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.
no but its bad writing It repeats information, It adds superfluous stuff, doesnt produce more specific forms of saying things, you are making It sounds like its "too perfect" when its bland because its artificial dumbness not artificial intelligence
Well said. In music, it's very similar. The jarring, often out of key tones are the ones that are the most memorable, the signatures that give a musical piece its uniqueness and sometimes even its emotional points. I don't think it's possible for AI to ever figure this out, because there's something about being human that is necessary to experiencing or even describing it. You cannot "algorithmize" the unspoken.
I'd like to see some concrete examples that illustrate this - as it stands this feels like an opinion piece that doesn't attempt to back up its claims.
(Not necessarily disagreeing with those claims, but I'd like to see a more robust exploration of them.)
I just sent TFA to a colleague of mine who was experimenting with llm's for auto-correcting human-written text, since she noticed the same phenomenon where it would correct not only mistakes, but slightly nudge words towards more common synonyms. It would often lose important nuances, so "shun" would be corrected to "avoid", and "divulge" would become "disclose" etc.
I wonder why AI labs have not worked on improving the quality of the text outputs. Is this as the author claims a property of the LLMs themselves? Or is there simply not much incentive to create the best writing LLM?
Those transformations happen to mirror what happens to human intelligence when you take antipsychotics. Please know the risks before taking them. They are innumerable and generally irreversible.
I see it on recent blog posts, on news articles, obituaries, YT channels. Sometimes mixed with voice impersonation of famous physicists like Feynman or Susskind.
I find it genuinely soul-crushing and even depressing, but I may be over sensitive to it as most readers don't seem to notice.
same. it is showing how many people are not trying to participate - just appear to. I want to read from and write for my peers, but it seems we are just awash with fakers
I find it extremely difficult to focus on any piece of writing the moment I see the patterns. Can’t tell if it’s an attitude problem I need to get over or if it’s just that all AI writing really is that bad.
It's almost disgusting to me tbh, for the first time I find it actually easy to unplug and go do offline things, whatever I want to explore online is hidden behind a forest of synth slop I can't even bother looking at anymore
> The model performs a statistical substitution, replacing a 1-of-10,000 token with a 1-of-100 synonym
Do we see this in programming too? I don't think so? Unique, rarely used API methods aren't substituted the same way when refactoring. Perhaps that could give us a clue on how to fix that?
> What began as a jagged, precise Romanesque structure of stone is eroded into a polished, Baroque plastic shell
Not to detract from the overall message, but I think the author doesn't really understand Romanesque and Baroque.
(as an aside, I'd most likely associate Post-Modernism as an architectural style with the output of LLMs - bland, regurgitative, and somewhat incongruous)
As a writer who has been published many times and edited many other writers for publication... It seems like AI can't make stylistic determinations. It is generally good with spelling and grammar but the text it generates is very homogeneous across formats. It's readable but it's not good, and always full of fluff like an online recepie harvesting clicks. It's kind of crap really. If you just need filler it's ok, but if you want something pleasand you definitely still need a human.
Yes I noticed this as well. I was last writing up a landing page for our new studio. Emotion filled. Telling a story. I sent it through grok to improve it. It removed all of the character despite whatever prompt I gave. I'm not a great writer, but I think those rough edges are necessary to convey the soul of the concept. I think AI writing is better used for ideation and "what have I missed?" and then write out the changes yourself.
I've found LLMs to be terrible with ideation. I've been using GPT 5.x to come up with ideas and plot lines for a Dungeon World campaign I've been running.
I'm no fantasy author, and my prose leaves much to be desired. The stuff the LLM comes up with is so mind numbingly bland. I've given up on having it write descriptions of any characters or locations. I just use it for very general ideas and plot lines, and then come up with the rest of the details on the fly myself. The plot lines and ideas it comes up with are very generic and bland. I mainly do it just to save time, but I throw away 50% of the "ideas" because they make no sense or are really lame.
What i have found LLMs to be helpful with is writing up fun post-session recaps I share with the adventurers.
I recap in my own words what happened during the session, then have the LLM structure it into a "fun to read" narrative style. ChatGPT seems to prefer a Sanderson jokey tone, but I could probably tailor this.
Then I go through it, and tweak some of the boring / bland bits. The end result is really fun to read, and took 1/20th the time it would have taken me to write it all out myself. The LLM would have never been able to come up with the unique and fun story lines, but it is good at making an existing story have some narrative flare in a short amount of time.
He ended a critical commentary by suggesting that the author he was responding to should think more critically about the topic rather than repeating falsehoods because "they set off the tuning fork in the loins of your own dogmatism."
> "they set off the tuning fork in the loins of your own dogmatism."
Eh... I don't know. To me, that sounds very AI-ish.
Claude is very good -- at times -- coming up with flowery metaphoric language... if you tell it to. That one is so over-the-top that I'd edit it out.
Put something like this in your prompt and have it revise something:
"Make this read like Jim Thompson crossed with Thomas Harris, filtered through a paperback rack at a truck stop circa 1967. Make it gritty, efficient, and darkly comedic. Don't shy away from suggesting more elegant words or syntax. (For instance, Robert Howard -- Conan -- and H.P. Lovecraft were definitely pulp, but they had a sophisticated vocabulary.) I really want some purple prose and overwrought metaphors."
Occasionally you'll get some gems. Claude is much better than ChatGPT at this kinda stuff. The BEST ones are the ever-growing NSFW models populating huggingface.
In short, do the posts on OpenClawForum all sound alike? Of course.
Just like all the webpages circa 2000 looked alike. The uniformity wasn't because of HTML... rather it was because few people were using HTML to its full potential.
