[HN Gopher] I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era
___________________________________________________________________
I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era
Author : joozio
Score : 230 points
Date : 2026-03-30 07:03 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lesswrong.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lesswrong.com)
| pypt wrote:
| Yeah, now it's "Here's what nobody else talks about" and "Here's
| the kicker" all day long.
| radimm wrote:
| This is exactly same struggle for me. Writing technical content
| about PostgreSQL and balancing my voice without sounding like LLM
| written is genuinely difficult.
|
| As English is not my first language, I do run into problem where
| the line between fix my clumsy sentence and rewrite my thought is
| very thin. Same with writing "boring" technical explanation and
| more approachable content. I'm getting pushed back for both.
| asdff wrote:
| Don't want to sound like an llm? Don't read llm content. Remove
| yourself from places where you might be liable to read it.
| Arainach wrote:
| It's not that simple. LLMs were trained on lots of writing,
| and the "LLM voice" resembles in many ways good English
| prose, or at least effective public communications voice.
|
| For years, even before LLMs, there have been trends of varied
| popularity to, for lack of a better word, regress -
| intentionally omitting capitalization, punctuation, or other
| important details which convey meaning. I rejected those, and
| likewise I reject the call to omit the emdash or otherwise
| alter my own manner of speaking - a manner cultivated through
| 30+ years of reading and writing English text.
|
| If content is intellectually lacking, call that out, but I am
| absolutely sick of people calling out writing because they
| "think it's LLM-written". I'm sick of review tools giving
| false positives and calling students' work "AI written"
| because they used eloquent words instead of Up Goer Five[0]
| vocabulary.
|
| I am just as afraid of a society where we all dumb ourselves
| down to not appear as machines as I am of one where machine-
| generated spam overtakes all human messaging.
|
| [0] https://xkcd.com/1133/
| asdff wrote:
| Well that isn't what I am suggesting. I'm suggesting people
| ditch x. Reddit. Probably also ditch hn in the next couple
| months. If you can run a headless agent to post somewhere,
| just don't bother visiting that site, honestly a great rule
| of thumb right there.
|
| That should leave you with media sources like nyt and your
| local library, which seems healthier to me. And maybe it
| might encourage a new type of forum to emerge where there
| is some decentralized vetting that you are a human, like
| verifying by inputting the random hash posted outside the
| local maker space.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| > like nyt
|
| I hope editorial departments everywhere are taking
| careful notes on the ars technica fiasco. Agree there's
| room for some kind of quick "verified human" checkmark.
| It would at least give readers the ability to quickly
| filter, and eliminate all the spurious "this sounds like
| vibeslop" accusations.
| raincole wrote:
| On HN o Reddit you can occasionally read genuine opinions
| from real people. On newspaper 100% of text is trying to
| manipulate you.
| watwut wrote:
| > "LLM voice" resembles in many ways good English prose, or
| at least effective public communications voice.
|
| It does not resembles that. It is usually grammatically
| correct writing, but it is also pretty ineffective writing
| bad writing with good gramar.
| Arainach wrote:
| One of the most common criticisms is the use of the
| emdash. This is a classic bit of English prose that is
| not problematic except as a stereotype used to dismiss
| writing for form rather than for content.
|
| Let's grab a few books off the shelf (literally).
|
| Douglas Adams' _The Hitchhiker 's Guide to the Galaxy_
| has four emdashes on the very first page:
|
| > It is also the story of a book, a book called THGTTG -
| not an Earth book, never...
|
| Isaac Asimov's classic _The Last Question_ : three
| emdashes on the first page (as printed in _The Complete
| Stories, Volume I_ )
|
| > ...they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking,
| flashing face -- miles and miles of face -- of that giant
| computer.
|
| Mark Z. Danielewski, _House of Leaves_ : Three emdashes
| on page 1
|
| > Much like its subject, _The Navidson Record_ itself is
| also uneasily contained -- whether by category or
| lection.
|
| Robert Caro, _Master of the Senate_ : Five emdashes on
| page one
|
| > Its drab tan damask walls...were unrelieved by even a
| single touch of color -- no painting, no mural -- or,
| seemingly, by any other ornament
|
| Other pages 1s:
|
| * Murakami - _1Q84_ : 1
|
| * Murray/Cox - _Apollo_ : 1
|
| * Meadows - _Thinking in Systems_ : 1
|
| * Dostoyevsky - _The Brothers Karamazov_ (Pevear
| /Volokhonsky translation): 4
|
| * Caro - _The Power Broker_ : 5
|
| * Hofstadter - _Godel, Escher, Bach_ - 3
|
| Honestly, when I started this post I expected to have to
| dig deeper than page 1. The emdash is an important part
| of English-language literature and I reject the claim
| that we should ignore all writing that contains it.
| dematz wrote:
| When a drunk chef dumps way too much salt into my ramen,
| the fact that good ramen also contains (more tastefully
| applied) salt redeems nothing!
| kristjansson wrote:
| No one is asking that we reject all prose with emdash.
| Not all emdash-users are LLMs, but many LLMs are
| profligate emdash-users, so adjust your priors
| accordingly.
|
| Secondarily, I think there's a part of the discourse
| missing: the presence of a syntactic emdash in a sentence
| on the internet is not itself a strong signal of LLM-
| writing - but the presence of an actual emdash glyph (--)
| should raise some eyebrows, esp. in fora that aren't
| commonly authored in rich text editors (here, twitter,
| ...)
| genthree wrote:
| Before LLMs, the em-dash glyph was a decent tell simply
| that... the author was using a Mac, because it's a simple
| and easy-to-remember (or even guess!) key-combo on there.
| Not that you can't type it on other keyboards, but the
| Mac one for whatever reason had a combo of users-who-
| wanted-to-type-it and layout-that-makes-it-easy that
| resulted in a high proportion of correct em-dash
| employers being Mac users.
|
| (option-underscore, or option-shift-dash if you prefer to
| think of it that way)
|
| On iOS, you can type it by simply holding down on the
| "dash" button then selecting the em-dash from the list of
| options it presents. It may also correct double-dash to
| em-dash a lot of the time, not sure.
|
| I have used the correct em-dash everywhere I can for over
| a decade, which amounts to nearly everywhere.
| annie511266728 wrote:
| The bad part is that people may start writing a bit worse
| on purpose, just so they don't get read as AI.
| raincole wrote:
| If you strictly read printed books only and am never exposed
| to online content, you'd think em-dash is a signal for human
| writing.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| No you'd not think that. The thought of something not being
| human written didn't even occur to anyone before decent
| LLMs came around.
| rane wrote:
| In some specific work contexts, such as writing pull request
| descriptions, not sounding like AI is something I've given up
| on trying to optimize. It's simply not worth the effort for me
| being non-native and writing detailed PR descriptions being so
| arduous, and the agent already has full context anyway.
| Obviously any fluff or inaccuracies are aggressively weeded out
| but I don't care anymore about the AI voice.
| kristjansson wrote:
| > any fluff or inaccuracies are aggressively weeded out
|
| this work is paramount. Without clear evidence of human
| filtering, a long, well formatted message/PR/doc is likely to
| reduce my estimate of the value/veracity/relevance of its
| content.
| voxleone wrote:
| This. My personal style have always been llm-like, including
| the generous use of em-dashes, and "not-only-this-that" style
| mannerisms. It' increasingly difficult to retain reputation.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I'll take a clumsy sentence written by a non-native speaker any
| day over LLM generated mush. At least I know you chose those
| words specifically so it gives me some insight into your state
| of mind and intended meaning.
