4 ms·
So glad to see color photographs of the site. One thing I'm not so glad to see is one paragraph that starts with this sentence: "The distinction is important.
by karmelapple 17d ago
So glad to see color photographs of the site.
One thing I'm not so glad to see is one paragraph that starts with this sentence:
"The distinction is important. Archaeological maps..."
That "The distinction is important" smells like AI writing... but maybe we all just have to accept that now?
- 0xpgm 17d agoAs more people start using AI for research, they'll probably adopt AI'isms in their writing too, even if they don't use AI itself to do the writing. Subconsciously we all pick up patterns that we regularly encounter.
- debo_ 17d agoThis distinction is important.
- hunter-gatherer 17d agoI've had that happen to me. I actually recently wrote a draft blog and looked over it, and it felt AI generated. My writing style has definitely changed.
- youniverse 17d agoMaybe we need our AI to only respond in bullet point lists.
- erickhill 17d agoWith emoji for the bullets, natch.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- TomK32 17d agoJust put "Don't use emojis" into the prompt.
- tacomagick 17d agoPass it as a memory or a system prompt and watch it forget 3 agent messages later.
- mxmilkiib 17d agowhat frontier models are this bad these days?
- tacomagick 17d agoI can't name one but I can tell you these models keep getting stupider as they keep existing and their system prompts get inflated with what not to do. I have experienced this happen with Qwen 3.8 Max Preview where for the early days it was blasting through Rust code fine and then before the release it silently got replaced and started to suck hard. Claude still has the "blue button" problem so it is probable that a casual chat with it could have this exact outcome of forgetting what to do. I saw some models also have this thing where when you tell them a text restriction they first ignore it in thinking, creating the full text and then apply them in their thinking rewriting it fully causing your output tokens to be inflated.
- fennecfoxy 17d agoWell yes, there are only so many attention heads (well whatever magical variant frontier models are using these days) that can attend to the context and so as the context grows attention becomes spread thin. But with reasoning enabled I find that even with a large context that induces mistakes most of the time a decent model realises and corrects itself before output. And it's always been known that prompting what it should do is far better than what it shouldn't, since just introducing "DON'T do X" into the prompt means that the tokens for X are present and can be paid attention to in the wrong way. But even then I've used plenty of "Do X, not Y" recently, especially for tools "Use this for x, don't use this for Y" and models perform like 90% of the time. I would be interesting to experiment to see performance curves given a restriction on reasoning tokens allowed to n% of context tokens and see if there's some magic number of "reasoning should be at least n tokens for a context of length p" even ignoring the complexity of instructions in the prompt itself.
- evoluketion 17d ago- The - Distinction - Is - Important
- stavros 17d agoLucid only lets the AI give notes, not change your text: https://www.writelucid.cc/ https://www.writelucid.cc/ But I still find that I have to consciously fight the urge to sound like an LLM. It's terrible.
- jcims 17d agoI've definitely picked up 'lever', I scrub it every time that I notice I write it but it's in there.
- rubicon33 17d ago“blast radius” for me
- joegibbs 17d agoI have the opposite, I can pick up AIsms much more now and they stick out like a sore thumb. A couple of years ago I had no such intuition, it just sounded like normal writing to me, but now if I try to use AI to write any prose it just sounds absolutely terrible.
- awesome_dude 17d agoThis is the load-bearing result
- Razengan 17d agoYou're right to call it out.
- seer 17d agoHah absolutely, after of a very intense project I’ve undertaken with Claude agent teams for a few months now, I have caught myself using opus expressions, since they come to mind now naturally because that’s most of the text I’ve read since then … I’m catching myself so far, but in a year or two maybe I will not, fable doesn’t do as much “mannerisms” and speaks plainly, so maybe by then we will all be running fable level models on hour local machines and just not notice it anymore?
- fc417fc802 17d agoOr maybe the frontier labs could run several "personality" variants of each model and route you to them at random. Sessions are already sticky because of cache so it seems like any given cluster could be assigned one out of several fine tunes.
- pid0x17 17d agoI recently started noticing myself using the term "candidly" instead of "honestly" a lot more. The only term I doubt I will ever use is "churn". I still don't understand why Claude likes to plug that term into random sentences every now and then. English is not my native language.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- TomK32 17d agoRan it through several testes, only one flagged a few sentences as AI, including the one you mention. Fair enough, it's unlikely that English is the (turkish in this case?) author's first language and a little AI help can't hurt here. I learned a great lesson for a gamedev youtuber this summer: Use AI to give you a summary what you have to implement, what functions you'll need, what edge case you missed and then write it yourself. Putting this into practice helps me to refine the ticket I'm working on. With the last ticket I had to persuade the AI (Atlassian's Rovo in my case) that a new data model wasn't necessary and we can do it more elegantly with less code. Many of us still have to figure out how AI fits into our workflow, letting it do all the work isn't it but asking AI to point you towards the goal and let it review/refine your work sounds a lot more acceptable to me.
