A lot of similar pieces have not considered a post is both the first and final work of a thing: opinions, and experience, and less of much in cited facts; with AI, that there even was a revision pass at all.
I guess there is a kind of participatory element to the discourse where, if you want an audience, there is an editing process. Whereas in other cases, we wrote these as progress notes on an unknown journey, breadcrumbs or upturned stones to mark a path to the horizon.
Maybe it's the difference between writing as a mode of discovery, retreading the mental arc of a solution, and writing something honed to leave a mark.
If you need AI for the draft, then it does not need to be written at all. You dont have a thing to say, you just have requirement to produce a lot of words.
And in that case, no one needs to read it ai or not.
That is honestly the highest possible praise -- thank you. And when this piece was starting to boil inside of me last night (triggered, I'm sorry to report, by an obviously LLM-authored guest blog entry from the Rust Foundation[0]), I messaged one of my colleagues: "Time to do what I do best: bluntly say what lots of people are thinking."
I saw 'the results speak for themselves' but for me this article seemed to have less LLM-ese than some of the more recent obvious LLM prose posted to hackernews. As a reader I think its jarring because you just see a lot of articles purportedly written by different people using a very similar voice. I guess pre-LLM you might see this in a newspaper with very strong editorial oversight. So the phenomena is not completely new but it feels stranger when its not from a single source. It's also kind of sad to see a some people who have written a lot in the past about interesting technical topics in a way that was easy to read to give up their voice and outsource it to an LLM. But given this is basically free labour from the authors it feels a bit ungracious to complain.
My complaint is directed at the Rust Foundation, not the authors, to be clear. Yes, it's free labor, but the Foundation ought to have standards.
I showed Bryan the post while in a meeting room with him, left the room, and a few minutes later heard a very loud, very exasperated primal scream coming from the room!
Agreed, I like the Oxide podcast as well, even though it’s hardware I’m unlikely to ever see never mind use, it’s nice that someone somewhere is still trying to be what they are trying to be.
Having dealt with Enterprise Hardware(TM) in a previous job, it’s refreshing simply to see someone look at that pile of crap and go “it doesn’t have to be that way” and then actually set out to prove it.
They have a ton of rfds publicly available that are worth reading. Recently, read this one: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0161 because I'm researching clickhouse for my work (there is also a podcast ep on it). Even if you never use their hardware, just reading their work around the software they use/make is incredibly valuable as an engineer.
I would go even further, I want a browser extension that scans all words on every page and colours them more and more transparent as the likelihood of llm prose is increased.
Are you footing the bill yourself, or would you be supporting BYOK? Not sure whether logging in with user's account would also be a good workaround or not.
Years ago I used a rudimentary (text matching) Greasemonkey script that hid Reddit posts and comments from accounts matching a few behavioral/history signals.
I wonder if that idea could be modernized now for this.
Unfortunately, it's not a browser extension and doesn't seem to have an API. I'd make a browser extension for this myself if it didn't involve paying for expensive Pangram usage.
I have (an API, not an extension), but pangram is way to expensive for me to run, current (v4) pricing is $0.05 per 100 words. Should be absolutely doable if we split the cost between users tho.
I tried searching for good opensource / reasonably priced alternatives, pangram themselves even have some of their older architecture and training data on github/hugging face, but i never got that working reliably enough.
> Indeed, Pangram has become important to so many of us that I was thrilled when Pangram Labs co-founder and CEO Max Spero joined us recently on Oxide and Friends.
Is obvious AI-assisted writing better or worse than an obvious PR quid pro quo and/or cross-promotion?
This is (obviously?) false, but considering how well-capitalized we are at the moment, you do have me wondering what a quid pro quo would be for; perhaps in this fictional universe Pangram has lucked into some of the PCIe clock buffers that we've been scrambling to secure enough of?
By "quid pro quo" I wasn't suggesting that Pangram's PR people's podcast placement was pay-for-play, just that they traded access for your positioning of their tech and their exec in your content marketing efforts.
That's pretty normal, but the point is that a blog post which is 35% Pangram promotion may not actually be less annoying than the use of AI to help write blog posts.
Yeah, fair -- and definitely not: I am earnestly just a fan of what they built (and I also think it's really important as a way of getting a check against rampant LLM use).
I hate to say this but AI assisted short pitch deks from founder to angel (usually their first time) have improved with AI. But also, they follow the same formula so are sorta obvious. Still, the decks are generally more business focused than typical founders early deck being very product/solution oriented.
You're marginalizing yourself. I don't have hard data for writing, but I do for another area: YouTube Thumbnails. AI generated thumbnails outperform human thumbnails, often with a +2-5% delta in CTR. Yet "so many" people loudly complain about how they HATE AI thumbnails and block channels that have them. Clearly the incentive is there, and (in the case of YT) these are mobs of angry people who don't really matter but scream and bitch as if they did.
How can you tell if people can accurately identify AI generated text?
If a person reads AI generated text and does not notice, they by definition will not know about it.
There have been numerous cases of people accessing human created content as being AI.
There are instances where it seems relatively uncontroversial that it is AI generated, but without knowing both the amount of AI content people are exposed toand the amount that they register I don't think you can draw a conclusion of the overall state.
Some people are still losing their shit over em-dashes, with no other tells, and humans can't use the not x; y construction anymore either, regardless of any other merit to the writing.
LLM writing is verbose and meandering, but people are making a much bigger deal over this stuff than necessary for virtue signalling purposes. You don't want to read someone else's LLM writing? Get a summary of the page from yours. No time wasted, no pretentious posturing, and you don't make the error of assuming because the piece was written by an LLM that there was no thought put into the subject or there's no value in what is being communicated.
> You don't want to read someone else's LLM writing? Get a summary of the page from yours.
I am disinclined to take someone's error-prone machine generated text and run it through an error-prone summarizer. That's a waste of time (not to mention electricity), when all that needed to happen was for the original person to not be so fucking lazy and just write out his thoughts.
This is very handwavy and dismissive. It is pretty safe to assume that must of us catch it most of the time because the simple fact is so many people just copy and paste whatever the LLM outputs without even trying to edit it or mask that they used one. We’ve all seen so many examples of the exact same cadence and verbiage that we’ve learned how to identify it pretty reliably. The ones who are “slipping past us” are actually putting in the work make not just pasting raw LLM outputs, which is the real issue here. If somebody has edited it meaningfully after the fact then it’s not the same crime.
> It is pretty safe to assume that must of us catch it most of the time because the simple fact is so many people just copy and paste whatever the LLM outputs without even trying to edit it or mask that they used one.
This statement does not logically cohere. "We can spot it because so many people make it easy to spot." You don't see how this is just petitio principii in action?
What is your point? It’s not that complicated. Obvious slop is obvious. Maybe there are some humans out there who sound like Claude but I’m not going to force myself through 900 slop blog posts on the off chance that one of them might actually be written by a human.
Maybe some people stop reading LLM slop purely because it violates their moral principles or whatever but most people bail out because slop is mentally painful to read. If you are a human and you write like today’s AI find a different writing style, not because reads like AI, but because it reads like shit.
There is no group of people who put enormous amounts of effort into not putting effort in to writing.
To fully disguise LLM prose, you'd have to rewrite it entirely, and if you were going to do that, you wouldn't be the sort of person to use it in the first place.
If something is obvious then by definition it’s obvious. LLM writing, unless someone puts in the time to improve it, typically follows the exact same patterns and favors the same words. You can’t reas a thread here without people talking about “Claude speak.” It is readily apparent, I do not need to show you a 10 year study with n=100,000 to make this point. The article isn’t hallucinating a problem, we are all nodding along because we all see it every goddamn day lmao. He even cited a study and makes a pretty strong case for why it’s a useful metric here in TFA.
If the AI writing is indistinguishable from human writing, then it is not lazy copy and pasting of AI outputs and isn’t just raw LLM output with no work done on it. So in that case it’s no longer a problem.
LLM’s cannot write in a natural, human way that distinguishes it from the typical LLM output on the first try. If they could, we wouldn’t have this problem. Maybe one day they will. Hell maybe it’ll even be next week. But currently they do not so I do not understand why we are having this discussion.
I don't think this is about edge cases where someone has successfully disguised the writing to some degree: the current crop of LLMs have some pretty blatant (and frankly annoying) habits by default, ones that are hard to miss once you have read a decent amount of their output. If I had to describe them broadly, I would say they are a collection of habits which are common in certain kinds of persuasive and emotive writing, but are usually applied way out of proportion to the topic at hand, which tends to make the result quite grandiose, overly dramatic, and tiring to read: a LLM will often write a TODO app README like it's a cross between a thriller novel, a political speech, and a bombshell news article. There's lots of specific tics (and just by sheer volume and uniformity almost any habit an LLM picks up is going to rapidly shoot into cliche regardless of its own merit) but this is the general effect which I think is objectionable independent of the source of the text.
I do think the sensitivity to it can vary a lot: it depends a lot on how much and how closely you read the text, and how much exposure you have to LLM writing. Certainly it seems like a lot of people just don't really notice, or at least don't care much.
> the current crop of LLMs have some pretty blatant
This is just "em dash redux." Except now we've moved on to accusing anyone who does "It's not X. It's Y." of being AI. In six months, it'll be "use of the word 'petrichor'" or something.
I do think there is a tendency to over-index on one or two particularly straightforward tells, and for any given feature of LLM writing you can find places where people do also use that feature (they had to learn it from somewhere, and in a lot of cases it is good writing practice — for the context in which it is used). But I'm not talking about just that, but also the general tone issue: it's bad writing regardless because it's in most cases just not appropriate for the context it's been written in.
(TBH I think the biggest likelihood for false positives comes from heavy LLM users picking up their tics: it's a natural tendency and I've already seen a few cases where it seems like that has happened).
Idk, it's more like "your writing is cliché and I don't feel like reading it because I've already read something that sounded similar countless times and it wasn't worth the read". The source of the clichés being an LLM. And maybe now humans are writing the same way as LLM output, I still am not going to read all that, sorry. If I see a sea of clichés, I'm going the other way.
I'm also not reading pumpkin spice murder mysteries for a similar reason. I'm also not reading stories where everybody clapped. Actually, I'm already familiar with petrichor, so unless someone has surrounded the word "petrichor" with non-cliché prose, I'm also not going to read all that.
(a) believe this is human prose
(b) enjoy reading this prose
(c) would enjoy reading 100 READMEs like this.
As for invoking petitio principii and questioning other commenters' logical coherence [0], can you politely shove the argumentum ad Latinum up your ass?
That’s the aspect I’ve had a hard time articulating. Definitely the right comparison. It feels like some huge revelation has been had and it’s so consequential and it’s unbelievable that it’s happening right before your very eyes and wow aren’t you so insightful and pushing the boundaries of knowledge!?
That plus the “it’s not X, but why” nonsense makes it feel like some condescending parent is trying to lecture me but at least 30% of what they’re saying is probably made up.
AI writing just means "writing I don't like" now. Just like Nazi means whatever and whoever I politically disagree with. Words have lost their meaning.