|
| Any native English speaker who doesn't live under a rock is
| very accustomed to reading and hearing English from non-native
| speakers and familiar with the common quirks and mistakes.
| English is quite forgiving as a language, we understand you.
| When in doubt, simplify it.
| kristjansson wrote:
| > English is quite forgiving as a language
|
| it's a couple mutually-conflicting languages in a trenchcoat;
| forgiveness and flexibility are perhaps its defining
| properties.
|
| To the broader issue: "polish" (in any language) is only
| valuable insofar as it makes the ideas clearer, attests to
| innate qualities of the author and/or the investment of their
| time, or carries its own aesthetic value. As LLMs make (a
| certain kind of polish) cheap to produce, the value of the
| middle category attenuates to nothing.
| thepasch wrote:
| I never use an LLM to paraphrase my own voice as a matter of
| principle, but I've still been repeatedly accused of doing so
| because I happen to always have written structured posts, used
| "smart quotes," and done that negative comparison thing (it's
| genuinely not just fluff, it's a genuinely useful way to-- ah god
| damn it). Sigh.
| internet_points wrote:
| Same here, I've always used em dashes and have been called out
| on negative comparisons - I didn't even know they were an LLM
| thing. Should I read more LLM to know what phraseology to
| avoid, or will doing that nudge me towards sounding more LLM?
| :-(
| Freak_NL wrote:
| I feel ya. I've never been accused of using an LLM,
| fortunately, but depending on the context I do use "smart
| quotes" (even in ,,Dutch" or >>German<<) and the em-dash
| obviously... (And that ellips fella there. It's just so simple
| to type with a compose key set up.)
| shagie wrote:
| I thought the guillemet was French rather than German and the
| other way around.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Summary_table
| Freak_NL wrote:
| German uses both kinds depending on the style and writer's
| preference. French has the guillemets the other way around.
|
| (That Wikipedia table shows that too by the way.)
| gjm11 wrote:
| Right. The LLMs' quirks aren't _bad in themselves_ , they're
| bad _when they 're in every damn paragraph_. They're mostly
| things that in moderation actually improve writing, and that if
| you see them once (without the knowledge that they're things
| LLMs do) would rightly tend to make you think better of the
| author. And so, of course, in RLHF training they get rewarded,
| and unfortunately it's not so easy for an LLM to learn "it's
| good to do this thing a bit _but not too much_.
|
| The _structured_ thing you mention is the one that bugs me
| most. I genuinely think that most human writing would be
| improved by having more of the "signposts" that LLMs overuse.
| Headings, context-setting sentences, bullet points where
| appropriate, etc. I was doing "list of bullet points with
| boldfaced intro for each one" before the LLMs were. But because
| the LLMs are saturating their writing with it, we'll all learn
| to take it as a sign of glib superficiality and inauthenticity,
| and typical good human writing will start avoiding everything
| of that kind, and therefore get that little bit harder to read.
| Alas.
| beej71 wrote:
| I refuse to cater to the "em dashes are AI" crowd.
|
| And I was just noticing that my home-built blog render pipeline
| produces dumb quotes and that was embarrassing to me. Needs to
| be fixed.
|
| (Counterpoint, dumb quotes are 7-bit clean and paste nicely...
| Hmm.)
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I refuse to cater to the "em dashes are AI" crowd.
|
| I wrote a plugin for my blog that converts all hyphens
| (surrounded by whitespace) into em-dashes.
|
| https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Dec/a-proclamation-
| regardi...
| tomku wrote:
| It's absolutely shocking how many people think that inverting
| all the quality metrics that we've traditionally used "because
| LLMs" will lead to good things. Nothing about this will end
| well.
| dude250711 wrote:
| There is no grandiose "AI era". Or it started like in 1950s
| already.
|
| What it is going to be is a 'Slop Decade' - a much better label
| if you insist on having one.
| nusl wrote:
| The slop decade will be a slop "rest of humanity." There's no
| going back from this.
| missingdays wrote:
| No technology ever became obsolete?
| netsharc wrote:
| Oh well, when the most powerful people on the planet manage
| to enshittify it enough, we'll be freed from AI...
|
| Or maybe there'll be the elite enjoying the world, while the
| rest of us have to work manual labor. But at least it'll be
| AI systems ensuring our compliance!
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I think some spaces will try to retain their value by
| actively combating LLMs, in the same way they combat hackers
| and trolls, and if they don't, they'll naturally die.
|
| Several subreddits became AI slop submission repositories and
| their human engagement dwindled. Some subreddits that were
| inundated with AI slop implemented policies that ban it, and
| it seems to work well.
|
| Strict no slop policies work, and surprisingly, so do rules
| that require AI submissions to be tagged as AI. Forcing slop
| slingers to tag their slop does a good job at discouraging
| said slop, it turns out that admitting your slop is slop is
| embarrassing or something.
| xtajv wrote:
| I remember taking a machine learning course in which the
| instructor explicitly warned us to make wise fiscal decisions,
| based on the assumption that ML funding follows a hype-driven
| boom/bust cycle.
|
| "Save during the summers and you'll make it through the
| winters".
| andai wrote:
| > This post, is written without any tools assistance I just wrote
| what my brain is instructing to type (might not reread it before
| posting).
|
| How is the author complaining about the quality of their own
| writing while admitting to not even bothering _reading_ what they
| wrote, let alone editing it?
|
| (Also, why would using a LLM based grammar checker trigger an AI
| writing detector? Did it end up rewriting substantial parts of
| the original submission?)
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| What makes you think that? I presume that's just the authors
| (sarcastic) way to say "beware: may contain typos and
| grammatical errors".
| Freak_NL wrote:
| There are a bunch of typos in there which jar a bit
| ('deterioted'), but I guess that makes sense for this
| specific article.
|
| Personally, I would recommend them to simple use any old
| editor with spellchecking enabled. That suffices for most
| writing where you just want to keep your own voice. To me,
| the red crinkly line just means that I should edit that word
| myself. In the rare case where I'm stumped on the spelling
| I'll look at the suggested edit of course, but never as a
| matter of course.
| roysting wrote:
| The problem here, the overarching issue is that the subject
| complaint about AI slop is actually a bigger issue that has
| been plaguing America in particular for many years now, and
| of which the AI slop era is only a current top. The
| qualities of American writing have clearly been on a
| precipitous decline for a very long time now, predating AI
| slop and even spell checkers and computers.
|
| Computers, digital text, and digital information
| distribution/transportation have made writing and thoughts
| cheap. Arguably due to what we are surely all aware of,
| humans rarely value that which is cheap, whether monetarily
| or in effort and consequential qualities. What people seem
| reluctant or maybe unable to acknowledge is that predating
| the current AI Slop, was what could be called Human Slop,
| low quality, low effort, careless output that was cheap;
| regardless of whether AI slop now outperforms.
|
| It is why you are justified in pointing out that even in
| the post complaining about AI Slop, the human has
| apparently abandoned what would have been common practice
| in just the recent past, using basic spellcheckers or
| simply reviewing what was written and also practicing with
| deliberation; the art and skill of writing, grammar, and
| sentence structure.
|
| No one is perfect and that is also what makes anything
| human, somewhat inexplicable and random variation. However,
| it takes a certain refinement before unique human character
| becomes a positive quality and is not just humans being
| sloppy ... human slop.
| shagie wrote:
| > The qualities of American writing have clearly been on
| a precipitous decline for a very long time now, predating
| AI slop and even spell checkers and computers.
|
| https://www.literaturelust.com/post/what-writers-need-to-
| kno...
