I tried writing a short novel using Claude Opus 4.6, I gave it outline and raw draft, and the style is very similar to this writing.
I tried to steer it away from this kind of writing because it feels weird. But it always try to output something similar to this. Or maybe I am just not used to reading novel.
So I was curious, what kind of training data was Claude trained on, that its very hard to steer it out from this style.
So I opened my kindle and looking through the recommended popular novels. Just reading through its free samples.
And the similarities are striking. Now, I dont know whether the recommended novel is the training data, or its actually written by LLM. Or maybe its just how novelist writes.
I even tried writing full chapter from scratch. And asked Claude to ghost write the second chapter for me using my writing style. It still wont follow my style and keeps writing in this kind of style from the article.
Not accusing the article of using an LLM to ghost write. Even so its fine to use LLM to ghost write. Its just one anecdote from my side, on how LLM fails to follow my writing style and keeps coming back to its training data.
Most amazing art isn't really a product of inspiration, but from severe editing (or severe practice, if it's live).
Good writing needs a lot of "post-production" to get the ideas hammered out. Most of it is removing content that isn't central to what the writer wants.
This LLM trend is part of a larger historical pattern that shifts editing away from us having to think things in our brain:
A. At one time, the editing was mental load, since writing was tedious.
B. The typewriter made writing easy, but modifying it required lots of handwritten scrawling, but the mental load was still within reviewing and rewriting the content.
C. By the end of the 20th century, editing and rewriting was a total breeze, but the mental load was still within handwritten note-taking.
D. Once we made a bazillion forms of productivity and note-taking software, the mental load was only in thinking the thought and getting it into a computer. Everything after that was massaging the idea.
E. Now, the regurgitation machine can get you 3/4 of the way to the finish line of your draft without even trying.
But, I'm convinced we lost something on each of these transitions. There is more power in one well-placed sentence assembled over tremendous meditation than 85 paragraphs of slop.
Paul Graham's essay on good writing (https://paulgraham.com/goodwriting.html) defines "right" written ideas as "developing them well — drawing the conclusions that matter most, and exploring each one to the right level of detail".
My opinion is that the absurd complexities of the Over-Information Age make the "right" level of detail the following:
1. Executive summary that children and dumb people can understand.
2. Tightly-defined specifications for everyone who cares or needs to know.
3. Footnotes and background information that you can throw everything and the kitchen sink onto. This includes attempts to persuade, artful descriptions, feelings you had, associations to other things, and that general elegant "waxing on" that everyone gets the fancy for doing sometimes.
I actually loved this, and felt moved. While reading, my mind fired rapidly through dozens of personal memes (i.e. tags for my regularly trod thought-paths) that I keep in my knowledge-base. This is the 30mb text corpus where I log all my work and peer conversations and thoughts, and (amongst other things) where I think through what I would consider my spiritual practices... my sensemaking around complex systems, including Daoist teachings. This text basically entangled itself with the work I am doing at the outer edges of my own knowing, where I am working on my rawest and most fragile but precious thoughts.
I don't think this is trite, I think there is something in this that is in contact with "living structure" (in the Christopher Alexander sense[1]), and much exists outside the edges of the text.
To those who dislike this, I am genuinely curious: Would you say you dislike metaphor? Do you tend to feel disconnected and lacking resonance with poetic writing?
EDIT: I experience this writing as giving me many quiet A's, or perhaps a smell of A's in a given direction of thought. I interpret others here as getting either B's or U's, in the sense of this A/B/U system: https://openresearchinstitute.org/onboarding/A_B_U.html
My humanist degree and all those years reading B’s and D’s of French philosophy come extremely useful in strange places. Having had to write long essays sieving through mounds of seemingly near impenetrable (and actually surprisingly banal, after you learn how to read it) prose of post-structuralist philosophy, I learned how to automatically look for the structure of the text first by skimming, starting from the end, creating a mental map of the text so that you can locate the main argument and the amino acid amongst the boilerplate and stock sentences.
Today it saves me time skimming a text, seeking for main sentences by jumoing around and quickly coming to the understanding of “Oh, hi ChatGPT”. In the past it has saved me a lot of time not being tricked to read SEO gurgle, ad-copy and just generally bad writing. If writing is really just editing, reading is mostly filtering, sieving the cereal from the chaff.
We have a print on our wall that says "These are the good old days" - when I'm going through it with newborns, chaotic toddler tantrums and work stress...it's a good reminder that I will desperately wish to return to this stage of life one day in the future.
