

Didn't you have this mechanism before the AI? The internet is a cesspit filled with empty words and commercial speech for some time now.

pllbnk 1mo ago

Back and forths with the LLM are very useful when the person inquiring the LLM is invested in the conversation and wants to uncover the ground truth. Ultimately, some good result can come out of it because the person has a goal and LLM helps them reach that goal by uncovering the layers of knowledge which the person might not have. When the AI-generated content is presented to a person without any prior investment, it just looks incoherent. An especially great example are these Claude-generated explainer-type pages, which look really nice, even interactive, the information from the first sight looks really well presented. But somehow it all just doesn't make sense to a human. And I think it's because humans are processing information linearly and building an internal story about the information. One could argue that LLM's also consume information linearly but the way this information is processed is a kind of all-at-once approach. Just some speculation on my part but I have been trying to cope with this way information is presented because I am currently working at a place which is heavily documented by AI. And the only way for me to properly understand the documentation is by inquiring AI to help me.

inigyou 1mo ago

It's a machine that generates plausible letter sequences that we all pretend have profound meaning. Sometimes they happen to be correct, but you have to read them in excruciating detail to know that.

zby 1mo ago

Do you have the same feeling when you chat with AI?

infinitebit 1mo ago

Oh my god thank you. I have been trying to put into words what is so draining about pair programming with claude, and “doing creative work to impart meaning to the words” is exactly it.

laserDinosaur 1mo ago

I once heard on a podcast about comics that an artist ran into someone who couldn't read comics. Not that they didn't like them, but they claimed that they just didn't understand how they worked. When the artist explained 'well each panel shows an illustration of the events in the story', the other person was confused - "each panel is connected to the previous?" they asked. They just couldn't wrap their head around the fact that each of the panels was connected in some way - their brain just refused to interperate them as anything other than 4 separate completely unrelated panels. When I see AI animated videos, that's how my brain feels. It's this strange brain-fog that I just cannot connect together the sequences of images being shown into some sort of chain of events. My brain just refuses to see them as anything other than a disconnected series of 2-3 second videos, even if the same character(ish) appears in them all. It's very strange.

yeodev 1mo ago

I feel you. Everytime I need to read a long text I just assume it's AI nowadays and I hate it because most of the time I'm right. I hate how AI writes. How much numb filler bullshit is in content I need to go through for my job.

gofreddygo 1mo ago

Its fuzzy matching a sequence of input words to weighted patterns extracted from a humungous training set based on the sentence structure (not meaning) to generate another sequence of words, and then filtered and smoothed to make the output more agreeable. Its fundamentally flawed. like tarot card reading and astrology.