You're right that Nazi doesn't mean Nazi anymore. It means neonazi / white supremacist / white nationalist, which is a much broader group of people that, for some baffling reason, are under the impression that people don't care about their fascism and racism anymore.
Clearly not, or this wouldn't be something people discuss at all.
There are lots of people who belong to the above groups, sure, but at least here in Germany Nazi is now applied to basically anyone who doesn't vote green, it's ridiculous.
Just like "violence" can now mean speech you don't agree with, "genocide" means military action you don't agree with, and nobody seems to know what "woman" means anymore, Maybe the solution is to stop using words.
"I have fantasized about sentencing the author to read them aloud, certain that they themselves will be unable to endure the slop that they are foisting upon the rest of us.)"
I see this at work. People are "writing" specs and design proposals with bots. This is noticeable and is a huge turn off. I don't have issues with using bots to aid research, but I'm not reading the doc you slopped together.
I work with a guy that I swear is addicted to LLMs. He uses them for literally all communication, often dropping mountains of text for design specs that could have been written with half the words. Even on a 1:1 Zoom call, he'll type things into Claude and then read me the response! It's infuriating, and I've told him on a number of occasions, in as many polite ways as I can, that I would prefer to speak and work with him instead of Claude, but he just can't break the addiction.
> Today, legitimate businesses are very careful about how they use bulk e-mail
I don’t think this is remotely true. Sure, they’re legally obliged to let you unsubscribe, and sure, it’s not dick pills, but every US company will immediately send you a newsletter when you purchase something, review requests and, if they/you use Shop for checkout, expect an abandoned cart reminder.
PR pieces and software companies don’t write tutorials to be helpful, they are advertising to you. If the LLM can do it for cheap, they really don’t care.
Not sending you anything before you make a purchase and providing the unsubscribe option are MAJOR changes from before. Some sites even give you an option at checkout to not have them email you. That is businesses being very careful. In ye olden days you'd get email from all kinds of businesses and scammers completely unsolicited and out of the blue with no way to tell them to stop. It was overwhelming and awful. Things are much better than they used to be. Still somewhat annoying? Absolutely. But much much better.
>to use an LLM to write is to void the social contract between writer and reader: we readers shouldn’t be expected to labor to understand a sentence that the writer themselves didn’t work to create.
Pretty much sums up the issue re: workplace lazy AI dumping on folks as well.
This meme of trying to make it sound like LLM text is so obvious is a joke. It’s literally not, you can tell it to write in literally any style and given just a bit of an example of a person’s writing style, frontier models copy it completely and effectively. This argument can probably be leveled at vanilla raw output from an LLM, but even the slightest attempt at obfuscation bears solid fruit.
Well, give it a shot -- you'll likely find that that technique doesn't work nearly as well (at least with Pangram 4) as you think it might. When we had Max on the podcast[0], Adam explicitly asked him about exactly this (after all, you can give an LLM access to Pangram and let it iterate!), and Max reported that someone had attempted to do this -- and ended up burning through $700 in tokens and had a "sad Claude." Another interesting bit: according to Max, newer models are diverging more from human writing not less. I think that that was more anecdotal than quantified, but an interesting comment nonetheless.
99% of college essays and pretty much everything “product” in corporate America is now LLM generated with some marginal oversight. It passes muster for the most part.
If someone uses an LLM to write and is able to tailor their writing such that it isn't obviously written by an LLM, then I'm fine with it! But two of my otherwise-favourite news sources -- the Hacker News front page and FT Alphaville -- are inundated by articles where the LLM usage is blindingly obvious.
This isn't very effective on any models released in recent years. With older ones, you used to be able to influence writing style significantly by just putting examples in the context, but newer models have gone through so much assistant RLHF, they really want to revert back to their default "assistant voice" during their turn.
You can still influence their writing style in a broad manner that might look correct at a glance, but the repetitive little patterns that give it away will always be there - if it was that easy to get rid of them, don't you think the AI labs themselves would've done it before releasing the models?
I think nowadays defeating the detection probably looks like finetuning a smaller LLM and getting it to paraphrase the text from the other one (or just using a more obscure finetune: it'll probably have its own cliches and habits but it will be at least different). As an added bonus this also likely removes the fingerprinting from the output as well. But I think most people are not going to bother with this.
Look, in the future we may get to a point where LLMs are indistinguishable from humans in writing style.
Even then, I would say that using an LLM is robbing you of the process of writing, a process that is crucial to developing and understanding your own ideas.
Think about the last time you wrote something for consumption and the sentence to sentence thought processes you’re going through. I bet a lot of that was “is that right?” Or “does that make sense?” Or “am I communicating this at the level of my reader?”.
All of that is fundamental to your readers understanding, but more importantly, its fundamental to YOUR understanding.
I agree. Most human-generated content I've run across on the internet over the past couple decades has been fairly low quality and, to be honest, most of the self-admitted LLM-generated content is higher quality. I'm continually surprised that so many consider any content written by humans to automatically be more worth their time to read.
I'm much more interested in the content itself than the author that wrote it.
I would love to use Pangram but they simply don’t allow signing up with my custom email domain. The error was “This email address can't be used for signup. Please use a different email.” I’m not about to create a Gmail is to use your service. To me the attack on the decentralized nature on Internet infrastructure is no less serious than the attack on the human provenance of writing itself.
> but they simply don’t allow signing up with my custom email domain.
Tried 4 different domains. 3 of email services of various kind. 4th one my private domain which has absolutely no email reputation because I use it only for internal emails and sending is not even possible.
In the end I dug out some old gmail address and tried to use that.
The error was always the same, there had been suspicious activity from that domain. So the message is definitely incorrect. Well, there could have been suspicious activity from some gmail address, but if they don't allow gmail I guess they don't want many customers.
Yeah, did not cover my tracks. The could easily notice that I was the same one trying to sign up repeatedly with different emails.
> To those who read broadly, the hand of the LLM is so clear it’s as if the writer’s intellectual fly is open
I dunno, man, according to Hardcover, I've read 76 fiction books this year, and I can't tell. All the "AI tells" fail the vibe check. I'm a writer and I get flagged by many of them.
I think anyone claiming 100% accuracy is wrong, but the recent Claude models, for example, have a writing style that is sufficiently distinct that claiming people can't recognize it is like claiming you can't recognize the styles of particular famous authors. Yes, particular elements of their writing are going to be used by others, and it's possible to disguise their style or emulate it deliberately, but it's pretty hard to accidentally write like them.
I am bad at recognizing LLM writing off the bat, though I am getting better. It's pretty common that the writing is good enough to get me reading on a topic I am interested in; then, once I am invested in the piece, it turns out to be shallow, wildly incomplete, or simply wrong.
It's common enough that it's training me to recognize and recoil from AI tics through sheer classical conditioning.
I'm confused and disturbed by the need to invoke Pangram (a model) as the arbiter of slop here. Slop, like smut, is self evident. You know it when you see it. Yes, some effort may be required before realizing that something is slop, which, yeah, is annoying, but that's nothing in comparison to outsourcing your shiite detection to a model! What do you get, except a loss of self worth, by needing a model to have the confidence to call something slop?
> Why do people have this reaction? Beyond having to endure aggravating stylistic tics, when reading a piece that has had substantial LLM assistance, we — the readers — don’t know what is real and what isn’t.
This is a strong articulation. Here too, though, I would pause and reflect on what it means to (think you) know what is real and what isn't in a pre-LLM setting. Authority bias predates LLMs, and can have disastrous consequences.
The part about false positives was telling. The author doesn't want to demonize human trash, that's not fashionable, they're only concerned about virtue signalling.
AI detection should NEVER be used in an educational setting where the only acceptable false positive rate is 0%. That being a rate that which will never be achieved.
Yeah, even Pangram is a bit problematic here. It has been notoriously fragile. Minor edits can flip scores from 100%-human to 100%-AI, because Pangram is crazy sensitive to local and surfacial features of text. Simple consulting with LLMs for word choices can result in 100%-AI score. Insane.
In a way, The ubiquity of AI-generated material will force the world to acknowledge the superiority of the human mind. Already on Youtube there are channels proudly claiming their music was not generated by AI. Will the software industry have similar disclaimers? (some already have).
I liked your piece, and agree with almost all of it, but I'm surprised by your faith in the accuracy of Pangram at detecting AI writing. Is your faith based on testing it with lots of writing of known origins, or are you just saying that it reaches the same conclusion that you do as a talented human?
In particular, I wondered if you have tried running all of your own writings through it to verify that it thinks you are human. I was struck by Freddie deBoer's recent piece where he did this and said it often failed: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-i...
What percentage of false positive rejections would you find acceptable? Would you accept this even if it forced you to change the way you write?
My experience is using Pangram quite often with lots of writing of all flavors (including a bunch of known origin).
As for my own writing, I didn't do this experiment, but one of my co-workers did -- and over 176 posts spanning 22 years, all 176 (well, 177 now with my latest) are 100% human. This is not hugely surprising in that (in addition to me having actually written them!) my voice is very... distinctive. What would be more entertaining would be to try to get an LLM to write like me and fool Pangram that way. I still think that this would be difficult based on the experiences that I've heard, but it wouldn't surprise me if you could pull it off (and I would assuredly find the result entertaining!).
In the dimensions that we use Pangram in the most actionable sense (namely, to audit our own public writing), I am unconcerned about false positives, and leave it to Oxide authors to rework/recast as needed. (Though it sounds like Freddie didn't even need to do that -- he just needed to provide a longer sample.)
Now that you’ve seen it can be brittle (e.g. if a small sample is provided, per this single case), would it be sensible to add a disclaimer to the post? It’s a great ad for the tool (& I’d love for a perfect tool to exist!), so it’ll sell subscriptions & we wanna make sure that some teacher out there doesn’t falsely accuse a kid, or engineer doesn’t think worse of their colleague unfairly, etc.
False negatives are mentioned, but the false positive is what could hurt people.
>I wondered if you have tried running all of your own writings through it to verify that it thinks you are human. I was struck by Freddie deBoer's recent piece where he did this
Maybe I'm taking the "all" too literally here, but I read the article, and I'm not seeing anywhere the author ran a substantial portion of his corpus through Pangram to determine the false positive rate. That would be really interesting to see.
He does
* give an example of a piece of his writing that was, when ran in segments, flagged as generated (which he disputes)
* multiply the size of his corpus by pangram's published false positive rate and estimate that a few of his pieces would be flagged
* get the pangram model to label a piece "100% AI" when it only has 3 generated sentences
* demonstrate the ability to intentionally trigger a false positive
I just typed 233 words into Pangram, I'm trying to synthesize an idea from Aristotle to an experience I am having at work. It's not an original thought, specifically, but the application to this thing at work does appear to be novel. I'm still trying to work out my thoughts. Anyway it concluded that it's 100% AI. Even with a couple of random typos and missing grammar that I added. Smells like horse shit to me. I also don't like the idea that I have to shove a corpus of text into this thing to get it to process that it's incorrect. That expectation is wrong headed and places the burden on the wrong entity.
For me, writing is an activity of expressing my feelings and conveying my thoughts. I rarely left that to LLM simply because one does not contract out activities one cherishes.