|
| > Every NYT bestseller from 1960 to 2014 falls in the
| seventh-grade level spread, from 4th to 11th.
|
| > ...
|
| > Since 2000, only 2 bestsellers have scored higher than
| 9th-grade readability.
|
| > ... ...
|
| > The bestselling authors of our time are writing at the
| 4th-grade level.
|
| > > "8 books tie for the lowest score," a 4.4, just above
| 4th-grade level. Prolific, well-known authors with huge
| sales: James Patterson, Janet Evonvich, and Nora
| Roberts."
|
| > These three authors have written a combined total of
| 419 books.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Because they're self-aware perfectionists and are actively
| working to stop it, because they reach for all kinds of tools
| like grammar checkers and AI, but they're aware that using
| those will make the post lose "their" voice, or the human
| element of the post.
|
| And that's, I think, a valid choice; you can choose to use all
| the tools and make something gramatically and stylistically as
| close to perfect, but who would want to read something as dry?
| That's for formal writing, and blog posts are not formal.
| watwut wrote:
| If you use grammar checker as a grammar checker, it wont make
| you loose your voice. It will make you use correct grammar.
|
| > you can choose to use all the tools and make something
| gramatically and stylistically as close to perfect, but who
| would want to read something as dry
|
| If it is dry, then it is not stylistically perfect. Per
| definition, dry writing is just an imperfect writing.
| Stylistically perfect writing does not have to be dry and
| usually is not dry.
|
| What happens here is that people use "stylistically perfect"
| when they mean "followed a bad stylistic advice".
| jerukmangga wrote:
| I see both sides here. Wanting to preserve your natural
| voice is valid, but editing and using tools don't
| necessarily take that away. In fact, they can help make
| your intended message clearer. It probably comes down to
| how much control you keep over the final result rather than
| wheater you use tools at all.
| watwut wrote:
| What annoys me here is that people say "I use AI as style
| checker to make my writing better" or claim that good
| writing is unfairly judged as being by AI ... and then
| proceed to describe inferior writing results they
| achieved with AI. None of what author wrote there signals
| that the way he uses AI made his writing better. His use
| of AI made his output inferior. And not just in a the
| "loosing own voice" way worst, but literally in the "the
| final text is less effective writing".
|
| I do not mean this comment to be kick against AI. It is
| very good for some stuff, it is less good for other
| stuff. What annoys me is someone calling output superior
| while actually complaining about it being inferior.
|
| Hey, maybe that llm needs to be used differently to
| achieve actually good writing results.
| vixen99 wrote:
| lose!
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Reading what you write for editing does not make a text lose
| your voice. If anything, it amplifies it, you get to ensure
| that what you intended to say was said.
|
| Not reading what you write smells more like laziness.
|
| Same thing for spell checks, grammar checks, and even AI
| usage. If you use things lazily, the result will be lazy as
| well.
|
| Instead of asking for an AI tool to write your thoughts in
| your place, you can write it yourself and ask it to criticize
| your text, instruct it to not rewrite anything, only give you
| an overall picture of text clarity, sentiment, etc.
|
| But that of course would require more work. Asking ChatGPT to
| produce a text based on a lazily written, bullet point list
| of brainfarts is probably easier.
| jychang wrote:
| Great! That's a good thing. Embrace being human sometimes.
|
| Plus, "lazy" would actually be just using AI to edit the
| writing.
| watwut wrote:
| > instruct it to not rewrite anything, only give you an
| overall picture of text clarity, sentiment, etc.
|
| LLM cant really do that. It can help you produce correct
| sentence where you struggle to create own, but it does not
| have capabilities to do what you suggest.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| What? LLMs are very capable of doing sentiment analysis.
| Hell, it's basically one of the things it actually excels
| at - understanding tone, nuance, context, etc.
|
| I used it many times for exactly this, with good results.
| It points out ambiguous contructs, parts that are
| dissonant from the tone I intend, etc.
|
| I have no idea why you think that LLMs can't do that lol
| watwut wrote:
| Sentiment analysis for the purpose of categorizing reddit
| comments, sure. For the purpose of giving you advice
| about nuance, overall clarity and tone of own long test,
| no.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| I tried it myself, and it did actually a good job.
|
| There's nothing magical about a long text you write
| yourself vs a stream o reddit comments in a thread. It's
| all sentiment analysis on text. It can extract ambiguity,
| how ideas are connected in the context, categorize and
| summarize, etc.
|
| You should try it and see it for yourself. Feed it some
| large text of a single author and ask it to do those
| things, see if the results are satisfactory.
| jmmv wrote:
| It sounds like you haven't tried.
|
| LLMs definitely can do this. The output tends to be
| overly positive though, claiming that any sort of rough
| draft you give them is "great, almost ready for
| publishing!". But the feedback you can get on clarity,
| narrative flow, weak spots... _is_ usually pretty good.
|
| Now, following that feedback to the letter is going to
| end up with a diluted message and boring voice, so it's
| up to you to do with the feedback whatever you think
| best.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Btw, this is precisely what I implied.
|
| I never ask the LLM to evaluate my text in terms of being
| good or bad. Instead I try something like this:
|
| "In this section I tried to explain X, I intended to
| sound in Y and Z fashion, and I want a reader to come out
| with ateast W impression. Is the text achieving these
| goals? Do I communicate my ideas clearly and consisely,
| or are they too confuse and meandering?"
|
| I typically get useful feedback. I preface specifically
| asking it to not rewrite, simply pointing the bits that
| it finds faulty and explaining why.
|
| Of course the prompt is different is I am writing, for
| example, technical documentation, or if it is an attempt
| at creative writing.
| eloisant wrote:
| There is no reliable way to detect AI writing. It probably
| trains on texts known to be AI, on texts known to be written by
| humans, then classify the text according to this training.
|
| The problem is that it has a pretty high false positive rate.
| Maybe it thinks it's AI because there are absolutely no
| spelling mistakes. Or maybe you're French and you use latin-
| roots words in English that are considered "too smart" for the
| average writer.
|
| And the problem is that people run those tools, see "80% chance
| to be written by AI", and instead of considering that 20% is
| high enough to consider you don't know, will assume it's
| definitely written by AI.
| tosti wrote:
| Exactly. Depending on what nutrians I've been consuming, the
| Indians/intelligence in my head could also be artificial.
| Perhaps that's why I fail those captcha tests most of the
| time.
| jofzar wrote:
| > Also, why would using a LLM based grammar checker trigger an
| AI writing detector? Did it end up rewriting substantial parts
| of the original submission?)
|
| Grammarly has seriously started rewriting whole paragraphs
| recently, I have been having to reject more and more "prompts"
| where in the past I would accept them almost by default because
| they actually were Grammer checks.
| Karuma wrote:
| Yes, these people are so unbelievably stupid that think others
| more intelligent than them can't tell when they use AI to write
| their stuff. And then they act so annoyed when they get
| exposed... It's unbearable.
|
| The article here is still full of AI slop, and so many people
| in the comments are defending the author. Blows my mind.
| amelius wrote:
| Are there any good writing LLMs out there?
|
| I get that the mainstream ones have been RLHF'd to death, but
| surely there must be others that are capable?
| shaoner wrote:
| https://hemingwayapp.com/ gives you advice about your writing.
|
| This is called Hemingway because he was apparently good at
| communicating efficiently which made him a popular author.
| amelius wrote:
| What happens if you take the output of a mainstream LLM and
| send it through this app? Would that solve the issue of the
| original article?