Pangram says this is 61% AI generated. Thinking of paying for a Pangram subscription so I can spend the valuable time I have to read for pleasure on human created pieces than AI slop.
I'm somewhat amazed this got upvoted to the frontpage... I guess the title got upvoted because it's really terrible writing, either LLM generated or someome trying their hardest to sound "deep".
There are so many technical and stylistic issues with this, I would say it's either someone learning to write and trying too hard, or again, using an LLM.
1) Why is the whole thing written in the second person perspective? Is it disguised autobiography? It seems to be a cheap way of trying to claim intimacy with the reader, "here look, this was your experience". It ends up sounding like someone narrating your life at you while actually (secretly) talking about themselves.
2) While mostly written in the second person, there are several jarring switches back into first person. Unsure if this is a mistake or was intentional, either way, it just sounds bad.
3) The tenses are bouncing all over the place in this writing. We have present tense: "You take the train", past tense: "You took it", future tense for a kind of prophetic vibe: "A decade from now, you will not know", and finally a sort of timeless present proverbial tense: "The text is the same. The reader is not. This is what the contemplative traditions mean when they talk about the spiral — the return to the same point, but at a different elevation."
The effect of all the tense switching and weirdness just makes it hard for the reader to feel grounded in any of the scenes.
4) Rhetorical negation. The writer loves this pattern of describing things by what they are not. Examples:
"It was not silly. It was not even reverent. It was just a thing."
"Not with a call. Not with a vision. Not with a voice in the night."
"Not a metaphor for one. Not like a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage."
It can be a nice effect if you use it once... not repeatedly in a short piece, it makes you think the writer is constantly arguing with an imagined critic. "It's not this, it's this!"
5) Performative plainness, e.g. "You walked. You ate. You slept." "You stood for a minute. You looked at the statue." There's a lot of these kinds of fragments, and they feel strange because they're written in an active voice by describing a "character" who never makes any choices, i.e. entirely passive. It's like the author is trying to ape Hemingway's style in these moments but missing the characters and the story which go along with this spartan active voice.
Taken altogether, it feels like the author is trying to sound profound but with enormous effort and trying to use every trick in the writer's toolbox, which ends up sounding confusing, and creating distance between the author and the reader, and the "gap" is obvious, the engineering is visible. It's like the writer is saying "You were not trying to be moved." and the reader feeling that the author has tried desperately hard writing 3000 words to try and move you.
I try not to be too critical of things by strangers on the internet, but I feel compelled to say that as a big fan of the type of fiction this seems to be going for - a kind of Franzen/DeLillo/Ishigoro aka mystical non momentousness - I found this really dull.
In reading, which I did before reading the comments here, I wondered too if it was LLM written or assisted. It has the hallmarks of an LLM; the "this but not this" - the proclivity to be profound. In this case as if it had been told "I want to make something meaningful out of these events, but it shouldn't mean anything."
There is not about page. No links to other socials. The entire site could be LLM generated for all we can tell.
If anything at all, this "essay" and site serve as a reminder that there is an uncanny valley to LLM writing, and that real authentic human communication will likely become rarer and more valuable as this slop proliferates.
edit: from the OP's profile it looks like this is probably a well-meaining person interested in post-structuralism and meditation, but is likely using LLM to achieve that goal. Maybe they wrote in Japanese and are translating to English? Also I kind of like coming across stuff like this on HN but I feel it should still be adjacent or at least peripheral to the topics we normally discuss
16 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 40.0 ms ] threadI tried to steer it away from this kind of writing because it feels weird. But it always try to output something similar to this. Or maybe I am just not used to reading novel.
So I was curious, what kind of training data was Claude trained on, that its very hard to steer it out from this style.
So I opened my kindle and looking through the recommended popular novels. Just reading through its free samples.
And the similarities are striking. Now, I dont know whether the recommended novel is the training data, or its actually written by LLM. Or maybe its just how novelist writes.
I even tried writing full chapter from scratch. And asked Claude to ghost write the second chapter for me using my writing style. It still wont follow my style and keeps writing in this kind of style from the article.
Not accusing the article of using an LLM to ghost write. Even so its fine to use LLM to ghost write. Its just one anecdote from my side, on how LLM fails to follow my writing style and keeps coming back to its training data.
Good writing needs a lot of "post-production" to get the ideas hammered out. Most of it is removing content that isn't central to what the writer wants.