I (am kinda forced to) use LLM to generate maybe 40% of the code at work, that is after my review and modifications. But I pretty much wrote all of the comments by myself. I can get into the flow by writing comments.
When I write technical documentation, here's how I use LLMs:
* If I need to learn something before I write about it, I rely on LLMs heavily to answer questions that I have about other source materials, e.g. to clear up ambiguities.
* I've recently started prompting it to find grammatical and spelling errors.
* And I've prompted it to find technical errors, places where I'm just wrong.
For all the prompting, I additionally tell it to not rewrite anything or offer any prose suggestions. It can keep all that to itself, thank you.
And I verify what it gives back for correctness.
(I'd encourage non-native speakers to use LLMs in much the same way. Don't sacrifice your human voice by letting the AI rewrite your words. Personally, I'd very much rather hear it from you, blemishes and all, than hear it from an AI.)
But if I could step back for a minute:
Why write anything?
If your writing goal is to flood the zone and make as much money as humanly possible from ads, then hell yeah, paperclip the everliving shit out of that.
But if your writing goal is to learn material or share material, then put that LLM on the back burner and don't use it to directly generate your text. It's bad for you, and the results are subpar.
When I'm learning something, I can go through reams of tokens and then, once I understand it, I digest that to single a paragraph about the topic. The paragraph is as concise and as helpful as I can make it. Now, I could just share the prompts that I went through with those pages of back-and-forth with the LLM... but wouldn't you rather just read the concise paragraph that gets the point across?
It's not hard to be better than an AI at writing for humans, so the minimum low bar to aim for is "better than an AI". And we can all get there with a small amount of practice. The real goal is to greatly exceed the LLMs' capabilities for sharing information.
Finally, I think everyone should write a lot. Blogs, morning pages, fiction, technical books, letters, whatever. Especially when it comes to technical content, nothing makes you do your research like putting your ass out in the ether to get flamed by 5 billion people. And teachers the world over know the best way to learn something is to teach it. Pick a topic, research, and write it up more clearly and concisely than anyone else ever has. You'll learn so much, and your readers will, as well. Writing fires up your brain. Don't give that up to an LLM.
“Personally, I'd very much rather hear it from you, blemishes and all, than hear it from an AI.”
Yes! Well said. If I already know someone, reading their own words, technical or businesss or personal, is meaningful to me. Warts and all. And if I don’t yet know the author then I definitely want to read their own words so I can get to know them.
Either way, taking the time to think and then write is a gift and I respect that.
My revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text. A trope typically indicates I’m in for an uphill read.
I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1].
> Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes:
> > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
> Orwell's version goes:
> > Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
> First notice how the two passages look. The first one at the top invites us to read it. The words are short and have air around them; they convey the rhythms of human speech. The second one is clotted with long words. It tells us instantly that a ponderous mind is at work. We don't want to go anywhere with a mind that expresses itself in such suffocating language. We don't even start to read.
The second one was very clear and to the point. Parsing it was rewarded with instant understanding and I enjoyed the word choice. The first one was just annoying; I could tell it was just listing a bunch of pointless analogies to try to make its point sound more grandiose so I immediately started skimming, and didn't come away feeling like it meant much other than "we all die in the end". The second one made an actual point and was the one that made me want to read it. The first one was the chore for me.
I can't see how you could apply "minimalist" to that excerpt. It's maximalist, hammering the same point over and over and over when one or two examples with a little more worldbuilding per example would have done better if they were going for "evocative".
If I had to pin a subjective experience to reading it, it would be that of being stuck in a car as a teenager with a parent who's ranting about whatever set them off that day and won't move on from repeating their grievance in different words when you got the point five minutes ago. In contrast, the second feels like having an enjoyable and productive level-headed conversation with someone who respects you and trusts you to understand the words.
The grammar is more straightforward. It has some extraneous words, and makes conspicuously bad choices of vocabulary, but it's still a more direct statement.
Other translations keep Zinsser's preferred lack of fuzz but avoid using "is ... to" for possession.
For example, the Lexham English Bible:
> I looked again and saw under the sun that the race does not belong to the swift, the battle does not belong to the mighty, food does not belong to the wise, wealth does not belong to the intelligent, and success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all of them.
This could be shortened to "success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all" with no meaning lost. It's self-indulgent fluff. Meanwhile, Orwell's actually adds more to the statement - much better signal to noise.
You're running into a cultural difference. The book of Ecclesiastes was written in Hebrew, in a poetical style even though large chunks of it are prose. But if you read other parts of the Bible, such as the book of Psalms (which is entirely poetry, specifically songs, though in many cases we do not know the tune that they were set to), you'll see that Hebrew poetry relied on repetition. For example, here's the King James Version's translation of the famous "to every thing there is a season" passage from chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes, which most translations render as poetry:
> To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
That could have been said in less than a quarter of the words the author expended on it. But something of the style would have been entirely lost. He wasn't trying to be succinct, he was trying to repeat the same concept over and over until it sinks in.
Repetition can make a good impact, but it's beyond excessive in this instance. Contrast with this poem:
Non est salvatori salvator,
neque defensori dominus,
nec pater nec mater,
nihil supernum.
Translated:
No rescuer hath the rescuer.
No Lord hath the champion,
no mother and no father,
only nothingness above.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky
I find this one profound, and it's given me a lot to think about over the years - in situations ranging from asking what our place in the universe is, to doing the "right thing" (and deciding what "the right thing" even means to yourself), or standing at the helm of some team or project, knowing that judgement call is yours alone and there's no authority or higher power coming to swoop in and give you the answer or authoritatively judge your decision can be simultaneously liberating and terrifying. The use of repetition works incredibly well in my opinion and it still gives me chills to read it.
I never had formal training in Latin, just what I've picked up. But grammatically, I would think the second line would translate to "No champion hath the lord", not "no lord hath the champion". Am I misunderstanding the grammatical suffixes here?
I'm admittedly no Latin expert, so I can't give an authoritative answer, but the translation was actually arrived at on a forum where the author asked for help, and I can see someone asked the same question: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qpp6ZdwHLNKj6PXRp/req-latin-...
The first is of course from the King James Bible which for centuries was essentially a standard that all English speaking peoples aspired to. If you find that version difficult I would expect much literary writing before the 1940s also seems difficult. This is just to say I recommend reading the King James even if you are an atheist, as I am.
I also have to say that the first strikes me as being written by someone that might be smarter than I am, the second as being written by someone significantly less intelligent than I, yet somehow placed by society in a position of authority above me.
In the context of newly written work in the modern era, I would argue it's best to use grammatical constructions that are used in modern 20th/21st century English, at least most of the time. Those who wrote the KJV were trying to be expressive but the whole point was to do so in language that ordinary people would be familiar with.
> the first strikes me as being written by someone that might be smarter than I am
This is why Joseph Smith tried to imitate the language of the King James Bible in the Book of Mormon, albeit not very successfully.
My guess is that if you were betting on a race, you would put your money on the swift and "sometimes fast runners trip over" wouldn't seem as smart.
The rewrite stinks of a consultant's report from IBM in the 1960s where humor is frowned upon because business is serious, and there's no way we could write in plain words that the CEO got there by chance instead of skill. Objective consideration distances the author compared to the subjective original I have returned and [I saw]. The original gives wide-ranging examples, the rewrite's contemporary phenomena is vague enough to avoid calling out the board of directors as potentially unskilled but lucky. A compelled conclusion is one the author is - reluctantly, you understand - forced into. Innate capacity leaves an escape hatch for a good education and life experience to excuse the board again. It's not an honest rewrite of the same sentiment.
A plenitude of observations undertaken in a multitude of geographically and culturally diverse locations has convinced this author of the incompleteness of the following claims: races are won by the swift, battles are won by the strong, bread is earned by wisdom, riches are earned through applied understanding, favours return to skilled persons. They do not mention the effects of time and chance on all situations, which experience has made clear. Other phenomena may also play a role, e.g. underhanded manipulation.
Yeah, I found Orwell's easier to understand and quite fast to read as well, but I think it's just because of the style of writing of the first one. It's from an earlier style of prose that I'm just not used to.
I also don't have a problem with large words as long as I'm well familiar with the words. The length of a word has nothing to do with the complexity of its meaning. We just have a limit to the number of pronounceable combinations of 5 letters.
I wonder if this is due to experience with reading technical documentation?
I think the second requires deeper concentration, but is still quite readable compared to the kind of low-content engagement / SEO stuff one read on the internet even before LLMs
>iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Orwell himself routinely ignores it, even in the first sentence of the essay:
>Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.
The second clause could be rewritten in active voice by changing it to "but people generally assume". But this would make the writing worse, and Orwell, as a good writer, probably didn't even consider the option of making it worse, and therefore didn't notice the passive voice.
Passive voice is an essential tool for all good writers of English. I always give the example of the opening of Pride and Prejudice:
>It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
The joke doesn't work in active voice. If you attribute this acknowledgement to some specific group of people then it's simply false, not a comedic exaggeration.
Technically, I think, that first sentence, by Austen, uses a passive participle but does not use a passive voice for any finite verb. I don't think that advice to avoid "the passive" is intended to apply to that situation.
For example, nobody would seriously suggest avoiding the passive participle in a sentence like "Put the broken plate in the bin". ("Put the plate that someone broke into the bin"?)
There's a rather simple reason this is so: A thought is typically most powerfully expressed in a sentence that puts the most surprising or notable word last, immediately before the period. Ideally, without any qualifying adjective/adverb.
And "... a wife." really turns on the ears, no?
So advice to prefer active voice is not wrong -- but the skilled writer adds other values into the balance.
> It's a bit of a pet peeve when people include quotes on a blog post without linking or otherwise references their source.
You’re peeved with good reason. It’s the blog equivalent of posting a screenshot of an article to social media. People, please post your sources! In the age of misinformation, that’s more important than ever.
> The Ecclasiast looked under the sun, but there was something he didn't understand. Something that wasn't right. Something that was not as it ought to be. And here is what the Ecclesiast didn't understand. Here is what nobody understood. Not then. Not in the years that followed. Not now. It was not the swift who won the race. Not the strong who won the battle. Not the wise who earned the bread. Not the men of understanding who gained the riches. Not the men of skill who gained the favor. And here is what I found: to any story of success, there is an element of unpredictability and chance.
(There are really just two possible outcomes: either the article is right or in, say, two years, we will be all writing and talking like this, as in humans learning from mediamatically enforced human feedback.)
I am a bit of a luddite in this domain and have so far managed to resist the lure of using the generator to expand my thoughts, and I still catch myself writing "it's not just an X it's a Y" and other generator type tells. If it infecting my patterns it is totally entering the wider subconscious as "How to write" (Sighs)
That's the flaw in LRHF: constructs tagged as effective or sophisticated speech become templates, are increasingly used out of context (e.g., "not A, not B, but C" is usually meant to provide some synthesis and further the progress of the text) and suffer from significant overexposure. (And gone is the em-dash…)
It's bad in and of itself the way LLMs use it. They separate it into a weird declaration when it's usually something you'd say at the beginning and/or end of a paragraph or passage where you're making a case for that statement.