| Kye wrote:
| This is an interface, not an LLM. Do they say which LLM they
| use? Many of these are interfaces to one of the big three
| model providers. Others run through OpenRouter to use one of
| the better open models, all of which have their own quirks.
| keiferski wrote:
| I have been writing stuff for a long time; my first internet
| experience was posting on forums about a Gameboy Advance game.
| Then in other forums, for a philosophy degree, and professionally
| as a copywriter and technical writer. I've been meaning to write
| up a post of my thoughts on writing and AI, but there things I've
| been thinking recently are:
|
| 1. There was a lot of slop pre-AI. In fact I'd say the majority
| of published writing was bad, formulaic, and just written to
| manipulate your emotions. So in some sense, I don't really think
| pre-AI slop had more value. It's just cheaper to make now.
|
| 2. AI has prompted me to study more off-beat writers that
| followed the rules of language a little less frequently. This
| includes a lot of people from circa 1890-1970, when experimenting
| with form was really in vogue.
|
| 3. Which brings me to my third point, which is that no matter how
| much the AI actually knows about writing, the person prompting it
| is limited by their own education and knowledge of writers. You
| can't say, "make me a post in the style of Burroughs" if you
| don't know who Burroughs was, or what his writing style was. So
| in a sense there is an increased importance to being educated
| about writing itself. Without it you're limited in your ability
| to use AIs to write stuff and in your awareness of how much your
| non-AI written work is influenced by AI writing.
| bananaflag wrote:
| Can't you just... not do this?
|
| I never passed any AI writing as my own. I would feel utterly
| awful. Also, I love tweaking words until they sound perfect.
|
| The number of people who just nonchalantly admit that AI writes
| their messages is honestly scaring me.
| aledevv wrote:
| I want to emphasize a thought you expressed:
|
| _> "..but maybe it's a good thing that most of us don't allow
| this technology to reframe our thoughts."_
|
| No, you're not the only one experiencing this: I too had the same
| concerns as you: with every new thought, every new creation, I
| had to ask the AI's opinion, as if I were no longer able to
| judge, to decide, without consulting the AI (...just to be safe,
| you never know...).
|
| The only way to regain your creative ability is to write down
| your thoughts yourself, read, reread, rewrite, correct, express
| your opinion...
|
| What AI can't do is convey emotions.
| Amekedl wrote:
| depending how hard the "the brain is a muscle" saying applies,
| there is no way using LLMs/chatbot systems/AI is not going to
| deteriorate your brain immensely.
| barbazoo wrote:
| If your body is in good shape, stopping exercise won't make
| you deteriorate that quickly. What I wonder is, will people
| get in good shape in the first place.
|
| What I mean is as someone with lots of experience, I don't
| care about me not learning about the basics anymore as much
| as someone in their 20s and 30s maybe should.
| recursive wrote:
| I think this is backwards.
|
| Not sure what you mean by quickly. Back when I was in
| racing shape, if I stopped my training plan for as little
| as two weeks, (probably less actually, but I'm being
| conservative here) I would have a measurable drop in
| fitness.
|
| Now, as someone who regularly walks the dog and bikes to
| work, I've got "less to lose" and probably wouldn't
| deteriorate as much.
| justonceokay wrote:
| Aerobic fitness is hard to shake, but neuromuscular
| changes can be lost very quickly
| barbazoo wrote:
| And here I was thinking how clever an example I was
| giving :)
| john_strinlai wrote:
| when i was younger, we didnt have cellphones. i had ~20-30
| phone numbers memorized, at least. i also used to remember my
| credit card number. my brain has not deteriorated now that i
| have offloaded that to my phone.
|
| point being: it depends on how you use it. if you offload
| critical thinking to ai, you will probably (slowly) atrophy
| your critical thinking muscles. if you offload some bullshit
| boilerplate or repetitive tasks or whatever, giving you more
| time overall to do the critical thinking part, you will be
| fine.
| justonceokay wrote:
| See the recent article suggesting use of navigation apps may
| correlate in populations to increased Alzheimer's. Will it
| happen to you? Maybe, maybe not. Life's a box of chocolates!
| ghywertelling wrote:
| In I,Robot, Will Smith prefers to drive himself because he
| doesn't trust AI. But we are moving towards self driving as
| it would be more safer. Would you trust a calculation more if
| it was done by hand using log tables? Having vehicles allowed
| us to create sports like dirt bike riding or monster truck
| racing. Yes something is lost but something is also gained.
| We move up the layer of abstraction.
| stavros wrote:
| A friend described it as "there's no blank page any more".
| krackers wrote:
| >as if I were no longer able to judge, to decide, without
| consulting the AI
|
| "the Whispering Earring" -
| https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/2012-10-03-yva...
| stabbles wrote:
| Are grammatical errors and typos fashionable now? Reading this
| post it seems the anti-thesis in the LLM era is not to edit at
| all, but rather write down a stream of consciousness to make it
| "personal".
| simianwords wrote:
| Definitely think it is. It will be glorious. We will focus more
| on content than on just aesthetic as people try to signal that
| they are not llm
| nslsm wrote:
| Oh no, I have had enough of people with quirky (i.e. cringey)
| writing on the internet. It started with those who refused to
| use their shift key and it's quickly devolving into something
| that makes you shiver when you read it. (Not to mention how
| easy it is to use a system prompt to make an AI write in
| whatever style you like.)
| fleebee wrote:
| I feel like having to signal that you're a human detracts
| from the content side of things. Proper spelling and grammar,
| good style etc. are there to help you convey your ideas more
| accurately. Resorting to a stream of consciousness style of
| unrefined writing makes it apparent that you're a human, but
| the downside is that your text is bad.
| ikr678 wrote:
| Style is entirely subjective, and not every text is looking
| for a refined reader.
| rozab wrote:
| I see loads of LLM articles where it's been prompted to never
| capitalise, avoid full stops, pepper in spelling mistakes,
| etc. it sucks.
| mandolingual wrote:
| Flaw become aesthetic all time. People faked butt bandage
| follow Sun King fashion. Ugly as sin, still aesthetic.
| simianwords wrote:
| lol
| shagie wrote:
| Kurzgesagt typically does STEM focused videos... they've
| got a new channel "After Dark" which focuses on history
| and historical figures. Their first one: Kurzgesagt After
| Dark The Final Days of Louis XIV -
| https://youtu.be/bIwX4QuL90k?si=9WLbzKqxo08KCDum&t=564
|
| > And though the operation was done in secret, a new
| fashion sweeps the court: Bandages wrapped around
| everyone's buttocks.
| jofzar wrote:
| I mean yes? I am more likely to read and trust something that
| is not written or cowritten by ai.
|
| I want real humans giving real human opinions not ai giving
| their best opinion on what is the most "rewarding" weighted
| opinion
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Maybe it is.
|
| Just like hand made items are popular for their imperfections.
| defrost wrote:
| And because hands can still make things that machines cannot.
|
| eg: https://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=SAAM-2011.6_1
|
| from: https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/mandara-79001
| https://www.museumofglass.org/ltlg
| xnorswap wrote:
| An awful lot of stuff in the "hand made" aesthetic are made
| by machine and factory too, and I suspect a similar thing
| will happen to any popular writing aesthetic that attempts to
| avoid being automated away.
|
| Personally, I'll just continue to use my own voice. I try to
| correct spelling and grammar mistakes, and proof-read my
| writing before posting.
|
| It's not perfect, and my writing can at times be
| idiosyncratic, but it's my voice and it's all I've got left.
|
| But don't be mistaken in thinking that those mistakes make it
| better, it just makes it mine.
