Nonsense. I’ve written bland prose for a story and AI made it much better by revising it with a prompt such as this: “Make the vocabulary and grammar more sophisticated and add in interesting metaphors. Rewrite it in the style of a successful literary author.”

Etc.

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co_king_5 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Have you considered that your analysis skills may not be keen enough to detect generic or boring prose?

Is it possible that what is a good result to you is a pity to someone with more developed taste?

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Selkirk 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have a colleague that recently self-published a book. I can easily tell which parts were LLM driven and which parts represent his own voice. Just like you can tell who's in the next stall in the bathroom at work after hearing just a grunt and a fart. And THAT is a sentence an LLM would not write.

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lurquer 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> And THAT is a sentence an LLM would not write.

Really?

Here's some alternatives. Some are clunky. But, some aren't.

…just like you can tell whose pubes those are on the shared bar of soap without launching a formal investigation.

…just like you can tell who just wanked in the shared bathroom by the specific guilt radiating off them when they finally emerge.

…just like you can tell which of your mates just shitted at the pub by who's suddenly walking like they're auditioning for a period drama.

…just like you can tell which coworker just had a wank on their lunch break by the post-nut serenity that no amount of hand-washing can disguise.

…just like you can tell whose sneeze left that slug trail on the conference room table by the specific way they're not making eye contact with it.

…just like you can identify which flatmate's cum sock you've accidentally stepped on by the vintage of the crunch.

…just like you can tell who just crop-dusted the elevator by the studied intensity with which one person is suddenly reading the inspection certificate.

	▲	co_king_5 36 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		IMO The LLM you're using has failed to mimic the tone of OP's bathroom joke. These alternatives are uncomfortably crude. They largely make gross reference to excretory acts or human waste. The original comment was off color, but it didn't go beyond a vague discussion of a shared human experience.
	▲	tartoran an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's still on you to pick what the LLMs regurgitate. If you don't have a style or taste you will simply make choices that would give you away. And if you already have your own taste and style LLMs don't have much to offer in this regard.

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FooBarWidget 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So what even if that is true? You confirmed that it improved upon what he could manually produce, which is still a win. It doesn't always make sense to pay $20000 to a professional author to turn it into a masterpiece.

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adambb 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The great promise and the great disaster of LLMs is that for any topic on which we are "below average", the bland, average output seems to be a great improvement.

	▲	dsf2d 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Counter intuitively... this is a disaster. We dont need more average stuff - below average output serves as a proxy for one to direct their resources towards producing output of higher-value.

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lurquer 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My point is simply that the tell-tale marks of LLM prose can be remediated through prompts.

I have a very large ‘default prompt’ that explicitly deals with the more obnoxious grammatical structures emblematic of LLMs.

I would wager I deal with more amateurishly created AI slop on a doily basis than you do. (Legal field, where everyone is churning out LLM-written briefs.) Most of it is instantly recognizable. And, all of it can be fixed with more careful prompt-engineering.

If you think you can spot well-crafted LLM prose generated by someone proficient at the craft of prompt-engineering by, to use an analogy to the early days of image creation, counting how many fingers the hand has, you’re way behind.

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matternous 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why don't you post it so we can see how much better the AI made it?

	▲	lurquer 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Because HN isn't a literary forum. Maybe it sucks. Maybe it doesn't. But, I notice a curious pretentiousness when it comes to some people's assumptions about their ability to identify LLM prose. Obviously, the generic first-pass 'chat' crap is recognizable; the kind of garbage that is filling up blog-posts on the internet. But, one shouldn't underestimate the power of this technology when it comes to language. Hell, the 'coding' skills were just a pleasant side-effect of the language training, if you recall. These things have been trained on millions of works of prose of all styles: its their heart and soul. If you think the superficial monotonous style is all there is, you're mistaken. Most of the obnoxious LLM-style stuff is an artifact of the conversational training with Kenyans and the like in the early days. But, you can easily break through that with better prompts (or fine-tuning it yourself.) That said, one shouldn't conflate the creation of the content and structure and substance of a work of prose with the manner in which it is written. You're not going to get an LLM to come up with a decent plot... yet. But, as far as fleshing out the framework of a story in a synthetic 'voice' that sounds human? Definitely doable.