It's part of how LLMs often seem to repeat the same thing over and over again. Most arguments are X is Y (and the others are X is not Y, or X is likely Y), and LLMs lean on "X is Y" because it is the most distilled form of that argument - a thesis minus the meat. Also "This is not a Y, this is a Z."
They're just thesis sentences inserted in inappropriate locations. The reason it makes them overdramatic is because separated from the argument, they seem like they should be premises.
The question is: how did your test reader respond to the version without the "It's not just an X, it's a Y." ? Perhaps the discussion went:
Test Reader: I got confused when you started talking about X as though it were a Y.
Author: But it is a Y. I should flag that up, where I introduce it.
Alternatively, the test reader comments
The villains monologue wasn't unhinged enough. He says that making himself universal dictator is democratic because he gives people what they secretly desire. I feel he would express himself with more empty rhetoric.
Author: Agreed. I'll add "It's not just democratic, it's not just super-democratic, it's ultra-democratic!!!"
Test Reader: Scary!
The error lies in using "It's not just an X it's a Y." for emphasis rather than to ward off a likely misreading.
I already notice LLM speech patterns in people that use them a whole lot. If you speak more than one language I recommend talking to LLMs in a language that you don't use when speaking to people.
The most frustrating one is when it does the papering over analysis and adding pushback to seem helpful. No, there shouldn't be a spot "where you pushback" unless it makes sense and responds to someone's concern!
Like with an LLM I would rewind the conversation. What do I do, shame them?
I have a tendency to switch between different languages when interacting with LLM depending on the language of the most likely sources the LLM will pull. It's interesting because the llm speech patterns vary from language to language. And I am much faster at noticing LLM generated text in English (which I use 70% of the time) than in French or Spanish.
In Greek they are still atrociously bad, still feels like they translate an English thought. Nevertheless, the etymological insights they can give on words or Ancient Greek passages is making reading the ancients really fun.
That one starts with a glaring hallucination "he didn't understand, nobody understood, not then or now...". But the second part is IMO better than the Ecclasiast, which has outdated phrasing.
> When I look under the sun, it's not the swift who win races, nor the strong who win battles, nor the wise who earn bread, nor the men of understanding who gain riches, nor the men of skill who gain favor. Ultimately, it's the lucky; every contest has a degree of unpredictability and chance.
The construction of meaning is totally distorted, though. In the original, the first part is entirely motivated by the conclusion, and puts emphasis to this by a crescendo of counterintuitive observations. This is what made this memorable phrasing. In the version suggested here, there's just an incompetence attributed to the original author, underlined by repetitive phrasing, so that the supposed speaker may claim all the glory by uttering an observation, which is in and by itself rather banal. Thus, the entire construct ends in a whimper and there isn't really any reason to put it that way, or to say this, in the first place. Its perceived purpose may be rather to occupy space and time (at the cost of the recipient.)
> two years, we will be all writing and talking like this
I have seen kids talking like youtubers: the top 10 things I like, or what I need to do before I die (the kids is 9 years old), ... not great (like repeating ad tunes or slogans) but not as bad as AI bullshit-talk.
My only hope is that AI bullshit-talk is so boring and predictable that it has low impact in our speech. And looking at what other commenters say boring and insufferable seems to be the case.
The problem is not the LLM prose appearing everywhere, it's the legions of AI-boosters appearing in every thread attacking anyone who complains.
Apparently, even though they want to spew AI prose everywhere, they want it read by humans, not by other bots, so when a few holdout places are insisting that prose be human authored they fight very hard against the rule.
I don't think I've ever seen someone on HN say that. Many people would say that AI makes them more productive at coding, not that the output is nice to read.
I would say that AI prose is often still a bit iffy, but I would disagree with anyone who would want to argue that this is any indication that AI prose will always be bad in the future.
This thread, in particular, stands out - reader makes the claim that Pangram found that the US constitution was 100% AI generated, when others tried they found 0% (or close to it) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48378191
Those are not that. The first two are people complaining about other people incontinently identifying text as AI, because it's annoying to listen to unreliable hunches and aspersions. The second two are complaining about AI detectors not being very reliable. The claim made in the last one is a casual anecdote about "an AI detector", presumably told because it's amusing. It isn't a vehement statement about how you must accept slop into your life.
Yeah, intentionally or unintentionally there is often at motte-and-bailey fallacy flavor to their arguments. The motte is that it can sometimes be hard to identify AI writing, the baily is that we should accept AI wholesale and stop worrying about AI writing.
i am a big fan of llms and the possibilities they enable. but i also find this type of behavior extremely rude! ai;dr for life. :is-your-human-around: is my preferred emoji for reacting to such behavior
LLMs get a lot of finetuning, but I suspect there are two things that can cause this kind of writing:
Firstly, some parts of the RLHF involve human graders on the LLM's performance. I suspect their general bias towards a punchy, persuasive writing style could come from what biases the graders towards preferring that response, especially in shorter segments and when the grader is not focused on writing style
Secondly, later parts of the finetuning involve reinforcement learning on achieving certain tasks which are automatically graded: stuff like coding tasks. I think this can create a kind of feedback loop where the style drifts further, and you get the kind of LLM tics which are even more extreme (it might be that they incidentally help somehow with the actual tasks, or it might be a drift that comes from the grader also now being an LLM or some of this finetuning happening on output from other models). The more recent claude models seem to suffer from this a lot, moreso than earlier ones.
I'm not an expert, but... might this indicate the need for "sub-models", meant to be invoked by the general model to write good prose for it? Those sub-models would not be RLed on code (or any algorithmic-feedback tasks that might reinforce bad writing), and could specifically be tuned for prose, even at the cost of general intelligence (which would be provided by the worse-at-writing more general model).
A bigger question I'm interested in is why do LLMs speak like that in the first place? Is that really what you get if you took the average of the English language? It would be difficult for me to believe that.
Is there something about tuning for desirable qualities that forces LLMs to have this voice?
And The New Yorker - writing that is written to sound impressive, and takes forever to get to the point. I hated that kind of writing in The New Yorker long before LLMs made it cool to hate that.
It wouldn't surprise me if it takes more effort to be succinct. There's some famous quote from I think Mark Twain "this letter would have been shorter but I ran out of time". Just my guess
Despite its bizarre look, the sentence is evocative and eloquent. It does make me get a clear mental image from the very first word. It leaves little room for roaming and guessing, as it firmly nails elements one by one, and, by the time I reach the end of the sentence, I get the full meaning almost immediately.
This sentence is not randomly written; this is crafted with intention. TBH, it would take me hours, if not days, to write a sentence this much condensed and easy to understand. I seriously like it.
Perhaps, this is more about context -- which style to use in which situation. I'm only guessing here, but, since Orwell is offering an interpretation, he probably chose to be more clinical. He probably had a point to make and didn't want to risk vagueness up-front.
When I read the Orwell's version, I immediately had the same feeling I had when reading mathematical proofs. I hate so much to hunt the preceding text for anaphora resolution... It's just such a bad and pretentious way of writing. It's hostile to the reader with the side of flaunting author's superiority.
It's like having to sit through a party with acclaimed academics: every single one is so full of themselves, they will constantly one-up each other by belittling everyone in their workplace s.a. to make you feel how great of an intellect they possess and how much more they would accomplish, had they not been surrounded by all these bumbling idiots.
I agree that it's not great style for just conveying information clearly and plainly (e.g I'd hate to read documentation written like this) but I'd argue that here, the medium is part of the message.
It's supposed to sound dry and depressing and somewhat sterile.
> It's hostile to the reader with the side of flaunting author's superiority.
I think if someone deliberately obfuscates meaning to sound fancier when the point is to communicate information directly, sure, I'd agree. But writing is often art, and I think demanding effort from the reader is fair in that case. I wouldn't make a blanket generalization like that.
I disagree. There is plenty of writing that operates at the same level of abstraction (philosophy, mathematics) without being needlessly convoluted.
Orwell is a master precisely because he understood language deeply enough to be able to produce a monstrosity on both the level of content (undue abstraction) and structure (winding, breathless syntax).
I agree in that I don't know in what context Orwell wrote the quote above. Maybe it made more sense the way it fitted in that context.
Whenever this kind of discussion happens, I recall Andrey Platonov (a Russian writer, who was so weird in his rejection of the "decadent" parts of speech and sentence clauses that he'd never use passive voice or adverbs, would never put two adjectives side by side etc. that even Soviet censorship decided to ban him.) His works were added to the mandatory high-school reading list back around the collapse of the Soviet Union. I studied book publishing in college right around that time and had taken an elective in editing (the process of preparing a manuscript for publication, especially for the more technical fields, like encyclopedias or handbooks). My professor was a huge fan of Platonov, and, probably, forever spoiled for me whatever people enjoy when they read flamboyant or contorted prose like the one quoted above.
One thing that would send my professor into a fit of rage about that quote is that the real subject is people: it's talking about how people incorrectly rationalize the connection between effort and outcome. But, it's written in a way that, formally, the subject is... "the consideration", making it necessary for the reader to work back from the formal towards intended before they can figure out what the author was really trying to say.
Ah, I just read through it. That’s was a fun read.
> This is a parody, but not a very gross one. …
So, Orwell wrote the second sentence as a parody of the first sentence, using the modern English that he was criticizing in the essay.
> … in the middle the concrete illustrations – race, battle, bread – dissolve into the vague phrase ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. …
> … The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. …
> … The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first.
He tried to argue that the second one is worse, but, unfortunately, he successfully simulated one possible interpretation of the original. Sure, the parody has narrower meaning, but it is a valid subset of the original meaning, which is still very significant tbh. This justifies the reduction of “race, battle, bread” into “success or failure”, invalidating one of his points.
Also, the parody is not necessarily less concrete. It replaced poetic expressions in the original with words that are bloated, for sure, yet more concrete. It does have awkward expressions, but every word plays a role in the sentence. This basically conflicts with one of his criticisms in the essay — meaningless words.
Funnily enough, his another example — “some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism” — also fails to capture the nature of the modern English. He points out the “euphemism” towards the violence as an issue of style, but, no, that’s the whole purpose of it, and his example really just excel at it. Style-wise, again, the writing is very solid.
All in all, Orwell simply failed to properly simulate what he was trying to criticize. Good examples of “modern English” can be found in the earlier part of the essay, basically written by other people. Those examples do fit into Orwell’s criticisms.
He tried to argue that the second one is worse, but, unfortunately, he successfully simulated one possible interpretation of the original
All in all, Orwell simply failed to properly simulate what he was trying to criticize
If I was going to read "Orwell was wrong about English" anywhere, I guess it was always going to be HN.
The sheer pomposity of your remarks here is the biggest clue that you are not writing them yourself.
No, my view is more like that he was too good at English to write bad English that he was criticizing. The examples he wrote are simply too sharp to fit well into his own criticisms. They are formulated so well that you can just “welp, my intention was different”.
> we are all way worse at reading compared to the average mid-20th centry reader?
I would say English has changed. Modern English speakers, especially those in academia and technology, prefers explicit styles over poetic and nuanced ones. There are a lot of factors at play (e.g. i18n, the internet, education, literature) but I’m too lazy to cover them here.
> you - and no one else in the hundred years since - found his fatal mistake?