| beej71 wrote:
| When writing letters of recommendation now, I write in a more
| human tone to avoid sounding like a bot with a line of
| explanation at the start. Not an error in the sense you mean,
| but an error in tone for a letter of recommendation, certainly.
| chorkpop wrote:
| I've started letting some run on sentences remain because it
| feels closer to how humans think and usually write. Letting
| typos go seems silly though.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I don't know but capitalisation seems to have gone down the
| shitter.
| everdrive wrote:
| Not joking, buy and read books. Old books are only written by
| people. (and the help of an editor)
| shafyy wrote:
| Fun fact: Editors are usually also people. Except for that one
| dog I met during a cold winter's day in 1987 in a run-down
| London pub.
| incognito124 wrote:
| On the internet, no one knows you're an editor
| taneliv wrote:
| No way, bro! I'm no longer an editor, though.
| scorpionfeet wrote:
| Can you explain the reference? It whooshed me.
| 65 wrote:
| Or read magazines and newspapers from reputable publications.
| My grammar and writing have improved tremendously from reading
| quality magazine articles, e.g. stuff from The Atlantic or The
| NY Book Review or whatever.
|
| Both magazines and books are valid forms of information
| consumption and books are not the only way to improve your
| writing, reading, and understanding of the world.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I wouldn't count on current stuff in those publications being
| free from AI. We're seeing it in peer-reviewed paper
| submissions so why not in literary forums?
|
| If you limit yourself to stuff from maybe five years ago or
| older, yeah it's going to be human-written and human-edited
| (ghostwriting still possible).
| Miraste wrote:
| AI is much better at generating text that resembles
| scientific papers than it is at literary writing. Even if
| they're not all flagged as AI, the incidence will be much
| lower because they're simply bad writing. They won't make
| it out of the slush pile at places like GP listed.
| skywhopper wrote:
| It's largely a problem of how these tools are packaged, but while
| it's certainly nice to have an LLM check your spelling, or review
| your grammar or style or usage, you should never allow them to
| actually edit your document directly.
|
| First of all, they _will_ make substantive changes you didn't
| intend. The meaning will get changed, errors will be introduced.
| Tone will be off, and as the author says, your voice will
| disappear. There is no single "correct" way to write something.
| And voice and tone are conveyed with grammatical and usage
| variation. Don't give that up to a robotic average.
|
| Secondly, you will never improve, or even maintain, your own
| writing skills if you don't actively engage with the suggested
| changes. You also won't fully realize half the purpose of
| writing, which is to understand the topic better _yourself_.
| Doing the work of editing your piece will help you understand the
| subject even better. If you just let the machine "fix" your
| errors, you'll become a worse writer and less of an expert over
| time.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| If you outsource your thinking and skills, your ability to do
| either atrophies. You'll become dependent on outsourcing for
| both.
|
| You're trading ability and competence for convenience.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| For some reason I read that as _" If you outsource your
| thinking and skills, your ability to do apostrophes."_
| epolanski wrote:
| I think that AI will accelerate an already existing trend that
| pre dates AI meaning the global regression to the mean we're
| seeing in any creative field, from design to videogames, from
| cars to fashion.
| beej71 wrote:
| Agree. This also ties into the hypothesis that we're hitting a
| local maximum in terms of the state of the art in creativity as
| we offload that work.
| MyHonestOpinon wrote:
| I find this similar to when photography was invented and
| painters moved away from realism trying to find originality
| and creativity and they produced modern art which for many of
| us just looks silly.
| beej71 wrote:
| I feel like asking it to polish or rewrite is going too far.
| Using it for a grammar/spell checker or thesaurus is fine,
| though. At least that preserves ones voice.
|
| And I've definitely used it when I can't remember that one
| stinking word that I know exists and is perfect for this
| occasion.
| kristjansson wrote:
| > one stinking word
|
| "hey robot give me every word even mildly related to
| $SOME_SENSE_ON_THE_TIP_OF_MY_TOUNGE" is a wildly satisfying and
| underrated experience.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| I've been a Grammarly customer for quite some time, and I have
| tried the AI suggestions, but it always loses something and ends
| up with a whiny, apologetic tone.
|
| AI always seems so verbose and wordy.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| For the most part, AI writing is pretty bad. It reads like a
| highschool kid trying to hit a minimum word requirement.
| kerblang wrote:
| > It means, I passed the text.
|
| Ha. Well I guess you did, _this time_.
|
| Can we not just ask an AI to correct our spelling mistakes and
| leave the rest alone?
| solomonb wrote:
| I actually find Gmail a better editor/grammar check then LLMs. It
| makes isolated simplifications/corrections that imo have minimal
| style impact and just focus on clarifying phrasing.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| Yeah Gmail got crazy good in the last 3 months, pretty sure
| it's LLM driven too but it went from 90s MS Word to better than
| Grammarly recently IMO
| aidenn0 wrote:
| What does it say about me that when I run my writing through one
| of those "detect if AI" tools I seldom see a value of less than
| 70% confidence that the writing was AI generated?
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| It probably means that your writing stylistically is close to
| the vector-space average of "good" writing, which is what AI
| produces.
|
| FWIW, your comment history here does not look like AI at all to
| me, and I think I have a very (maybe too?) high sensitivity to
| AI slop.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I haven't tried my HN comments; I've only tried things
| spanning more than a few sentences and that I've put more
| effort into. I only discovered this when my son put an e-mail
| I wrote to his teacher that he was CC'd on into the tool on
| his school iPad.
| ilogik wrote:
| try it with something published before 2022. do you still get
| the same results?
|
| I really doubt those tools are good for anything
| spoiler wrote:
| I know this is a spicy take, but it probably just means you're
| more eloquent in your writing than most netizens...
|
| And that's not really a hard bar to clear if you look at how
| people write comments online (including places like GitHub).
|
| Anyone that uses punctuation, and capitalises words, probably
| automatically gets past the 70% confidence line.
| podgietaru wrote:
| It baffles me when I see ostensibly smart people refusing to
| click shift. Especially programmers. I know you can do it!
| I've seen you use curly brackets!
| john_strinlai wrote:
| _about_ you? not much. but i wouldnt spin up a blog, or even
| longer comments here, if you want to keep your sanity.
|
| the amount of "that is obvious ai slop" comments i see on mine
| or other people's genuine non-ai writing has discouraged me
| from sharing anything more than roughly a paragraph for
| probably the rest of my life.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Simple: The derived variance in your word usage and sequences,
| is outside the mean distribution range, that would be labeled
| as AI generated, given this specific evaluation algorithm
|
| It's not nondeterministic
|
| you can probably do the shannon entropy calculation yourself if
| you understand what the evaluation algorithm is
|
| That said...if the evaluator is non-deterministic, then there's
| no value in the estimate anyway
| crthpl wrote:
| have you tried pangram? it's basically the only good AI
| detector, and they have nearly 0 false positives
| ttamslam wrote:
| > and they have nearly 0 false positives
|
| I really don't see how this can be possible unless they're
| accepting abysmal recall? Perhaps I'm missing something
| fundamental here, but the idea that AI and non-AI assisted
| text can be separated with "nearly 0 false positives" just
| says to me that it's really just a filter for the weakest,
| most obvious AI generated text. Is that valuable?
| levocardia wrote:
| Pangram's explicit pitch is extremely low false positives,
| accepting that a higher rate of false negatives is
| acceptable.
| bluebarbet wrote:
| What it says (and this fact is not popular around here) is that
| _you write better than the average person_.
| charlieflowers wrote:
| AI detectors don't work.
