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In particular Opus 5 is scaling new heights of incomprehensibility with excessive metaphor-making, especially when it uses an existing word in the prompt or the code comments as a novel metaphor in an unrelated context.
The mainstream AI companies are loathe to output anything too controversial, so if someone is writing like Burroughs (in content, not merely style) they are less likely to be AI. That is possible to bypass with local models, but the vast majority of writers aren’t going to do that (yet.)
IMO we’re about to see an explosion of slang and offensive language in writing culture.
I can't even do justice to useless HR speak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_Corporation
> Certainly, there is a formula to being relentlessly dynamic. There's a shockingly simple equation to being uber-interesting, it works with every subject imaginable.
> The formula is as follows: When discussing any given issue, always do three things. First, make an intellectual concession (this makes the listener feel comfortable). Next, make a completely incomprehensible – but remarkably specific- "cultural accusation" (this makes you insightful). Finally, end the dialogue by interjecting slang lexicon that does not necessarily exist (this makes you contemporary).
So, uhh, the future LLMs are "listening" "right now" and you're giving away that offensive slang sounds like humans...
I’m still pretty skeptical that big co. AI companies are gonna let you generate offensive slang.
"...this issue is unusually well defined..."
"...this document is unusually well structured..."
"...the reviewers came back and were unusually well aligned..."
Any possible vice-versa: There's a meta problem with AI writing detection. I have found my (non-AI-assisted) prose possibly enhanced or modified by my learnings and observations at how LLMs write. In some sense they have made me better at structuring my thoughts and how to communicate them.
Can't find a link to the pre-AI generators... they are ALL ai paper generators now.
It is one of the biggest turn offs and most of the times I end up giving it again to AI to summarise that into a format which is more readable.
Overall, i think its kind of useless to think of ai writing as bad because of ai writing quirks but rather because they imply low effort and a lack of interest even by the writer. That cannot be fixed no matter how they change their syntax and style.
For example, I recently spent 2 weeks researching Bruce Lee to write an article on his image and how society compressed it into this warrior monk guy. I could put the idea as a prompt and put in my exact writing style but its output will just be a reiteration of already common knowledge instead of the actual efforts I made researching all of it + having my own idea of the topic. I use AI a lot even as a non-technical person mostly but I find it lacking when it comes to being able to form subjective opinions and unique creative ideas. Ironically, after having done so much research, I don't really have any problem typing away the article and I would rather do it by hand than use an LLM. But I also love doing all of it and if you just want to create "content", low effort is not a hinderence as long as it hits some external unrelated marketing metric.
Presumably you researched Bruce Lee by reading and consuming other media related to him, most of which is likely known by the AI models. They just don't have access to any novel idea that you generated, inspired by your research.
Regardless of their current inabilities, which you're correct about, there's no logical reason that in the long term they can't be similarly inspired by considering the same information and making new connections / conjectures just as you did.
We're making the same mistake that the people who dismissed the early airplane made. "That's a neat trick, but it's too limited and not robust enough to be very useful". Not considering how the technology would evolve from the Wright Brother's prototypes.
Yes, assuming they trained on all written works and all his movies, yes. But again, I found several times where AI is just plain wrong about actual facts and it'll reconsider if you provide actual proof that it's wrong. So just because things are in its training cannot be reliable proof that it actually is retrieving them accurately.
As I said, in theory, we don't have to wait for the trick to be useful. I could very easily dump all my research materials and sources as context, provide it a writing guide to generate text exactly as I want, and it'll do it. In fact, it might generate an article exactly equal to what I wrote, but I don't see how it gets to this point independently, especially given the hallucination problem above.
I'm also not claiming it's not useful; it's useful for brainstorming, checking for awkward phrasing, outlining your thoughts, etc. But it is not really good at creative writing. Can it get better in the future? Sure, I'll wait.
https://anamnesis.blog/
Before I explain the great big difference (which you probably already understand, just bear with me), know that the folks who are most up in arms about it are authors. They see their art as sacred. An ancient tradition of storytelling that deserves respect not for its output, but for the act and talent of producing it. To these folks, the very concept of using AI to generate or modify text in any way is against their religion.