First, the essay is from 1946 — 80 years ago. Second, why not? Often-times, a different perspective is all that takes to discovers something new in the old.
I think you’re trying to make an appeal to authority here — a logical fallacy. You’re basically saying I cannot criticize his essay because Orwell is a great writer.
Also, my point is neither fatal nor about mistake. Orwell’s examples still demonstrate his claims in a relative sense, all within the context of the essay. However, when you pull them out of the context and put them out in the wild, it’s going to be very difficult to say those are bad writings right away, because, compared to other bad writings, those examples are very solid and straightforward.
> This is not even a sentence.
It is informal, sure, but I intentionally made it colloquial with something called bare quotation, a style commonly used in informal conversation. I wanted to avoid being “an overeducated dolt” and send a friendly gesture too, oh, but you chose to put that on a pitchfork. Bravo, clap clap.
> Also, my point is neither fatal nor about mistake[sic]. Orwell’s examples still demonstrate his claims in a relative sense, all within the context of the essay. However, when you pull them out of the context and put them out in the wild, it’s going to be very difficult to say those are bad writings[sic] right away, because, compared to other bad writings[sic], those examples are very solid and straightforward.
You should take this as an opportunity to improve your English and widen your reading, rather than trying to win a silly argument on a forum with 'logical fallacies' and other such humdrum wikiphilosophy. I'm not even sure what you meant to say in this paragraph, it's not at all clear I'm afraid.
Your perspective on this is entirely wrong, starting with a mistake about the intentions of Orwell and the quality of the text (which is deliberately obtuse and plain awful in so many ways). If you can't easily interpret the biblical text, that's fine, it is quite old, but there is really no excuse for saying that Orwell is a bad writer or .
But Orwell's example here is an example of bad writing, not good, and was produced deliberately as an anti-pattern. It has no redeeming features, and deliberately so. If you read 1984, you'll see further what he was getting at and rebelling against - a tendency to use words to obscure and twist meaning rather than transmit it.
> widen your reading, rather than trying to win a silly argument on a forum with 'logical fallacies' and other such humdrum wikiphilosophy.
Yeah, sure, the paragraph there is pretty bad, I admit. I was having an technical issue w/ my phone. But, look, did you really read my comment, the whole set of it? It's not even about philosophy. I'm just talking about a little /finding/ that Orwell's examples of bad-English is much better than what you usually find in your daily lives.
I'm not even arguing here, because you people avoid engaging w/ my point itself. It's more like I'm only repeating myself again and again and again. I'm not raising anything new.
> Your perspective on this is entirely wrong, starting with a mistake about the intentions of Orwell and the quality of the text (which is deliberately obtuse and plain awful in so many ways). If you can't easily interpret the biblical text, that's fine, it is quite old, but there is really no excuse for saying that Orwell is a bad writer
First, if you were talking about my first comment, I did mention that "I'm only guessing". I did clarify that I didn't read at that point. Someone replied with a link to the essay, so I read it, and only then I said "I [had] read it".
Second, I never said the original is bad. I only said the parody is pretty good, perhaps because of its brutal explicitness, which the first one lacks comparably.
Also, I've been saying that Orwell is a bad /bad-English/ writer, not a bad writer. His proficiency in English doesn't imply any proficiency in reproducing the bad-English he was criticizing. This part is childish, sure, but it was supposed to be /fun/.
> But Orwell's example here is an example of bad writing, not good, and was produced deliberately as an anti-pattern.
I totally agree here, but ...
> It has no redeeming features
... this is the part I disagree with.
Sure, on the surface, they are chokingly bad. I definitely agree that he removed certain qualities from those examples, and, for demonstration purposes, they serve the purpose.
However, if you offer those examples completely out-of-context, it's going to be difficult to dismiss them simply as bad writings. Their logical flow is very natural, and his word choices are very precise. It is much better /formulated/ than a lot of real-world bad English writings. I definitely sense /professional touches/ from those examples. That's why I said that it would take me hours, if not days, to write such sentences by myself.
Both versions are great: the former is poetic and grand and would fit right in in a fantasy text; the latter is dry and informative and requires much less mental effort to translate and extract meaning from (though still more than "normal" text.
I could imagine a third version that's clearer than the second and still nearly as poetic as the first.
Orwell's bad sentence uses harder words than it needs to, but it reworks the bible verse into direct claims.
Needing better reading skills to understand the bible verse just shows that it's not a good way to communicate. If an HNer wrote like the bible verse, you'd find them insufferably ostentatious. Just like you wouldn't want Claude to use literary flair when you're asking why your production database stopped working.
If you dumb down Orwell's sentence back to simpler terms, it's a point much better communicated than the bible verse.
Frankly the bickering in this thread is due to the original HN comment choosing a bad comparison because both sentences are poorly communicated for different reasons in this context: you wouldn't want Claude to write either.
It appears LLMs are much better at writing during a debate than when explicitly asked to write. The moment LLMs are tasked with composing a blog article or intro for a book they introduce all the nuances that identify the output as AI slop.
My take is that the generated stuff is terrible for communications.
It feels great to use, direct your machine minion to fill out your thoughts for you, but holy hell does it suck to be on the receiving end. Least of all is the disrespect, they don't care enough to even talk to you but worse is having to try and reason through that big incoherent blob.
Probably to only reasonable thing to do is to try and get your own mechanical agents to produce summaries. Inventing the lossy expansion algorithm(like compression but things get bigger on the wire), And we wept.
Now I am all depressed because it is probably inevitable, apparently thinking is hard and in general people are all to happy to outsource it to the machines.
Let's say I'm making an HN comment. I have a one-sentence idea, I get an LLM to expand it into an impressive-looking (or oppressive-looking) wall of text, and then I post that. Well, let's say 10 people see it. And each one of them has to either plow through it on their own, or paste it into LLM to get the summary.
But even with one-to-one communication, it's still terrible, as you say. You can't be bothered to clarify your idea, but you're trying to use an LLM to make up for your lack of thought? So you're going to make me plow through that huge blob of text to try to understand what your thought was, the thought that you couldn't bother to actually really think through. That's far less efficient than you, the sender, actually doing the thinking.
But it lets the sender be lazy. And the sender is the one in control.
I used to sympathize with those on the "receiving end" but I'm becoming extremely desensitized to their plight.
The sheer amount of hatred they level towards anyone who's using AI or is even just positive towards it is something to behold. They've got racism-tier slurs for us now.
The negativity and stigma are so strong I've stopped caring.
> I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
> * *Ultra-concise:* Talent and effort don't guarantee success; luck and timing happen to everyone.
> * *Punchy:* The best don't always win—chance rules us all.
> * *Modernized:* Skill, speed, and wisdom don't decide the outcome; everyone is at the mercy of time and circumstance.
I feel like it did pretty well, and made the point more clearly than either the original or Orwell's rework (Gemini 3.8 Flash).
Or, as the version I've used for 30 years goes: "It's better to be lucky than good." I do like Reagan's addition, though: "But I find the harder I work, the luckier I get."
Concise helps clarity, but notice what still is lost. The original version used multiple perspectives to illustrate the point. It invites consideration, putting yourself in the shoes of each person before the "twist" is applied to each. It makes the point more visceral and memorable because it is (slightly) lived instead of told.
This is the difference between writing to convince a broad audience and writing to explain a point. AI can summarize well but until we can contextualize a richer framework for human comprehension, LLMs will struggle to resonate.
I find the original poorly written, and it did not, for me, invite any consideration, because it didn't make much sense. "Bread to the wise"? "Riches to men of understanding?" Why would someone wise get bread, or someone with understanding be rich? What's the difference between "wise" and "men of understanding", anyway?
LLMs didn't write "It's better to be lucky than good.", but I find it both easier to understand and easier to remember than the biblical version.
Here on HN, I've noticed that I pro-actively defend myself against things I think will be said in counter to my comments. I concluded it's being trained into me.
Alternatively, I've been banging on against the same things that I see as insane so long that I know all the objections.
Personally, I think Orwell's version is a lot easier to read. I read the Ecclesiastes verse several times and can't really get it: "time and chance happens to everyone"? Okay?
While phrases like "contemporary phenomena" and "tendency to be commensurate" are a bit over-the-top, summarily the picture is conveyed much more clearly imo: Luck plays a factor, no matter how good you are.
I don't see how "nor yet favor to men of skill" is more natural or clearer, at least to the modern reader.
Disclaimer: I do not like to read LLM-generated text any more than anyone else.
IMHO a big problem with Pangram in particular is that they market it as a reliable tool that can be used to catch students cheating. This can obviously have disastrous effects on young lives, because it is not as reliable as they say.
There is validity to their goals, but that is overshadowed by the irresponsible way in which it is marketed.
(All of this, swirling in a context where students are being told that they absolutely must become proficient at using LLMs to do exactly this kind of work by the highest levels of state and federal governments, as well as the leaders of the workforce into which they hope to graduate. The message to youth is extremely muddled at best.)
I don't think 100% accuracy is logically possible. Because it's entirely possible that someone would just naturally write the exact same thing as an LLM would write. And after the fact there is no way to distinguish the two. But pangram does have an extremely low false positive rate, which I think does make it useful for detecting cheating students. Assuming the base rate of cheating students is 1%, and assuming pangram has a false positive rate of 1 in 10,000 and a true positive rate of 7,000 in 10,000, that means ~98% of students flagged by pangram actually cheated. Combined with a teacher's familiarity with that student's previous work, which should rule out many more false positives, it should be a very useful tool.
> ~98% of students flagged by pangram actually cheated
That 2% is a large number! Of people who will have their integrity impugned for no good reason! That's not okay!
Your calculations also are mixing assignments and students. The rate of false positives of 1/10k is of corpuses, not students. 10k students might each submit 2-3 written assignments per week. Obviously, this greatly increases the impact of the false positive rate.
And all of these numbers are dependent on lab conditions for usage, which are not the case in the real world.
> I don't think 100% accuracy is logically possible.
Yes. Which is why marketing this product as it currently is, is a deeply irresponsible endeavor.
The false positive rate for Pangram 4 is something like one in 24,000.[0] To put that in perspective, the wrongful-conviction (false positive rate) for death-sentenced defendants in the US is estimated conservatively to be around 4.1%.[1] The FP rate for death-sentence convictions is 1,000 times bigger than Pangram’s FP rate.
Now, the US criminal system is not a great yardstick for justice. But it goes to show you Pangram is really good evidence that something was LLM generated. It can be an amazing tool for enforcing AI policies in schools, and there ought to be ways to use it with caveats for the rare but inevitable false positives (appeals, etc).
> The false positive rate for Pangram 4 is something like one in 24,000.
Gotta suck to be one of the 8B/24k=~300k people in the world whose writing pattern is falsely labelled as slop by this tool that people say is so accurate so customers are going to feel really sure about your alleged dishonesty about writing your own texts
This false positive rate is a double-edged sword. Please still be careful when accusing people
There are a couple of statistical errors in your argument here.