| piker wrote:
| AI for editing is garbage. Chat to it to get ideas maybe, but in
| its current incarnation it's just going to degrade anything you
| filter through it.
| ArcHound wrote:
| I thought it's quite good. Of course, I'm not taking 100% of
| output, but it takes care of my grammar blindspots (damn you
| commas and a/an/the articles!).
|
| Can you please share what and how gets degraded? Sometimes I
| don't like a phrase it selects, but it's not common
| piker wrote:
| Well, for one example, it inhibits your desire to improve
| against those very blind spots. In exchange for that your
| audience gets 3-4x length normalized bullshit to read
| instead.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| AI can take a rough draft, clean it up and _shorten_ it as
| much as you want. The suggestions very often expose
| ambiguities in the original text. If you think the LLM got
| it wrong, it's nearly often the LLM overreading some
| feature of the original that you failed to catch, which is
| precisely what you'd want out of your proofreader.
|
| Yes, LLMs reduce the individual charm of prose, but the
| critique itself carries a romantic notion that we all
| _loved_ the idiosyncratic failures of convention and
| meaning which went into highly identifiable personal
| styles, and which often go missing from LLM-edited work.
| shagie wrote:
| > Well, for one example, it inhibits your desire to improve
| against those very blind spots.
|
| I'd contend this is not true. Even professional authors go
| to an editor who identifies things that need to be fixed.
| As the author of the text and knowing what it _should_ be,
| it can be difficult to read what you wrote to find those
| mistakes.
|
| > In exchange for that your audience gets 3-4x length
| normalized bullshit to read instead.
|
| This is not at all what is implied by having an AI act as
| an editor. Identifying misplaced commas, incorrect subject
| verb agreement (e.g. counts), and incomplete ideas left in
| as sentence fragments.
|
| You appear to be implying that the author is giving agency
| to create the content to the AI rather than using it as a
| tool to act as a super-charged grammerly.
| piker wrote:
| > Even professional authors go to an editor who
| identifies things that need to be fixed.
|
| Yes, and these people are good at it. What's your point?
|
| If you need grammar checking, there are thousands of apps
| including word processors, web browsers and even most
| mobile devices that will check your inputs for grammar
| and spelling mistakes as you type. All of that without
| burning down the rainforests or neutering your thesis.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > it takes care of my grammar blindspots (damn you commas and
| a/an/the articles!)
|
| There are plenty of pre-LLM tools that can fix grammar
| issues.
|
| > Can you please share what and how gets degraded?
|
| I'm not the person you asked, but IMO LLMs suck the style and
| voice out of the written word. It is the verbal equivalent of
| photos that show you an average of what people look like, see
| for example:
|
| https://www.artfido.com/this-is-what-the-average-person-
| look...
|
| As definitionally average the results are not bad but they
| are also entirely unremarkable, bland, milquetoast. Whether
| or not this result is a degradation will vary, of course, as
| some people write a lot worse than bland.
| viccis wrote:
| >damn you commas and a/an/the articles
|
| This sounds like an ESL issue. LLMs are good at proof reading
| ESL-written English text. They are not as good at proof
| reading experience English writers.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| In many kinds of writing, perhaps most, communicating your
| state of mind to the reader is a primary goal. Even a smart
| LLM fundamentally degrades this, because to whatever degree
| that it has a mind it isn't shaped like yours or mine. I've
| had a number of experiences this year where I get to the end
| of a grammatical, well-structured technical document, only to
| find that it was completely useless because it recited a
| bunch of facts and analyses but failed to convey what the
| author was thinking as they wrote it.
|
| (Of course, that may well be exactly what you're looking for
| if you're writing an audit report or something.)
| hectdev wrote:
| I work mostly on the tech side of things but my corporate
| limitation has always been writing up documentation,
| communicating/translating to stakeholders, and recalling
| everything relevant when writing PR descriptions. AI has been a
| breath of fresh air. I actually communicate more information
| efficiently than I would have ever put the effort into before.
| I still maintain my own writing for more casual things like
| social media (HN included) and low stakes Slack conversations
| but AI for getting across ideas and then proofreading it is
| great.
| Morromist wrote:
| "I actually communicate more information efficiently than I
| would have ever put the effort into before"
|
| - this is subjective and evidence seems to point to the
| opposite in my view. In reality most people who think they
| communicate better with AI don't actually read what the AI
| has written for them and just puke it out on the world,
| expecting their readers to do the work.
|
| The Ai almost always writes boring, repetitive garbage and
| very, very often includes redundant information. But saying
| it creates more efficiant communication is a great excuse for
| being sloppy and lazy.
| holoduke wrote:
| Only if you don't understand how to control AI. If you
| understands how it works and have the skills to ride it like a
| wild horse, you can make yourself a 10x developer. Its maybe a
| bit of an insult, but you seriously have to change that
| mindset. AI is not going to be worse tomorrow. It will get
| better and it will dramatically change our life as developers.
| Code will no longer be a prominent thing we are working on in
| the near future.
| wincy wrote:
| I was asked to write user stories about a complex topic where
| I'm the SME at work. I spent two hours info dumping everything
| I knew about the project, everything the AI wouldn't have any
| context for, using Cursor to add related projects to the
| workspace, tagging specific files where we'd implemented
| similar things with our styles, noted all the quirks of the
| system and how it works and where to find relevant information.
| I spent a lot of time on it, and then asked it to reach out
| using cli to grab relevant information from our infra, and
| write stories about how we'd accomplish everything I intend to
| get done. I then spent another few hours reviewing the 45 or so
| stories that conversation generated. It was similar to how I'd
| talk to a new contractor I'm onboarding to work on the work.
|
| I have a deep knowledge of the information, have done the
| process we're doing on two previous projects, but organizing
| all the stories would have been an absolute nightmare. I still
| spent half a day on this, I'd guess the fatigue from the boring
| parts would have made this take a week or maybe two, just
| because I was doing the parts I enjoy (knowing things and
| describing them) and I was able to offload the parts I'm not
| great at (using a lot of boilerplate language to organize the
| info I knew into scrum stories). Then I had a meeting, reviewed
| the stories with my coworkers, we had a discussion, deleted two
| or three of them that we determined weren't necessary, and
| fixed up one or two where I'd provided insufficient information
| about some context surrounding coloring of a page.
|
| It burned through a ton of Opus 4.6 tokens, looked through a
| ton of code (mostly that I'd written, pre-LLM), but has been
| amazing for helping me move into a lead position where grooming
| stories and being organized has always been my weakest point.
|
| Also, when I wrote a postmortem for a deploy that had some
| issues, I wrote it all by hand. You have to know when the tools
| help and when they will hinder.
| pryelluw wrote:
| It's kinda useful to me for the following three reasons:
|
| - spelling - grammar or weird grammar as English is not my
| native language - read proofing and finding things that do not
| make sense in terms of sentence structure
|
| I do not use it for ideas, discussing the writing, or anything
| else because that beats the purpose of writing it myself
| (creative writing).
| pizzly wrote:
| AI for editing is good and have many useful cases. The part
| where it fails is that the tone/style of the writing gets
| overtaken and reads like all other AI edited writing. But the
| quality of the edit is good, its just not in your style. When
| everyone sounds the same then there is no uniqueness. But using
| it edit legal letters, software documentation etc are very good
| use cases, using it to explain your ideas in a blog not so
| much.
| nikitadotla wrote:
| I am not a native speaker, for anything like HN comments I don't
| use AI, but I see no harm in using AI in correcting grammar and
| maybe some wording, but the ultimate change shouldn't be a copy-
| paste replacement, it should be well thought through by the
| author.