- aprilthird2021 17d ago> and a little AI help can't hurt here. Wrong wrong wrong. Bad writing makes the reader stop thinking about what you wanted to convey. As unintuitive as it is for most people in this forum, AI writing smell is as bad as bad grammar. Doesn't matter how you get rid of it. Maybe even more AI can clean those up, but those unintuitive phrases that pop up in AI writing are going to be a hindrance for many people who would love for the focus to be on what they're presenting, not the sloppy way they've written it up
- pitkali 17d ago> AI writing smell is as bad as bad grammar It sounds to me like you want to censor perfectly fine phrasing just because AI rolled the dice to use it. Let's not forget that AI learned to "speak" from people in the first place. Not to mention that as people shift their phrasing to avoid being accused of using AI, the AI will keep evolving, training on the new phrasing and then adopting it, too. I understand the language evolves, but evolving language just to sound different from AI feels like wasting effort better spent elsewhere. On actual substance of the message for example.
- aprilthird2021 16d ago
- azernik 17d agoWe all have to accept that people will look at perfectly innocuous, clear, well-written prose and assume that AI wrote it.
- psychoslave 17d agoOne can still suspect that something might not have been uttered through some AI assistance. There might even be still some living humans outside, who knows.
- kakacik 17d agoYeah its getting annoying how people discuss endlessly how some text is AI or not... like some extra imaginative points are awarded to those who spot the most. People seem to keep getting triggered by little insignificant things in the text. LLMs average human writing thats out there, its not making up new expressions or language constructs so just move on if you (anybody) can and put that little obsessive pedantic part of you behind you. I couldn't care less, why be a prick and not just enjoy & discuss the content, not this ultra focus on the form. If content is crap then thats another story altogether. I wish there would be some plugin/feature to just block those rather empty subthreads.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- chmod775 17d ago> LLMs average human writing thats out there Not really, and also they do not vary their writing like humans would. Human writers do not repeat the same pattern over and over as much as LLMs do. They'd get bored of their own writing. People as a whole are always going to be sick of whichever affectation current popular LLMs have, since they'd be reading a fair bit of that. As a writer you should steer clear of things that would elicit groans in a contemporary audience and "LLM prose" is just the latest addition. So, as the person you're replying to said, you'll have to get used to this being a new angle from which writing is critiqued. You'll live happier if you don't let your cortisol spike over it. If it is any comfort, writers will eventually adjust and you'll encounter less of it.
- 21asdffdsa12 17d agoRemember the "IDunno" of archeology - "It most likely served ritual and cultural purposes" .. i wonder if AI adapts such a thing
- st_goliath 17d ago> the "IDunno" of archeology - "It most likely served ritual and cultural purposes" If all you know about archeology is from daytime television and clickbait articles, all you know about history is what you vaguely remember from school, you never met anybody working in those fields and actually don't even have a passing interest to engage with the subject, then yes, you might be inclined to believe that's how it works. EDIT: of course this comment accumulates nothing but drive-by down votes from arrogant computer touchers, presumably before heading off to other comment sections to discuss law, macroeconomics, quantum physics and whatever else they are experts at, having watched YouTube videos. You see, only CS requires years of study and is divided into dozens of intricate sub fields, everything else is simple, straight forward and can be "disrupted".
- 21asdffdsa12 16d agoRemember, when it was "dig" even if it is destructive. Now its scan, map- return when the scanners get better, read scrolls of ash via scanner. We are 10 years away from a "Do not disturb ground" sign on every suspected digsite.
- deleted 16d ago[deleted]
- jimmygrapes 17d agoWorst thing is that because the smell is bad and you called it out, too comments are all about the smell vs the substance. I contribute, sadly. Maybe we should all be more judicious with when we say there's a smell, save that for when it's really rank? Like a polite thing. Yeah it stinks but maybe it's worth something beyond that. Not sure if this is the one, just thinking out loud.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- ragall 16d agoGiven that models have been trained on tons of academic papers as well as internal corporate documentation, it's no surprise their output sounds a lot like an unholy fusion of both styles.