First is frequency. Even using Pangram's claimed numbers, the University of Georgia should expect to see several false positives every week. Remember that the metric is # of assignments run through Pangram, not number of students. A campus of 40k students will see many more than 40k assignments every week, and so should expect honest students to be accused of cheating with some high degree of frequency. You're comparing infrequent events (death penalty sentences) to high-frequency events (students submitting assignments).
And obviously, you are citing a company marketing document as fact, of which we should all be suspicious.
Second, you're using the upper bound for Pangram's claimed numbers and the lower bound cited in the NIH publication.
> at least 4.1% would be exonerated. We conclude that this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States.
302 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 40.4 ms ] threadI guess there is a kind of participatory element to the discourse where, if you want an audience, there is an editing process. Whereas in other cases, we wrote these as progress notes on an unknown journey, breadcrumbs or upturned stones to mark a path to the horizon.
Maybe it's the difference between writing as a mode of discovery, retreading the mental arc of a solution, and writing something honed to leave a mark.
The chief grief appears to be phoning in the whole process.
And in that case, no one needs to read it ai or not.
Always a pleasure reading Bryan's writing; it's like Bryan is sitting there with you and saying the words (hard to convey the feeling).
Glad those words proved prophetic!
[0] https://rustfoundation.org/media/how-the-rust-standard-libra...
AAUGH IT BURNS
Yes, quantity famously has a quality all its own, but perhaps not where correctness checks for something this central is concerned.
I showed Bryan the post while in a meeting room with him, left the room, and a few minutes later heard a very loud, very exasperated primal scream coming from the room!
Having dealt with Enterprise Hardware(TM) in a previous job, it’s refreshing simply to see someone look at that pile of crap and go “it doesn’t have to be that way” and then actually set out to prove it.
I wonder if that idea could be modernized now for this.
Unfortunately, it's not a browser extension and doesn't seem to have an API. I'd make a browser extension for this myself if it didn't involve paying for expensive Pangram usage.
I tried searching for good opensource / reasonably priced alternatives, pangram themselves even have some of their older architecture and training data on github/hugging face, but i never got that working reliably enough.
Is obvious AI-assisted writing better or worse than an obvious PR quid pro quo and/or cross-promotion?
That's pretty normal, but the point is that a blog post which is 35% Pangram promotion may not actually be less annoying than the use of AI to help write blog posts.
this goes 10x for all the slide decks and google docs and wikislop everyone's trying to pass off as an accomplishment lately
If a person reads AI generated text and does not notice, they by definition will not know about it.
There have been numerous cases of people accessing human created content as being AI.
There are instances where it seems relatively uncontroversial that it is AI generated, but without knowing both the amount of AI content people are exposed toand the amount that they register I don't think you can draw a conclusion of the overall state.
LLM writing is verbose and meandering, but people are making a much bigger deal over this stuff than necessary for virtue signalling purposes. You don't want to read someone else's LLM writing? Get a summary of the page from yours. No time wasted, no pretentious posturing, and you don't make the error of assuming because the piece was written by an LLM that there was no thought put into the subject or there's no value in what is being communicated.
I am disinclined to take someone's error-prone machine generated text and run it through an error-prone summarizer. That's a waste of time (not to mention electricity), when all that needed to happen was for the original person to not be so fucking lazy and just write out his thoughts.
This statement does not logically cohere. "We can spot it because so many people make it easy to spot." You don't see how this is just petitio principii in action?
Maybe some people stop reading LLM slop purely because it violates their moral principles or whatever but most people bail out because slop is mentally painful to read. If you are a human and you write like today’s AI find a different writing style, not because reads like AI, but because it reads like shit.
To fully disguise LLM prose, you'd have to rewrite it entirely, and if you were going to do that, you wouldn't be the sort of person to use it in the first place.
If the AI writing is indistinguishable from human writing, then it is not lazy copy and pasting of AI outputs and isn’t just raw LLM output with no work done on it. So in that case it’s no longer a problem.
LLM’s cannot write in a natural, human way that distinguishes it from the typical LLM output on the first try. If they could, we wouldn’t have this problem. Maybe one day they will. Hell maybe it’ll even be next week. But currently they do not so I do not understand why we are having this discussion.
I do think the sensitivity to it can vary a lot: it depends a lot on how much and how closely you read the text, and how much exposure you have to LLM writing. Certainly it seems like a lot of people just don't really notice, or at least don't care much.
This is just "em dash redux." Except now we've moved on to accusing anyone who does "It's not X. It's Y." of being AI. In six months, it'll be "use of the word 'petrichor'" or something.
(TBH I think the biggest likelihood for false positives comes from heavy LLM users picking up their tics: it's a natural tendency and I've already seen a few cases where it seems like that has happened).
I'm also not reading pumpkin spice murder mysteries for a similar reason. I'm also not reading stories where everybody clapped. Actually, I'm already familiar with petrichor, so unless someone has surrounded the word "petrichor" with non-cliché prose, I'm also not going to read all that.
https://github.com/ucsandman/declick/blob/main/README.md
Please let me know if you
As for invoking petitio principii and questioning other commenters' logical coherence [0], can you politely shove the argumentum ad Latinum up your ass?[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582713
https://github.com/prathish-ks/isthmus/blob/main/README.md
https://github.com/prathish-ks/isthmus/blob/main/docs/thesis...
https://github.com/prathish-ks/isthmus/blob/main/docs/host-d...
https://github.com/prathish-ks/isthmus/blob/main/docs/threat...
https://github.com/prathish-ks/isthmus/blob/main/docs/threat...
https://github.com/prathish-ks/isthmus/blob/main/docs/baseli...
But Wait, There's More!
https://github.com/prathish-ks/isthmus/tree/main/docs
What—do—you—think————is this human?
That’s the aspect I’ve had a hard time articulating. Definitely the right comparison. It feels like some huge revelation has been had and it’s so consequential and it’s unbelievable that it’s happening right before your very eyes and wow aren’t you so insightful and pushing the boundaries of knowledge!?
That plus the “it’s not X, but why” nonsense makes it feel like some condescending parent is trying to lecture me but at least 30% of what they’re saying is probably made up.
There are lots of people who belong to the above groups, sure, but at least here in Germany Nazi is now applied to basically anyone who doesn't vote green, it's ridiculous.
I wish that were true, but I fear it may not be.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/canadian-legislator-reads...
That’s too soft, you have to tell him that you’ll work with him but not with Claude mediated through him, and follow through on that.
I don’t think this is remotely true. Sure, they’re legally obliged to let you unsubscribe, and sure, it’s not dick pills, but every US company will immediately send you a newsletter when you purchase something, review requests and, if they/you use Shop for checkout, expect an abandoned cart reminder.
PR pieces and software companies don’t write tutorials to be helpful, they are advertising to you. If the LLM can do it for cheap, they really don’t care.
Pretty much sums up the issue re: workplace lazy AI dumping on folks as well.
[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/ai-detectio...
>This argument can probably be leveled at vanilla raw output from an LLM, but even the slightest attempt at obfuscation bears solid fruit
Whoops, disproven by bcantrill's comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582629
Let's talk about the detection ability of corporate normies instead:
>pretty much everything “product” in corporate America is now LLM generated with some marginal oversight. It passes muster for the most part.
Goalposts: moved.
You can still influence their writing style in a broad manner that might look correct at a glance, but the repetitive little patterns that give it away will always be there - if it was that easy to get rid of them, don't you think the AI labs themselves would've done it before releasing the models?
They just don't care to put the slightest attempt because they have a blindness to the problem. They are not doing it to intentionally mislead people.
Even then, I would say that using an LLM is robbing you of the process of writing, a process that is crucial to developing and understanding your own ideas.
Think about the last time you wrote something for consumption and the sentence to sentence thought processes you’re going through. I bet a lot of that was “is that right?” Or “does that make sense?” Or “am I communicating this at the level of my reader?”.
All of that is fundamental to your readers understanding, but more importantly, its fundamental to YOUR understanding.
If you want to read something good, read a good book.
I'm much more interested in the content itself than the author that wrote it.
Tried 4 different domains. 3 of email services of various kind. 4th one my private domain which has absolutely no email reputation because I use it only for internal emails and sending is not even possible.
In the end I dug out some old gmail address and tried to use that.
The error was always the same, there had been suspicious activity from that domain. So the message is definitely incorrect. Well, there could have been suspicious activity from some gmail address, but if they don't allow gmail I guess they don't want many customers.
Yeah, did not cover my tracks. The could easily notice that I was the same one trying to sign up repeatedly with different emails.
I dunno, man, according to Hardcover, I've read 76 fiction books this year, and I can't tell. All the "AI tells" fail the vibe check. I'm a writer and I get flagged by many of them.
And according to PhD linguists with expertise in the field, most AI tells are just the equivalent of old wives' tales. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORgKY9AlybA
It's common enough that it's training me to recognize and recoil from AI tics through sheer classical conditioning.
> Why do people have this reaction? Beyond having to endure aggravating stylistic tics, when reading a piece that has had substantial LLM assistance, we — the readers — don’t know what is real and what isn’t.
This is a strong articulation. Here too, though, I would pause and reflect on what it means to (think you) know what is real and what isn't in a pre-LLM setting. Authority bias predates LLMs, and can have disastrous consequences.
I liked your piece, and agree with almost all of it, but I'm surprised by your faith in the accuracy of Pangram at detecting AI writing. Is your faith based on testing it with lots of writing of known origins, or are you just saying that it reaches the same conclusion that you do as a talented human?
In particular, I wondered if you have tried running all of your own writings through it to verify that it thinks you are human. I was struck by Freddie deBoer's recent piece where he did this and said it often failed: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-i...
What percentage of false positive rejections would you find acceptable? Would you accept this even if it forced you to change the way you write?
As for my own writing, I didn't do this experiment, but one of my co-workers did -- and over 176 posts spanning 22 years, all 176 (well, 177 now with my latest) are 100% human. This is not hugely surprising in that (in addition to me having actually written them!) my voice is very... distinctive. What would be more entertaining would be to try to get an LLM to write like me and fool Pangram that way. I still think that this would be difficult based on the experiences that I've heard, but it wouldn't surprise me if you could pull it off (and I would assuredly find the result entertaining!).
In the dimensions that we use Pangram in the most actionable sense (namely, to audit our own public writing), I am unconcerned about false positives, and leave it to Oxide authors to rework/recast as needed. (Though it sounds like Freddie didn't even need to do that -- he just needed to provide a longer sample.)
False negatives are mentioned, but the false positive is what could hurt people.
To human writing. Thank you!
Maybe I'm taking the "all" too literally here, but I read the article, and I'm not seeing anywhere the author ran a substantial portion of his corpus through Pangram to determine the false positive rate. That would be really interesting to see.
He does
* give an example of a piece of his writing that was, when ran in segments, flagged as generated (which he disputes)
* multiply the size of his corpus by pangram's published false positive rate and estimate that a few of his pieces would be flagged
* get the pangram model to label a piece "100% AI" when it only has 3 generated sentences
* demonstrate the ability to intentionally trigger a false positive
I (am kinda forced to) use LLM to generate maybe 40% of the code at work, that is after my review and modifications. But I pretty much wrote all of the comments by myself. I can get into the flow by writing comments.
