> Have it rewrite your terrible first draft.

> Have it fix your grammar.

> Have it make your argument clearer.

> Have it turn your 2,000-word ramble into something people can actually read.

Please don't do this, and then try to "put some of yourself back into it".

By all means, use AI to find bugs. But don't let it write a single word. Let it tell you what's wrong, then you can fix it and iterate.

> Nobody talks like this in real life.

Marketing folks talked like that, for almost my entire career (it was basically a meme), which wound up, as AI was coming into its own.

If you’d have told me this breathless post. Talking about being tired about the AI tone.

Punctuated like this.

Was then AI tone…

Then I’d have believed you.

I don't use LLMs a whole lot, mostly for research, but personally I'm more bothered by the prompting than by the responses. After years of randomly receiving (now less frequent) incorrect answers, I've gotten used to preempting obvious but wrong trains of thought: "I need X. It's not Y." When I forget to do this and the reply is incorrect, sometimes I'm too lazy to reprompt, so I'll just write back "It's not Y" and it'll answer "wow omg you're so absolutely right, Y is not X!!! here's X instead."

This wasn't great, but then I started catching myself writing "It's not Y" responses to colleagues on Teams. I'm pretty sure I've caught all of these and never actually sent them (I did go and review a few chat logs recently and found no such sent message), but my point is that despite my relatively light LLM usage, I am "LLM-conditioned." The abyss stares back. There could be a lot of deeply "LLM-brained" people out there.

One thing that works quite well for me for a couple of model generations now is to mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English, something along the lines of

  **Use controlled technical English.** Prefer an ASD-STE100 style: use short sentences, direct terms, active voice, and one idea per sentence; avoid slang, hype, vague pronouns, and unnecessary jargon.

"AI writing has this strange obsession with making every sentence flow beautifully into the next one. Real people don't do that."

If we care, we bloody try!

That's what I like most about codex, it has the 'pragmatic' tone mode which basically makes it tone-less. If claude's tone was the only one available I would seriously consider not even using LLMs or switching to a career that didn't require it because I literally can't stand interacting with it's personality for many hours each day.

This actually makes me think about what kind of material these companies actually used to train the models. I remember watching a video from Andrej Karapathy and him telling that in OpenAI they used subject matter experts to refine the training material for earlier versions of ChatGPT.

I wonder even if normal people don’t talk, write like that, the subject matter experts or the professionals in their respective fields talk/write like that though

Part of the problem is that AI has been trained on all text, not just the internet but scientific papers and books of all varieties. AI style is almost certainly the average of that style approach but we use very different styles for different writing and getting it wrong grates, and AI doesn't seem to deal with these style differences well at all.

Oh the irony. That website itself seems to have been designed or written by AI. I mean, it's not just the writing tone. There's a tone for everything AI does. The design tone, for instance.

it's funny I quite like this blog post so I also read the previous post on that blog. And it said:

"It won't replace your staff engineer. It replaces the forty minutes before they open the tab. Your branch rots while someone's in a meeting three timezones away. The bot comments in ~30 seconds. You fix it while the code is still loaded in your head."

the default writing style of 'Google AI mode' is less tiresome than that of Claude or ChatGPT. I wonder if the difference is due to training or due to prompting.

Another Torment Nexus taken from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Genuine People Personality is real.

"Post draft is ready, do you want me to make it shorter?" LEL

Maybe it's my burnout speaking but one fact that frustrates me to no end is how our team essentially went through a 180 when it comes down to code comments (where a cynical me would say this is caused by AI that always loves to leave said comments)

Sometimes it's hard to differentiate whether it's a human, a robot, or a human whose mind is far gone. I can understand the sentiment of "the joy of programming is gone" but for me it's not from a personal lack of daily coding but from a surrounding dispassion towards the craft under the guise of better ergonomics or productivity. Never before is actual behavior irrelevant while the blame game when said behavior turns out to be wrong gets really sour very quickly.

This is more of a "in the hands of x" kind of situation where it's perhaps too early to make a general statement. But being constantly gaslit will definitely be the end of me some day, I can feel my sanity slipping.

I'm also tired of people who write articles with weird incorrect grammar.

Not to be contrarian but there’s also a lot to like in it. Load bearing is a good word and I hope it wins the memetic lottery and becomes common.

A lot of arguments do boil down to one specific “load bearing” one and I’m glad I learned vocabulary to express this thing from Claude

I wish all posts here had headings prefixed with "AI:" if it is about AI or written by AI :)

What I hate about AI writing is not the tone but the path dependence. Let me explain.

You create a document. You review it and ask it to make changes. Now the LLM will remember this change and make the document become a record of all stuff I asked it to change.

The LLM doesn’t have an intuition to make the document an evergreen record.

Then ask it to use a different tone!

I didn't think LinkedIn could get much worse than it was but now 90 % of the posts in my timeline are AI slop full of the usual LLM writing patterns. I'm getting a little paranoid already, but the style really is quite tiring, maybe because it uses hooks and bait so much and buries the lede at the end of the text, as if it was trained to keep human attention for as long as possible instead of just conveying the required information.

I recently tried writing a paper with Claude and it was an absolute disaster, I spent hours (days?) instructing it about writing style and pointing out anti patterns to avoid, but I couldn't get it to even produce simple sentences, it would always add unnecessary lead up sentences, put the most important information at the end of the sentence, use the typical "It's A, not B!" or "B, not A!" type sentences. In the end I gave up and edited everything manually. Makes me wonder how AI can be so smart that it poses a human-level extinction threat but can't seem to even write a simple paper based on facts and information you spoon feed it. I now think it's an intelligence illusion due to the training data and optimization process being hidden from us, essentially it keeps working better and better because we invested massively in optimization of specific use cases like coding, where users contributed billions of training samples that are part of the LLM model. The same is true for text-based workflows and others, the sampling density of the training space is getting much better due to the massive use of AI everywhere so the models extrapolate better between the different instances, but I'd wager they would still miserably fail to generalize to things that are outside of the most common training use cases now. That's why I am also very skeptical about recursive self improvement of these systems, look at what happens when you let agents work recursively / in a loop now, they just keep piling more garbage onto garbage and choke on their own output. I have observed it in my paper writing as well, you feed input into the AI system, the system produces output, the next paper iteration works on that output but the AI doesn't differentiate properly between it's own output and your original input, that pollutes the next output which is then used as input again, eventually the system just churns on its own hallucinated/fabricated outputs until the result is complete garbage that no amount of steering will fix. The same is true for most vibe coded software I built with AI, it holds together decently initially, but the more AI code and decisions accumulate the more the system operates on its own outputs and keeps piling more output on it. More than anything we really need a way to keep system data accurately tagged, i.e. clearly mark human input from AI output and keep AIs churning on output data that it produced itself but treats as input.

I'm sad that the em dash has been appropriated by clankers. It was a part of my tone, which I used often in writing.

And yet, "I'm tired of x" is one of the tropes of the last few years. I'm tired of people communicating they're tired. No, actually, I'm annoyed.

I know, that's meta. But still.

“Load bearing”

“Here’s the part no one is talking about”

[flagged]

[dead]

You better get used to it because that's all there is now.