This LLM trend is part of a larger historical pattern that shifts editing away from us having to think things in our brain:
But, I'm convinced we lost something on each of these transitions. There is more power in one well-placed sentence assembled over tremendous meditation than 85 paragraphs of slop.Paul Graham's essay on good writing (https://paulgraham.com/goodwriting.html) defines "right" written ideas as "developing them well — drawing the conclusions that matter most, and exploring each one to the right level of detail".
My opinion is that the absurd complexities of the Over-Information Age make the "right" level of detail the following:
And, in this attitude, LLMs are only good for #3.I don't think this is trite, I think there is something in this that is in contact with "living structure" (in the Christopher Alexander sense[1]), and much exists outside the edges of the text.
To those who dislike this, I am genuinely curious: Would you say you dislike metaphor? Do you tend to feel disconnected and lacking resonance with poetic writing?
[1]: https://dorian.substack.com/p/at-any-given-moment-in-a-proce...
EDIT: I experience this writing as giving me many quiet A's, or perhaps a smell of A's in a given direction of thought. I interpret others here as getting either B's or U's, in the sense of this A/B/U system: https://openresearchinstitute.org/onboarding/A_B_U.html
Today it saves me time skimming a text, seeking for main sentences by jumoing around and quickly coming to the understanding of “Oh, hi ChatGPT”. In the past it has saved me a lot of time not being tricked to read SEO gurgle, ad-copy and just generally bad writing. If writing is really just editing, reading is mostly filtering, sieving the cereal from the chaff.
Horrible soulless dross.
There are so many technical and stylistic issues with this, I would say it's either someone learning to write and trying too hard, or again, using an LLM.
1) Why is the whole thing written in the second person perspective? Is it disguised autobiography? It seems to be a cheap way of trying to claim intimacy with the reader, "here look, this was your experience". It ends up sounding like someone narrating your life at you while actually (secretly) talking about themselves.
2) While mostly written in the second person, there are several jarring switches back into first person. Unsure if this is a mistake or was intentional, either way, it just sounds bad.
3) The tenses are bouncing all over the place in this writing. We have present tense: "You take the train", past tense: "You took it", future tense for a kind of prophetic vibe: "A decade from now, you will not know", and finally a sort of timeless present proverbial tense: "The text is the same. The reader is not. This is what the contemplative traditions mean when they talk about the spiral — the return to the same point, but at a different elevation."
The effect of all the tense switching and weirdness just makes it hard for the reader to feel grounded in any of the scenes.
4) Rhetorical negation. The writer loves this pattern of describing things by what they are not. Examples: "It was not silly. It was not even reverent. It was just a thing." "Not with a call. Not with a vision. Not with a voice in the night." "Not a metaphor for one. Not like a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage."
It can be a nice effect if you use it once... not repeatedly in a short piece, it makes you think the writer is constantly arguing with an imagined critic. "It's not this, it's this!"
5) Performative plainness, e.g. "You walked. You ate. You slept." "You stood for a minute. You looked at the statue." There's a lot of these kinds of fragments, and they feel strange because they're written in an active voice by describing a "character" who never makes any choices, i.e. entirely passive. It's like the author is trying to ape Hemingway's style in these moments but missing the characters and the story which go along with this spartan active voice.
Taken altogether, it feels like the author is trying to sound profound but with enormous effort and trying to use every trick in the writer's toolbox, which ends up sounding confusing, and creating distance between the author and the reader, and the "gap" is obvious, the engineering is visible. It's like the writer is saying "You were not trying to be moved." and the reader feeling that the author has tried desperately hard writing 3000 words to try and move you.
In reading, which I did before reading the comments here, I wondered too if it was LLM written or assisted. It has the hallmarks of an LLM; the "this but not this" - the proclivity to be profound. In this case as if it had been told "I want to make something meaningful out of these events, but it shouldn't mean anything."
There is not about page. No links to other socials. The entire site could be LLM generated for all we can tell.
If anything at all, this "essay" and site serve as a reminder that there is an uncanny valley to LLM writing, and that real authentic human communication will likely become rarer and more valuable as this slop proliferates.
edit: from the OP's profile it looks like this is probably a well-meaining person interested in post-structuralism and meditation, but is likely using LLM to achieve that goal. Maybe they wrote in Japanese and are translating to English? Also I kind of like coming across stuff like this on HN but I feel it should still be adjacent or at least peripheral to the topics we normally discuss