* If I need to learn something before I write about it, I rely on LLMs heavily to answer questions that I have about other source materials, e.g. to clear up ambiguities.
* I've recently started prompting it to find grammatical and spelling errors.
* And I've prompted it to find technical errors, places where I'm just wrong.
For all the prompting, I additionally tell it to not rewrite anything or offer any prose suggestions. It can keep all that to itself, thank you.
And I verify what it gives back for correctness.
(I'd encourage non-native speakers to use LLMs in much the same way. Don't sacrifice your human voice by letting the AI rewrite your words. Personally, I'd very much rather hear it from you, blemishes and all, than hear it from an AI.)
But if I could step back for a minute:
Why write anything?
If your writing goal is to flood the zone and make as much money as humanly possible from ads, then hell yeah, paperclip the everliving shit out of that.
But if your writing goal is to learn material or share material, then put that LLM on the back burner and don't use it to directly generate your text. It's bad for you, and the results are subpar.
When I'm learning something, I can go through reams of tokens and then, once I understand it, I digest that to single a paragraph about the topic. The paragraph is as concise and as helpful as I can make it. Now, I could just share the prompts that I went through with those pages of back-and-forth with the LLM... but wouldn't you rather just read the concise paragraph that gets the point across?
It's not hard to be better than an AI at writing for humans, so the minimum low bar to aim for is "better than an AI". And we can all get there with a small amount of practice. The real goal is to greatly exceed the LLMs' capabilities for sharing information.
Finally, I think everyone should write a lot. Blogs, morning pages, fiction, technical books, letters, whatever. Especially when it comes to technical content, nothing makes you do your research like putting your ass out in the ether to get flamed by 5 billion people. And teachers the world over know the best way to learn something is to teach it. Pick a topic, research, and write it up more clearly and concisely than anyone else ever has. You'll learn so much, and your readers will, as well. Writing fires up your brain. Don't give that up to an LLM.
Yes! Well said. If I already know someone, reading their own words, technical or businesss or personal, is meaningful to me. Warts and all. And if I don’t yet know the author then I definitely want to read their own words so I can get to know them.
Either way, taking the time to think and then write is a gift and I respect that.
I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1].
> Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes:
> > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
> Orwell's version goes:
> > Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
> First notice how the two passages look. The first one at the top invites us to read it. The words are short and have air around them; they convey the rhythms of human speech. The second one is clotted with long words. It tells us instantly that a ponderous mind is at work. We don't want to go anywhere with a mind that expresses itself in such suffocating language. We don't even start to read.
[1] https://blog.kierangill.xyz/clotted-claude
Does that make sense?
The second transcribed considerable information bandwidth through intentionally structured word choice for maximal density.
I'm pretty sure that the general public does not want to read software specifications.
If I had to pin a subjective experience to reading it, it would be that of being stuck in a car as a teenager with a parent who's ranting about whatever set them off that day and won't move on from repeating their grievance in different words when you got the point five minutes ago. In contrast, the second feels like having an enjoyable and productive level-headed conversation with someone who respects you and trusts you to understand the words.
For example, the Lexham English Bible:
> I looked again and saw under the sun that the race does not belong to the swift, the battle does not belong to the mighty, food does not belong to the wise, wealth does not belong to the intelligent, and success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all of them.
> To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
That could have been said in less than a quarter of the words the author expended on it. But something of the style would have been entirely lost. He wasn't trying to be succinct, he was trying to repeat the same concept over and over until it sinks in.
I find this one profound, and it's given me a lot to think about over the years - in situations ranging from asking what our place in the universe is, to doing the "right thing" (and deciding what "the right thing" even means to yourself), or standing at the helm of some team or project, knowing that judgement call is yours alone and there's no authority or higher power coming to swoop in and give you the answer or authoritatively judge your decision can be simultaneously liberating and terrifying. The use of repetition works incredibly well in my opinion and it still gives me chills to read it.
"Success or failure in any human endeavor depends more on luck than on innate ability."
2036 version:
"Success depends on luck."
I also have to say that the first strikes me as being written by someone that might be smarter than I am, the second as being written by someone significantly less intelligent than I, yet somehow placed by society in a position of authority above me.
> the first strikes me as being written by someone that might be smarter than I am
This is why Joseph Smith tried to imitate the language of the King James Bible in the Book of Mormon, albeit not very successfully.
The rewrite stinks of a consultant's report from IBM in the 1960s where humor is frowned upon because business is serious, and there's no way we could write in plain words that the CEO got there by chance instead of skill. Objective consideration distances the author compared to the subjective original I have returned and [I saw]. The original gives wide-ranging examples, the rewrite's contemporary phenomena is vague enough to avoid calling out the board of directors as potentially unskilled but lucky. A compelled conclusion is one the author is - reluctantly, you understand - forced into. Innate capacity leaves an escape hatch for a good education and life experience to excuse the board again. It's not an honest rewrite of the same sentiment.
A plenitude of observations undertaken in a multitude of geographically and culturally diverse locations has convinced this author of the incompleteness of the following claims: races are won by the swift, battles are won by the strong, bread is earned by wisdom, riches are earned through applied understanding, favours return to skilled persons. They do not mention the effects of time and chance on all situations, which experience has made clear. Other phenomena may also play a role, e.g. underhanded manipulation.
I also don't have a problem with large words as long as I'm well familiar with the words. The length of a word has nothing to do with the complexity of its meaning. We just have a limit to the number of pronounceable combinations of 5 letters.
I think the second requires deeper concentration, but is still quite readable compared to the kind of low-content engagement / SEO stuff one read on the internet even before LLMs
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
(I'm guessing Zinsser's comments are from "On Writing Well", which you can also find online even though it is still under copyright.)
It's a bit of a pet peeve when people include quotes on a blog post without linking or otherwise references their source.
>iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Orwell himself routinely ignores it, even in the first sentence of the essay:
>Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.
The second clause could be rewritten in active voice by changing it to "but people generally assume". But this would make the writing worse, and Orwell, as a good writer, probably didn't even consider the option of making it worse, and therefore didn't notice the passive voice.
Passive voice is an essential tool for all good writers of English. I always give the example of the opening of Pride and Prejudice:
>It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
The joke doesn't work in active voice. If you attribute this acknowledgement to some specific group of people then it's simply false, not a comedic exaggeration.
For example, nobody would seriously suggest avoiding the passive participle in a sentence like "Put the broken plate in the bin". ("Put the plate that someone broke into the bin"?)
Orwell can answer you himself if you read just a little further:
> vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
And "... a wife." really turns on the ears, no?
So advice to prefer active voice is not wrong -- but the skilled writer adds other values into the balance.
You’re peeved with good reason. It’s the blog equivalent of posting a screenshot of an article to social media. People, please post your sources! In the age of misinformation, that’s more important than ever.
> The Ecclasiast looked under the sun, but there was something he didn't understand. Something that wasn't right. Something that was not as it ought to be. And here is what the Ecclesiast didn't understand. Here is what nobody understood. Not then. Not in the years that followed. Not now. It was not the swift who won the race. Not the strong who won the battle. Not the wise who earned the bread. Not the men of understanding who gained the riches. Not the men of skill who gained the favor. And here is what I found: to any story of success, there is an element of unpredictability and chance.
(There are really just two possible outcomes: either the article is right or in, say, two years, we will be all writing and talking like this, as in humans learning from mediamatically enforced human feedback.)
Shoot me now.
I'm sorry, I can't generate that because the request violates our content policies.
I am a bit of a luddite in this domain and have so far managed to resist the lure of using the generator to expand my thoughts, and I still catch myself writing "it's not just an X it's a Y" and other generator type tells. If it infecting my patterns it is totally entering the wider subconscious as "How to write" (Sighs)
Good points should be rewarded confidence. I read so many not X it's Y where the distinction beteeen X and Y isn't relevant to the discussion!
It's part of how LLMs often seem to repeat the same thing over and over again. Most arguments are X is Y (and the others are X is not Y, or X is likely Y), and LLMs lean on "X is Y" because it is the most distilled form of that argument - a thesis minus the meat. Also "This is not a Y, this is a Z."
They're just thesis sentences inserted in inappropriate locations. The reason it makes them overdramatic is because separated from the argument, they seem like they should be premises.
Test Reader: I got confused when you started talking about X as though it were a Y.
Author: But it is a Y. I should flag that up, where I introduce it.
Alternatively, the test reader comments
The villains monologue wasn't unhinged enough. He says that making himself universal dictator is democratic because he gives people what they secretly desire. I feel he would express himself with more empty rhetoric.
Author: Agreed. I'll add "It's not just democratic, it's not just super-democratic, it's ultra-democratic!!!"
Test Reader: Scary!
The error lies in using "It's not just an X it's a Y." for emphasis rather than to ward off a likely misreading.
Like with an LLM I would rewind the conversation. What do I do, shame them?
> When I look under the sun, it's not the swift who win races, nor the strong who win battles, nor the wise who earn bread, nor the men of understanding who gain riches, nor the men of skill who gain favor. Ultimately, it's the lucky; every contest has a degree of unpredictability and chance.
I have seen kids talking like youtubers: the top 10 things I like, or what I need to do before I die (the kids is 9 years old), ... not great (like repeating ad tunes or slogans) but not as bad as AI bullshit-talk.
My only hope is that AI bullshit-talk is so boring and predictable that it has low impact in our speech. And looking at what other commenters say boring and insufferable seems to be the case.
Apparently, even though they want to spew AI prose everywhere, they want it read by humans, not by other bots, so when a few holdout places are insisting that prose be human authored they fight very hard against the rule.
A 5m search got me the following:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49410941
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411042
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49059571
This thread, in particular, stands out - reader makes the claim that Pangram found that the US constitution was 100% AI generated, when others tried they found 0% (or close to it) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48378191
I feel that if one doesn't want to send that message, they shouldn't be attempting to convince others that rejection of AI prose must stop.
I feel that if you want humans to read your stuff, those humans insisting that you write your own stuff is not an unreasonable position to take.
Firstly, some parts of the RLHF involve human graders on the LLM's performance. I suspect their general bias towards a punchy, persuasive writing style could come from what biases the graders towards preferring that response, especially in shorter segments and when the grader is not focused on writing style
Secondly, later parts of the finetuning involve reinforcement learning on achieving certain tasks which are automatically graded: stuff like coding tasks. I think this can create a kind of feedback loop where the style drifts further, and you get the kind of LLM tics which are even more extreme (it might be that they incidentally help somehow with the actual tasks, or it might be a drift that comes from the grader also now being an LLM or some of this finetuning happening on output from other models). The more recent claude models seem to suffer from this a lot, moreso than earlier ones.
Is there something about tuning for desirable qualities that forces LLMs to have this voice?
Despite its bizarre look, the sentence is evocative and eloquent. It does make me get a clear mental image from the very first word. It leaves little room for roaming and guessing, as it firmly nails elements one by one, and, by the time I reach the end of the sentence, I get the full meaning almost immediately.
This sentence is not randomly written; this is crafted with intention. TBH, it would take me hours, if not days, to write a sentence this much condensed and easy to understand. I seriously like it.