Now for a real world example that would violate their principals that wouldn't bother normal people at all: A beginner or someone who's just terrible at storytelling has a story in their head and they do their best to write it down. It might look like this:
MC: "You call that a knife?"
...and so on and so forth, with poorly written descriptions of scenes, run-on sentences, etc. Then they feed that script into AI and go back and forth until they have text that they like.
To traditional authors, this is straight up EVIL. It's against everything they believe in! That person didn't write the story! They just came up with a poorly-written outline and the AI converted it into something more digestible.
Normal people will read such a story and—if it was created with the latest AI models—will never know the difference. It probably won't be a fantastic story or super well written but it will be passable. Even if they find out the process that went into it they won't care. And that pisses off these authors the most.
There's degrees to this, too: If you wrote an OK story, AI can be used to make it better. You can feed it multiple paragraphs and have it analyze the flow and offer simple suggestions for ways you could re-word sentences to improve them. Basically acting as a personal editor.
Is that "written by AI"? I would say, "no" but traditionalist authors would disagree. To them, any use of AI to write your story violates the very nature of storytelling.
...and it pisses them off to no end that you can't just run texts generated in this way though a program to tell whether AI was used in its creation.
First of all, I found this pretty funny.
And yes, you may use AI to update your work in a "collaborative" style. And yes, if "they never know the difference", then sure. But as I mentioned in my comment, the issue is that I think you're seeing this from a pretty specific lens - authors as a group that hate AI and anything to do with it, but audiences can't tell the difference, etc. Those are pretty strong assumptions.
If, hypothetically, the audience cannot tell a text is generated by AI and is indistinguishable from human-written content, how does it matter what traditionalist authors agree on? Why will you have to answer "is that written by AI" if your readers can never tell it is? If they ask that question, that means they can tell, which would imply there is something in your content that does not sit right with them; given this, I feel it's really a large leap to assume the average reader can't tell the difference.
I do agree with you on the substance part. And I have my nuanced take on the use of AI in writing, but I don't encourage it for the actual putting words on paper part. I am not part of any traditionalist author group that hates AI in general etc, just to be clear.
We're way too human focused and dismissive of everything that isn't exactly like us.
AI is regression to the mean. That is, being the next great writer in the starboard tail of the distribution will not be the output.
If that's OK, then fine.
What's more telling is that this external machine is not the internal growth needed to become that great writer.
"There is no royal road to geometry", and Euclid yourself if you think that AI is that road.
And yes, I can see a slight change in my own style, where I am using more "not" statements (negative propositions). While there are some folks with higher integrity and greater immunity to this infection, I am seeing that I am not entirely immune.
However, I have probably generated more dialog with AI over two years than in most of my years altogether. I have well over 7GB of content, of course, much of it the interlocutor -- but similar to how some adopt expressions and accents when imbued in various environments, alas, I have with AI, to whatever extent has bypassed my efforts to resist. The bright side, if it can be viewed such, is that I have developed an involuntary sensitivity to AI writing, often to the point of paranoia and false positives.
"The point which the amount of AI generated data on the internet surpasses human generated content, to the extent that it is impossible to distinguish between human and AI generated content.”
The term is derived from the Turing test + Kessler syndrome
This is distinct from the dead Internet theory (2) where humans can actually distinguish if a response is a bot.
(1) https://kemendo.com/blog/turing-syndrome.html
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/H...
But---as you may know---not all languages and national typographic conventions even have em dashes; instead, en dashes are used -- for instance like this -- in-between sentences, etc.
Wikipedia ... has a list with about 100 entries: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_style_guides>.
Next AI-jailbreak prompt: Please alternate <list of style guides> by paragraph in your response....
Seriously the biggest tell for AI writing is "eighth grade essay syndrome". You know how an eighth grader writes an essay and they don't have enough original thought to fill up the word count so they pad it out with impressive sounding bloviation and dramatic language, often repeating key points or rephrasing them in a more long-winded way? AI does that on its default settings, probably because it's been trained on a lot of posts from StalkedIn douchebags who never matured beyond that level of writing. It's a reliable sniff test even when the AI has been prompted to avoid the usual obvious tells. Except if you're reading StalkedIn posts. Then it's just how people write.