| ChaitanyaSai wrote:
| I am sorry but perhaps some use of AI or grammar-check would
| help? A lawn that's not overly manicured has its charm, but if it
| has one too many barren patches of clumps of overgrown grass, it
| doesn't appeal as much? This essay feels a bit like that.
| boca_honey wrote:
| >I just wrote what my brain is instructing to type (might not
| reread it before posting)
|
| Why would I put effort into reading something that had no effort
| put in by the author?
|
| This guy needs an editor, AI or otherwise.
| ianseyer wrote:
| "I think that is the beauty of writing, the raw , unedited
| emotions of the person behind every words either for
| entertainment or educational purposes, is what makes it
| special"
|
| - the article, clearly expressing the intent of its own
| mistakes and contextualizing them in the era of LLM-borne
| "perfect" text
| boca_honey wrote:
| I appreciate the sentiment, and good for him. However, from
| an audience perspective, why choose to watch a guy filming
| himself eating cereal with a shaky phone camera when you
| could watch The Sopranos? (or the latest MrBeast
| extravaganza, to avoid being pedantic).
|
| I guess it's OK if you enjoy reading someone expressing
| himself without communicating anything valuable and well
| produced. It's kind of like people who enjoy stream-of-
| consciousness poetry or unhinged personal blog posts. It's
| fine.
|
| But most of us (I think) read for our own gain, expecting
| substantial / stimulating text that is ideally well
| researched and serves a clear purpose.
|
| Something like that needs an editor, effective proofreading,
| and quite some time of work and rework.
| tadfisher wrote:
| At this point, it is far more distracting to see LLM-isms
| and get completely thrown out of the reading-understanding
| process than to see some typos or grammatical errors. I
| actually feel reassured when I see something like a
| "they're/their" swap, because I know I am reading the
| author's thoughts instead of some linear algebra vaguely
| influenced by the author's thoughts.
|
| Five years ago, I probably would have been annoyed by the
| same.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > why choose to watch a guy filming himself eating cereal
| with a shaky phone camera when you could watch The
| Sopranos? (or the latest MrBeast extravaganza, to avoid
| being pedantic).
|
| This is a specifically funny question because every
| Masaokis video is better than every MrBeast video
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OERZ8Pqs9iU
| plasticeagle wrote:
| "I think that is the beauty of writing, the raw , unedited
| emotions of the person behind every words either for
| entertainment or educational purposes, is what makes it
| special"
|
| This is not the beauty of writing. Everyone's writing needs
| editing. The "raw unedited emotions" are not something anyone
| wants to read, and this article is no exception.
|
| The author tells us that English is their fourth language,
| which is certainly impressive. However their writing is messy
| and poorly constructed. It's difficult to read, and not at
| all enjoyable. The choice is not between doggerel like this,
| and LLM empty perfection.
| projektfu wrote:
| I feel like French must be their first !
| saltcured wrote:
| Here's a possibly fun topic to navel gaze on...
|
| Compare thoughts on this notion of AI and authenticity in
| writing to the way things like auto-tuners and sequencers
| have been perceived in the music world.
|
| Like there are some esoteric corners of the Jazz space where
| musicians seem to try to emulate a sequencing machine and
| play perfect notes, will there be writers trying to emulate
| the clean AI performance? :-/
| kristjansson wrote:
| The relative value of those things are shifting. As the cost of
| polished LLM drivel falls to zero, some might prefer even the
| most unedited, off-the-cuff human writing to the slop.
| dsign wrote:
| Indeed. I for one enjoyed this piece. Yes, it had errors and
| lots of odd grammatical choices, but the reading remained
| affordably challenging and the prose had a newness to it.
| alex43578 wrote:
| What if the reality is that both are worthless? LLM slop is
| of no value, but human slop doesn't gain value because
| fingers typed it.
| kristjansson wrote:
| I mean there's lots of room at the bottom. but part of the
| reason LLM slop seems to me so objectionable is its
| sameness; it's obviously drawn from the same thin manifold
| of the language. A human articulating their own thoughts,
| however those may be rendered on the page, at least
| realizes their own idiosyncratic region of the language.
| Writing one's own thoughts in one's own words declares the
| existence of one's own language, consonant with but
| distinct from all the others. Asserting one's individual
| voice and style, even if the content is worthless and the
| aesthetics objectionable maintains diversity in face of the
| LLM monoculture. We lament the lost apples, even the bitter
| ones; we don't ask the birds to each justify their
| differences.
| elbasti wrote:
| There are some people that believe that writing is an act of
| creative expression. In other words, that writing is primarily
| about the _act_ (and as such, it 's a quite selfish activity).
| Editing destroys the expressive act and must be avoided.
|
| These people's writing is usually incoherent and they are very
| proud of it. If you've ever read a bad new-age self-help book
| you've probably encountered writing like this.
|
| Good writers understand that writing is about communication.
| The initial act of writing (ie, word puke) is worthless. What
| matters most is a piece of writing's ability to communicate
| clearly.
|
| This writing is usually pleasant, concise, and clear.
| margalabargala wrote:
| I 'm sure you consider your opinion to be correct, but there
| is something to writing being an act of creative expression.
| It's fine for it to be a selfish activity. Diaries are this
| way, for example, and the negativity you point at other
| people's hobbies is unfortunate.
|
| There's something to the idea that if the writer is writing
| with the intention of publishing it, that should be edited.
| But if you're writing for yourself, and happen to simply keep
| your writings somewhere public, some other person's desire
| for you to edit more is a measurement of that other person's
| feeling of entitlement.
|
| I have about as much desire to read some publisher's edited
| version of Anne Frank's diary as you appear to have to read
| the original.
| encom wrote:
| Franks diary was edited, both by herself and later
| publishers.
| ollysb wrote:
| While I can get behind the sentiment I hope bad writing doesn't
| become the standard for anti AI. A simple grammar check would
| have greatly improved this post.
| dpark wrote:
| AI has plenty of training data on poor writing. If people
| start looking for bad grammar and typos to identify human
| articles, generative AI is certainly capable of spitting out
| prose that looks poorly edited.
|
| I kind of hope the anti-AI-writing stuff passes and we can
| focus on what makes writing good or bad again instead of
| "this is clearly AI" posted in response to every blog. I
| actually don't care if it's AI but I do care if it's worth
| reading and pleasant to read.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > I actually don't care if it's AI but I do care if it's
| worth reading and pleasant to read
|
| I do care if it's AI. It makes it automatically not worth
| reading imo
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Once I think something is AI I just can't read it anymore. It
| isn't out of principle or anything, I just become so distracted
| by the idea that I can't focus or derive any benefit or pleasure
| from continuing.
| viccis wrote:
| >Although 80 % of the content was my own writing, the fact that
| it was run in a LLM enginee for grammar and vocabulary cross-
| check, made it failed the "probable written by AI " metric; and
| it was rejected.
|
| should be:
|
| >Although 80% of the content was my own writing, the fact that it
| was run through an LLM engine for grammar and vocabulary cross-
| checking meant that it failed the "probably written by AI"
| metric, and it was rejected. 1. 80 % -> 80%
| 2. in -> through 3. a LLM -> an LLM 4. enginee ->
| engine 5. cross-check -> cross-checking 6. cross-
| checking, -> cross-checking (removed the comma) 7. made it
| failed -> meant that it failed, (or "made it fail" depending on
| whether you want to preserve the past tense or preserve the word
| "made") 8. probable -> probably 9. by AI " -> by AI"
| 10. ; and it was -> , and it was (no need for a semicolon when
| linking with a conjunction like "and", and I would consider
| another word or phrase such as ", and, as a result, it was
| rejected" to emphasize the causal relationship between the
| clauses)
|
| That's _ten_ corrections that are fixing straightforward typos
| and /or grammar and vocab mistakes in _one sentence_. Most are
| fairly objective, though I can understand different opinions on
| 2, 7, or maybe 10.
