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Discussion (12 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Stuff like isolating the hot core and packing the cold fields, that's just common knowledge you pick up.
Compared to purely human writing, it's actually safer and reads better than you'd expect, so I find it hard to understand why people are complaining about this.
If anything, I think tech blogs especially need to check whether their own thoughts line up with the knowledge of an LLM, which is basically a talking encyclopedia. But it seems like people don't really see it that way.
Scrubbing that away from writing with AI has the same effect as would running everyone's speech through an anonymizer.
Some people may be blind to that sort of thing entirely, much like some people can't recognize faces, but for most people it just creates a sense of noise and discomfort when everything everywhere is written in the same style. And that impression is only made worse when that increasingly uniquitous anonymized style is so painfully average and repetitive.
If there was a tool that let you edit select characteristics of your writing while preserving your voice, the way a professional editor might help a professional writer, that might be amazing for helping people communicate better and more easily. But that's not this. This is loud, articulate noise.
I'd probably hate it too if AI generated writing started showing up in novels. But when it comes to things like wikis or encyclopedias where the whole point is conveying information, I find myself wondering, is it really that bad?
So rather than saying "it's bad for all writing," I kind of feel like as long as the facts get across in informational writing, that's good enough.
Because there were a few techniques in there that I didn't know about. I copied them down and saved them. So in other words, I gained new knowledge.
On the other hand, if it had been a novel, the writing style itself would have been a problem, so I'd think it was bad. But for this kind of informational writing, I don't think it's a bad thing at all.
I'd hard disagree here. Not when you're bombarded with this every single day. First, you start to be able to reliable recognize this writing style. Then, every time you see it you start getting the urge to pick up your chair and smash your monitor with it.
There's also the issue of not being able to distinguish "AI slop" from "human written + AI polished". Am I being led to read some lazy, low quality AI slop? Or is this actually something that a real human spent time and effort to produce? Both look the same, so how can you tell the difference?
Personally I find it somewhat offensive to use AI in human-to-human communication. If you expect another person to read it then please write it yourself! It's not going to be as "polished" as-if AI would have written it, but that's okay! If you insist on using AI then, at most, just get it to review your writing and apply its findings wherever it makes sense.
People can have different opinions, of course. I write most things with my own hands. But if I feel like the AI's suggestion is better than what I wrote, I'll improve my writing. In fact, I did exactly that with a few pieces recently.
I respect that some people prefer things unpolished, and I respect their way of thinking. But I don't think that flat, AI assisted writing is bad for information delivery.
I believe there are many different kinds of writing. In novels or reportage, I think AI writing is bad. The style itself is part of the author's signature, after all. But on the flip side, I'm skeptical about whether someone's personality really needs to come through in a wiki or an encyclopedia.
The core of the anti AI argument right now is ultimately about form and style. But that style is something the model was trained on, based on datasets that people, on average, preferred. In other words, it's the most average, the most flat. It's inorganic, but it's the median.
When we define readers or consumers, there's always the question of where to draw the line, what segment to set. And when you think about it, the AI's training data comes from the broadest consumer distribution. It spits out that kind of data because it learned that most people preferred it.
Of course, even in informational writing, things like "has this person actually been through this?" or "is this exaggerated?" do matter, and that feeling is important. But when I read a technical article, the most important thing, unlike a novel, isn't the prose style. It's whether it hands me the technique or not.
So while I respect your opinion, I don't think it aligns with my values.
That's not what it is! The heavy reinforcement learning that the models go through makes their writing the farthest thing possible from the "most average, flat" distribution. The distribution actually becomes very sharp due to this, unlike any writing it has seen in 99.99% of its training data! (The heavier the RL is, the more same-y the output becomes.) This is why every AI-written piece feels the same, and why people can learn to easily tell that something was written by an AI. And frontier labs make this problem even worse by how they sample[1] their logits.
[1]: https://gist.github.com/Hellisotherpeople/71ba712f9f899adcb0...
> But when I read a technical article, the most important thing, unlike a novel, isn't the prose style.
Exactly! Which is why I think there's no need to "enhance" it with AI.
> The honest rule
Sigh... yet another Claude written article, and (unless I'm blind) it doesn't seem to be disclosed anywhere.
Normally I'm not the one to complain, but it's really tedious to see this writing style pretty much everywhere nowadays, and the more you see it the more you start to find it unbearable to read.