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.”
I think they can fix all that but they can't fix the fact that the computer has no intention to communicate. They could imbue it with agency to fix that too, but I much prefer it the way things are.
I personally think “generative AI” is a misnomer. More I understand the mathematics behind machine learning more I am convinced that it should not be used to generate text, images or anything that is meant for people to consume, even if it is the most blandest of email. Sometimes you might get lucky, but most of the time you only get what the most boring person in the most boring cocktail party would say if forced to be creative with a gun pointed to his head. It can help in multitude of other ways, help human in the creative process itself, but generating anything even mildly creative by itself… I’ll pass.
Precisely. If companies would just focus on what it could be good at - deductive search, coding boilerplate with assistance, etc. then it would be a great tool. Instead you have dario, altman, and co. trying to pump stock and give us more spaghetti agents.
This isn't new to AI. The same kind of thing happens in movie test screenings, or with autotune. If something is intended for a large audience, there's always an incentive to remove the weird stuff.
Meh. Semantic Ablation - but toward a directed goal. If I say "How would Hemingway have said this, provided he had the same mindset he did post-war while writing for Collier's?"
Then the model will look for clusters that don't fit what the model consider's to be Hemingway/Colliers/Post-War and suggest in that fashion.
"edit this" -> blah
"imagine Tom Wolfe took a bunch of cocaine and was getting paid by the word to publish this after his first night with Aline Bernstein" -> probably less blah
As someone longtime involved in software development, can we call this "best practices" instead of some like "semantic ablation" that nobody understands?
the word choice here is so obtuse as to trigger my radar for "is this some kind of parody where this itself was AI generated". it appears to be entirely serious, which is disappointing, it could have been high art.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadBut 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.
It wanted to replace all the little bits of me that were in there.
(Obviously a different question from "is an AI lab willing to release that publicly” ;)
(Not necessarily disagreeing with those claims, but I'd like to see a more robust exploration of them.)
I see it on recent blog posts, on news articles, obituaries, YT channels. Sometimes mixed with voice impersonation of famous physicists like Feynman or Susskind.
I find it genuinely soul-crushing and even depressing, but I may be over sensitive to it as most readers don't seem to notice.
And, the worst part is noone will ever make a new internet because of the founder effect. We are basically in the worst timeline.
Do we see this in programming too? I don't think so? Unique, rarely used API methods aren't substituted the same way when refactoring. Perhaps that could give us a clue on how to fix that?
When not given a clear guideline to "just" refactor, I have had problems with LLMs hallucinating functions that don't exist.
Not to detract from the overall message, but I think the author doesn't really understand Romanesque and Baroque.
(as an aside, I'd most likely associate Post-Modernism as an architectural style with the output of LLMs - bland, regurgitative, and somewhat incongruous)
I'm no fantasy author, and my prose leaves much to be desired. The stuff the LLM comes up with is so mind numbingly bland. I've given up on having it write descriptions of any characters or locations. I just use it for very general ideas and plot lines, and then come up with the rest of the details on the fly myself. The plot lines and ideas it comes up with are very generic and bland. I mainly do it just to save time, but I throw away 50% of the "ideas" because they make no sense or are really lame.
What i have found LLMs to be helpful with is writing up fun post-session recaps I share with the adventurers.
I recap in my own words what happened during the session, then have the LLM structure it into a "fun to read" narrative style. ChatGPT seems to prefer a Sanderson jokey tone, but I could probably tailor this.
Then I go through it, and tweak some of the boring / bland bits. The end result is really fun to read, and took 1/20th the time it would have taken me to write it all out myself. The LLM would have never been able to come up with the unique and fun story lines, but it is good at making an existing story have some narrative flare in a short amount of time.
https://youtu.be/605MhQdS7NE?si=IKMNuSU1c1uaVCDB&t=730
He ended a critical commentary by suggesting that the author he was responding to should think more critically about the topic rather than repeating falsehoods because "they set off the tuning fork in the loins of your own dogmatism."
Yeah, AI could not come up with that phrase.
Eh... I don't know. To me, that sounds very AI-ish.
Claude is very good -- at times -- coming up with flowery metaphoric language... if you tell it to. That one is so over-the-top that I'd edit it out.
Put something like this in your prompt and have it revise something:
"Make this read like Jim Thompson crossed with Thomas Harris, filtered through a paperback rack at a truck stop circa 1967. Make it gritty, efficient, and darkly comedic. Don't shy away from suggesting more elegant words or syntax. (For instance, Robert Howard -- Conan -- and H.P. Lovecraft were definitely pulp, but they had a sophisticated vocabulary.) I really want some purple prose and overwrought metaphors."
Occasionally you'll get some gems. Claude is much better than ChatGPT at this kinda stuff. The BEST ones are the ever-growing NSFW models populating huggingface.
In short, do the posts on OpenClawForum all sound alike? Of course.
Just like all the webpages circa 2000 looked alike. The uniformity wasn't because of HTML... rather it was because few people were using HTML to its full potential.
Sounds like word salad. Of course if you write like GPT-2 it would not sound like current models.
Etc.
don't be mean, it's median AI à la mode
Then the model will look for clusters that don't fit what the model consider's to be Hemingway/Colliers/Post-War and suggest in that fashion.
"edit this" -> blah
"imagine Tom Wolfe took a bunch of cocaine and was getting paid by the word to publish this after his first night with Aline Bernstein" -> probably less blah
the words TFA is looking for is mode collapse https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t9svvNPNmFf5Qa3TA/mysteries-... and the author could herself learn to write more clearly.