|
| Relying on AI for editing seems to have atrophied the author's
| writing if that is what he or she thinks is worth publishing on a
| blog like this. I would suggest practicing editing your own work
| and not even thinking about passing it through AI (especially
| when you were _told_ not to use any AI!) to edit for a while.
| Given that English is not your first (or even second or third)
| language, I would also suggest having a native speaker with some
| demonstrable writing skill review your writing and give feedback
| on how to make it more idiomatic. For example, writing being
| "run through an LLM" rather than "run in an LLM" is a relatively
| subtle difference compared to the others, and it's very very
| common for preposition mistakes like this to show up when writing
| in another language than your first. I am still hopeless with
| French prepositions.
| levocardia wrote:
| Typos and minor grammatical errors within a well-reasoned piece
| are aesthetic now, means you didn't run it through an LLM...
| mlsu wrote:
| Every now and then when I'm reading something, the writer will
| use a turn of phrase, a specific word, a metaphor, etc, that is
| unusually clever, or allows me to see the concept in some obtuse
| light. Or even, they are just able to choose the right words to
| make something sound musical or rhythmic in some pleasant way.
| It's intellectually delightful to come across these in writing.
|
| I've never been surprised at AI writing. Emotion the biggest part
| of communication and these grey boxes have none.
| metalman wrote:
| wrong, or at least, slightlywrong, but not, lesswrong
|
| you are missing the writing era, which is gone. whatever we have
| now will slowly congeal into cold grue that will get a name or
| names
|
| the madness of bieng chastised for speakerphoning and disturbing
| people gulping the slop
|
| what do we call that?
| zwischenzug wrote:
| The first sentence makes no sense.
| jhhh wrote:
| I miss the text only reading era. This is a blog and should not
| need to have JavaScript enabled to render text to a page. I would
| rather not have to be annoyed by flavor of the month duplicate
| scroll bars, cookie banners, newsletter pop-ups 5 seconds in,
| scroll to the top pop-ups, idle overlays, highlight helper bars
| that break copy paste, etc. This blog didn't have all of those
| but had some. I'm sure the metrics look great because I had to
| load this page four times. First initially, and then disabling
| JavaScript and realizing it doesn't load anything at all. A third
| time re-enabling JavaScript and then deleting all the annoying
| elements, and then a fourth time to make sure my cosmetic filter
| is applied correctly. 4x the interactions! Must be doing
| something right.
| gwern wrote:
| You'll love GreaterWrong, then:
| https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BJ4pnropWdnzzgeJc/i-am-de...
| kogasa240p wrote:
| Thanks, I keep JS disabled on most sites and am continually
| baffled on why simple text and image blogs are web apps now.
| lelandfe wrote:
| > I had to load this page four times. First initially, and then
| disabling JavaScript
|
| Had to?
| burnished wrote:
| They gave enough detail that its clear from context what 'had
| to' meant.
| kohllision wrote:
| I appreciate the sentiment, but this remark is far too common
| here. It does not address the content of the post and could
| apply to any submission from LessWrong. The author of the post
| has made none of those technical choices.
| narcindin wrote:
| Funny, I assumed it was a subtle critique of how change
| always elicits haters. Though now I realize it was an honest
| non-sequiter to complain about his pet issue?
|
| Honestly not sure anymore.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| You are not alone! There is in fact a whole dedicated rule
| about this on hn:
|
| > Please don't complain about tangential annoyances--e.g.
| article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button
| breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Clearly doesn't really move the needle much but sometimes it
| helps to tap the sign at people.
|
| Charitably, we are all on our own timelines of getting to
| HTML zen, and its hard not to shout from the rooftops when it
| clicks for you and you have your plain text RSS setup on Gnus
| all chugging along nicely.
| nyfresh wrote:
| I long for the days of hand written scrolls. Fresh papyrus
| adorned with the latest calligraphy and stamped with a warm wax
| seal...
| joemazerino wrote:
| I'd push back on the author and ask him really if his writing is
| getting worse or his standards have increased, leading to undue
| stress that might throw the flow state off.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era
| time0ut wrote:
| I certainly miss the pre-AI reading era.
|
| So much content is just straight copy/pasted from the LLM now.
| Articles, blog posts, linked in posts, reddit comments, etc. Even
| just using the LLM for 'editing' tends to shift the voice to an
| obvious LLM voice when used naively. It is getting worse too.
| Last week a co-worker sent me a screenshot of Claude for me to
| review their "work", which was just whatever Claude made up.
|
| Usually, if something is very obviously unfiltered LLM output, I
| just stop reading.
|
| I do use LLMs for writing myself. They are useful, but are poor
| authors.
| malwrar wrote:
| > And for people who successfully taken back their creative
| writing skills, how did you do it?
|
| "AI is one possible reference for my actual writing". Generate
| info and perspectives, but only ever write stuff yourself.
| Something about this for me forces me to stay in my own ""writing
| voice", at least personally, for the various places I use AI tech
| in. I think of the tech as a chess engine; they are better than
| any human player but I use them to help me gain perspective
| rather than cheat. Otherwise, why bother playing chess?
| globular-toast wrote:
| This writing is terrible. I can't read it. But are people really
| unable to write without wanting to put it into an LLM? I haven't
| done a single piece of natural language writing with an LLM. The
| thought has never even crossed my mind. Why would I? Surely to
| give the LLM context of whatever I want to write about would
| amount to, you know, writing it down? Just write that "prompt" in
| your blog and send it. No need for LLMs.
| dhosek wrote:
| I've completely avoided using AI for writing (although it looks
| like my coding avoidance is coming to an end). As someone who
| kind of views using a _thesaurus_ as "cheating"1, using AI to do
| the writing is way beyond the pale. A lot of what writing is
| about for me is about discovering and distilling and figuring out
| what I think. Take that away and I might as well just the spend
| the day watching television and playing video games and getting
| dumber by the minute.
|
| I would go a step further, in fact, and when I'm writing
| something creative, I may choose to avoid whatever the
| autocomplete is suggesting as the next word (although I have it
| disabled in most contexts). People have a tendency to fall into
| grooves in their writing/speaking and this kind of acts as a
| reminder to not do that,3 although I'm far from immune myself
| (looking at my comment history, it's upsetting to see the same
| verbal tics repeated when I have something to say).
|
| [?]
|
| 1. If you don't know a word well enough for it to come to mind
| when you're looking for a word for something, you may not know it
| well enough to use it in your writing.2
|
| 2. Cue the people who will disagree. Suffice it to say that I
| occasionally will use a thesaurus to pull up a word that's just
| out of reach, especially as my brain gets older and weaker, but
| even that I try to avoid.
|
| 3. When I got my MFA, there was a visiting writer who had
| published a creative writing book which was largely based on his
| former students' transcriptions of his lectures. During the
| lecture he gave, even though he was speaking extemporaneously, he
| would speak word-for-word whole paragraphs from the book.
| Liftyee wrote:
| Why is it upsetting to see the same patterns repeated when you
| have something to say?
| syngrog66 wrote:
| bad English, bad writing, stopped reading fast.
| ahhhok wrote:
| Also the pre-video audio era
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-03-30 23:00 UTC)