| ▲ | barrkel 4 hours ago |
| This is a good statement of what I suspect many of us have found when rejecting the rewriting advice of AIs. The "pointiness" of prose gets worn away, until it doesn't say much. Everything is softened. The distinctiveness of the human voice is converted into blandness. The AI even says its preferred rephrasing is "polished" - a term which specifically means the jaggedness has been removed. But it's the jagged edges, the unorthodox and surprising prickly bits, that tear open a hole in the inattention of your reader, that actually gets your ideas into their heads. |
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| ▲ | svara 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I think that mostly depends on how good a writer you are. A lot of people aren't, and the AI legitimately writes better. As in, the prose is easier to understand, free of obvious errors or ambiguities. But then, the writing is also never great. I've tried a couple of times to get it to write in the style of a famous author, sometimes pasting in some example text to model the output on, but it never sounds right. |
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| ▲ | Retric 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I find most people can write way better than AI, they simply don’t put in the effort. Which is the real issue, we’re flooding channels not designed for such low effort submissions. AI slop is just SPAM in a different context. | | |
| ▲ | andrewflnr an hour ago | parent [-] | | You may be in a bubble of smart, educated people. Either way, one of the key ways to "put in the effort" is practice. People who haven't practiced often don't write well even if they're trying hard in the moment. Not even in terms of beautiful writing, just pure comprehensibility. | | |
| ▲ | Retric 28 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I may be in a bubble of smart people, but IMO AI consistently far worse than many high school works I’ve read in terms of actual substance and coherent structure. Of course I’ve had arguments where people praise AI output then I’ve literally pointed out dozens of mistakes and they just kind of shrug saying it’s not important. So I acknowledge people judge writing very differently than I do. It just feels weird when I’d give something a 15% and someone else would happily slap on a B+. |
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| ▲ | lich_king 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I am really conflicted about this because yes, I think that an LLM can be an OK writing aid in utilitarian settings. It's probably not going to teach you to write better, but if the goal is just to communicate an idea, an LLM can usually help the average person express it more clearly. But the critical point is that you need to stay in control. And a lot of people just delegate the entire process to an LLM: "here's a thought I had, write a blog post about it", "write a design doc for a system that does X", "write a book about how AI changed my life". And then they ship it and then outsource the process of making sense of the output and catching errors to others. It also results in the creation of content that, frankly, shouldn't exist because it has no reason to exist. The number of online content that doesn't say anything at all has absolutely exploded in the past 2-3 years. Including a lot of LLM-generated think pieces about LLMs that grace the hallways of HN. | | |
| ▲ | layer8 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Even if they “stay in control and own the result”, it’s just tedious if all communication is in that same undifferentiated sanded-down language. | |
| ▲ | marbro 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | littlestymaar 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > A lot of people aren't, and the AI legitimately writes better. It may write “objectively better”, but the very distinct feel of all AI generated prose makes it immediately recognizable as artificial and unbearable as a result. |
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| ▲ | folbec 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think it is also fairly similar to the kind of discourse a manager in pretty much any domain will produce. He lacks (or lost thru disuse) technical expertise on the subject, so he uses more and more fuzzy words, leaky analogies, buzzwords. This maybe why AI generated content has so much success among leaders and politicians. |
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| ▲ | coke12 a minute ago | parent [-] | | Every group want to label some outgroup as naively benefiting from AI. For programmers, apparently it's the pointy haired bosses. For normies, it's the programmers. Be careful of this kind of thinking, it's very satisfying but doesn't help you understand the world. |
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| ▲ | baxtr 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think it’s essential to realize that AI is a tool for mainstream tasks like composing a standard email and not for the edges. The edges are where interesting stuff happens. The boring part can be made more efficient. I don’t need to type boring emails, people who can’t articulate well will be elevated. It’s the efficient popularization of the boring stuff. Not much else. |
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| ▲ | layer8 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It contributes to making “standard” emails boring. I rather enjoy reading emails in each sender’s original voice. People who can’t articulate well aren’t elevated, instead they are perceived to be sending bland slop if they use LLMs to conceal that they can’t express themselves well. | |
| ▲ | dingnuts 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | gdulli 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Mediocrity as a Service |
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| ▲ | co_king_5 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I liked mediocrity as a service better when it was fast food restaurants and music videos. |
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| ▲ | devmor 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > But it's the jagged edges, the unorthodox and surprising prickly bits, that tear open a hole in the inattention of your reader, that actually gets your ideas into their heads. This brings to mind what I think is a great description of the process LLMs exert on prose: sanding. It's an algorithmic trend towards the median, thus they are sanding down your words until they're a smooth average of their approximate neighbors. |
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| ▲ | amelius 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I'm sure this can be corrected by AI companies. |
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| ▲ | yoyohello13 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The question is… why? What is the actual human benefit (not monetary). | |
| ▲ | q3k 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Just let my work have a soul, please. | | |
| ▲ | AreShoesFeet000 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That is NOT possible. | | |
| ▲ | q3k 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Why not? | | |
| ▲ | AreShoesFeet000 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Because even though at work it looks like you’re tasked with creating use values, you’re only there as long as the use values you create can be exchanged in the market for a profit. So every humane drive to genuinely improve your work will clash with the external conditions of your existence within that setting. You’re not there to serve people, create beautiful things, solve problems, nu-uh. You’re there to keep capital flowing. It’s soulless. | | |
| ▲ | Angostura 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Unless you work in the public sector, non-profit or charity. | | |
| ▲ | AreShoesFeet000 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | To think that “non-profit” work is actually non-profit work is just to not have grasped the nature of labor. You have to ask yourself: Am I producing use values for the satisfaction of human needs or am I working on making sure the appropriation of value extraction from the production of use values continues happening? In some very extreme cases, such as in the Red Cross or reformist organizations, your job looks very clear, direct, and “soulful”. You’re directly helping desperate people. But why have people gotten into that situation? What is the downstream effect of having you helping them. It’s profit. It’s always profit. You’re salvaging humanity for parts to be bought and sold again. It doesn’t make a dishonest work. It’s just equally soulless. |
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| ▲ | amelius 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Eh, it's not __that__ simple. | | |
| ▲ | ses1984 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It is, just don’t use a thing with no soul like ai if soul is what you’re after. | | |
| ▲ | vasvir 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The point is that he may not using AI in any shape or form, Regardless, AI scrapes its work without explicit consent and then spits it back in "polished" soul free form. | |
| ▲ | co_king_5 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Great comment. It really is that simple. |
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| ▲ | co_king_5 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] |
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