Perhaps, this is more about context -- which style to use in which situation. I'm only guessing here, but, since Orwell is offering an interpretation, he probably chose to be more clinical. He probably had a point to make and didn't want to risk vagueness up-front.
It's like having to sit through a party with acclaimed academics: every single one is so full of themselves, they will constantly one-up each other by belittling everyone in their workplace s.a. to make you feel how great of an intellect they possess and how much more they would accomplish, had they not been surrounded by all these bumbling idiots.
It's supposed to sound dry and depressing and somewhat sterile.
> It's hostile to the reader with the side of flaunting author's superiority.
I think if someone deliberately obfuscates meaning to sound fancier when the point is to communicate information directly, sure, I'd agree. But writing is often art, and I think demanding effort from the reader is fair in that case. I wouldn't make a blanket generalization like that.
Orwell is a master precisely because he understood language deeply enough to be able to produce a monstrosity on both the level of content (undue abstraction) and structure (winding, breathless syntax).
Whenever this kind of discussion happens, I recall Andrey Platonov (a Russian writer, who was so weird in his rejection of the "decadent" parts of speech and sentence clauses that he'd never use passive voice or adverbs, would never put two adjectives side by side etc. that even Soviet censorship decided to ban him.) His works were added to the mandatory high-school reading list back around the collapse of the Soviet Union. I studied book publishing in college right around that time and had taken an elective in editing (the process of preparing a manuscript for publication, especially for the more technical fields, like encyclopedias or handbooks). My professor was a huge fan of Platonov, and, probably, forever spoiled for me whatever people enjoy when they read flamboyant or contorted prose like the one quoted above.
One thing that would send my professor into a fit of rage about that quote is that the real subject is people: it's talking about how people incorrectly rationalize the connection between effort and outcome. But, it's written in a way that, formally, the subject is... "the consideration", making it necessary for the reader to work back from the formal towards intended before they can figure out what the author was really trying to say.
> This is a parody, but not a very gross one. …
So, Orwell wrote the second sentence as a parody of the first sentence, using the modern English that he was criticizing in the essay.
> … in the middle the concrete illustrations – race, battle, bread – dissolve into the vague phrase ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. …
> … The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. …
> … The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first.
He tried to argue that the second one is worse, but, unfortunately, he successfully simulated one possible interpretation of the original. Sure, the parody has narrower meaning, but it is a valid subset of the original meaning, which is still very significant tbh. This justifies the reduction of “race, battle, bread” into “success or failure”, invalidating one of his points.
Also, the parody is not necessarily less concrete. It replaced poetic expressions in the original with words that are bloated, for sure, yet more concrete. It does have awkward expressions, but every word plays a role in the sentence. This basically conflicts with one of his criticisms in the essay — meaningless words.
Funnily enough, his another example — “some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism” — also fails to capture the nature of the modern English. He points out the “euphemism” towards the violence as an issue of style, but, no, that’s the whole purpose of it, and his example really just excel at it. Style-wise, again, the writing is very solid.
All in all, Orwell simply failed to properly simulate what he was trying to criticize. Good examples of “modern English” can be found in the earlier part of the essay, basically written by other people. Those examples do fit into Orwell’s criticisms.
The sheer pomposity of your remarks here is the biggest clue that you are not writing them yourself.
I would say English has changed. Modern English speakers, especially those in academia and technology, prefers explicit styles over poetic and nuanced ones. There are a lot of factors at play (e.g. i18n, the internet, education, literature) but I’m too lazy to cover them here.
> you - and no one else in the hundred years since - found his fatal mistake?
First, the essay is from 1946 — 80 years ago. Second, why not? Often-times, a different perspective is all that takes to discovers something new in the old.
I think you’re trying to make an appeal to authority here — a logical fallacy. You’re basically saying I cannot criticize his essay because Orwell is a great writer.
Also, my point is neither fatal nor about mistake. Orwell’s examples still demonstrate his claims in a relative sense, all within the context of the essay. However, when you pull them out of the context and put them out in the wild, it’s going to be very difficult to say those are bad writings right away, because, compared to other bad writings, those examples are very solid and straightforward.
> This is not even a sentence.
It is informal, sure, but I intentionally made it colloquial with something called bare quotation, a style commonly used in informal conversation. I wanted to avoid being “an overeducated dolt” and send a friendly gesture too, oh, but you chose to put that on a pitchfork. Bravo, clap clap.
You should take this as an opportunity to improve your English and widen your reading, rather than trying to win a silly argument on a forum with 'logical fallacies' and other such humdrum wikiphilosophy. I'm not even sure what you meant to say in this paragraph, it's not at all clear I'm afraid.
Your perspective on this is entirely wrong, starting with a mistake about the intentions of Orwell and the quality of the text (which is deliberately obtuse and plain awful in so many ways). If you can't easily interpret the biblical text, that's fine, it is quite old, but there is really no excuse for saying that Orwell is a bad writer or .
But Orwell's example here is an example of bad writing, not good, and was produced deliberately as an anti-pattern. It has no redeeming features, and deliberately so. If you read 1984, you'll see further what he was getting at and rebelling against - a tendency to use words to obscure and twist meaning rather than transmit it.
Yeah, sure, the paragraph there is pretty bad, I admit. I was having an technical issue w/ my phone. But, look, did you really read my comment, the whole set of it? It's not even about philosophy. I'm just talking about a little /finding/ that Orwell's examples of bad-English is much better than what you usually find in your daily lives.
I'm not even arguing here, because you people avoid engaging w/ my point itself. It's more like I'm only repeating myself again and again and again. I'm not raising anything new.
> Your perspective on this is entirely wrong, starting with a mistake about the intentions of Orwell and the quality of the text (which is deliberately obtuse and plain awful in so many ways). If you can't easily interpret the biblical text, that's fine, it is quite old, but there is really no excuse for saying that Orwell is a bad writer
First, if you were talking about my first comment, I did mention that "I'm only guessing". I did clarify that I didn't read at that point. Someone replied with a link to the essay, so I read it, and only then I said "I [had] read it".
Second, I never said the original is bad. I only said the parody is pretty good, perhaps because of its brutal explicitness, which the first one lacks comparably.
Also, I've been saying that Orwell is a bad /bad-English/ writer, not a bad writer. His proficiency in English doesn't imply any proficiency in reproducing the bad-English he was criticizing. This part is childish, sure, but it was supposed to be /fun/.
> But Orwell's example here is an example of bad writing, not good, and was produced deliberately as an anti-pattern.
I totally agree here, but ...
> It has no redeeming features
... this is the part I disagree with.
Sure, on the surface, they are chokingly bad. I definitely agree that he removed certain qualities from those examples, and, for demonstration purposes, they serve the purpose.
However, if you offer those examples completely out-of-context, it's going to be difficult to dismiss them simply as bad writings. Their logical flow is very natural, and his word choices are very precise. It is much better /formulated/ than a lot of real-world bad English writings. I definitely sense /professional touches/ from those examples. That's why I said that it would take me hours, if not days, to write such sentences by myself.
In short: badly written, well formulated.
Both versions are great: the former is poetic and grand and would fit right in in a fantasy text; the latter is dry and informative and requires much less mental effort to translate and extract meaning from (though still more than "normal" text.
I could imagine a third version that's clearer than the second and still nearly as poetic as the first.
Nothing meaningful was said for 9 words.
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that the words appearing here could be anything
Needing better reading skills to understand the bible verse just shows that it's not a good way to communicate. If an HNer wrote like the bible verse, you'd find them insufferably ostentatious. Just like you wouldn't want Claude to use literary flair when you're asking why your production database stopped working.
If you dumb down Orwell's sentence back to simpler terms, it's a point much better communicated than the bible verse.
Frankly the bickering in this thread is due to the original HN comment choosing a bad comparison because both sentences are poorly communicated for different reasons in this context: you wouldn't want Claude to write either.
No it isn't. It trades concrete imagery for empty abstractions which could encompass just about anything and are basically meaningless.
If you think this is good writing, you need a serious detox from corporate America.
It feels great to use, direct your machine minion to fill out your thoughts for you, but holy hell does it suck to be on the receiving end. Least of all is the disrespect, they don't care enough to even talk to you but worse is having to try and reason through that big incoherent blob.
Probably to only reasonable thing to do is to try and get your own mechanical agents to produce summaries. Inventing the lossy expansion algorithm(like compression but things get bigger on the wire), And we wept.
Now I am all depressed because it is probably inevitable, apparently thinking is hard and in general people are all to happy to outsource it to the machines.
Let's say I'm making an HN comment. I have a one-sentence idea, I get an LLM to expand it into an impressive-looking (or oppressive-looking) wall of text, and then I post that. Well, let's say 10 people see it. And each one of them has to either plow through it on their own, or paste it into LLM to get the summary.
But even with one-to-one communication, it's still terrible, as you say. You can't be bothered to clarify your idea, but you're trying to use an LLM to make up for your lack of thought? So you're going to make me plow through that huge blob of text to try to understand what your thought was, the thought that you couldn't bother to actually really think through. That's far less efficient than you, the sender, actually doing the thinking.
But it lets the sender be lazy. And the sender is the one in control.
The sheer amount of hatred they level towards anyone who's using AI or is even just positive towards it is something to behold. They've got racism-tier slurs for us now.
The negativity and stigma are so strong I've stopped caring.
Despite our best efforts, events continue to occur!
"Surely the testimony of misfortune will be imposed at any season"
I saw a comment on HN that that was roughly "re: ChatGPT, when I write one sentence and I get back three screens of lecture, I don't consider that a 'chat'". I consider that comment often when prompting Claude and hoping for a two line response and getting an "it's important to note that <blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah>".
> Reword this concisely:
> I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
> * *Ultra-concise:* Talent and effort don't guarantee success; luck and timing happen to everyone. > * *Punchy:* The best don't always win—chance rules us all. > * *Modernized:* Skill, speed, and wisdom don't decide the outcome; everyone is at the mercy of time and circumstance.
I feel like it did pretty well, and made the point more clearly than either the original or Orwell's rework (Gemini 3.8 Flash).
Or, as the version I've used for 30 years goes: "It's better to be lucky than good." I do like Reagan's addition, though: "But I find the harder I work, the luckier I get."
This is the difference between writing to convince a broad audience and writing to explain a point. AI can summarize well but until we can contextualize a richer framework for human comprehension, LLMs will struggle to resonate.
LLMs didn't write "It's better to be lucky than good.", but I find it both easier to understand and easier to remember than the biblical version.
Here on HN, I've noticed that I pro-actively defend myself against things I think will be said in counter to my comments. I concluded it's being trained into me.
Alternatively, I've been banging on against the same things that I see as insane so long that I know all the objections.
While phrases like "contemporary phenomena" and "tendency to be commensurate" are a bit over-the-top, summarily the picture is conveyed much more clearly imo: Luck plays a factor, no matter how good you are.
I don't see how "nor yet favor to men of skill" is more natural or clearer, at least to the modern reader.
IMHO a big problem with Pangram in particular is that they market it as a reliable tool that can be used to catch students cheating. This can obviously have disastrous effects on young lives, because it is not as reliable as they say.
There is validity to their goals, but that is overshadowed by the irresponsible way in which it is marketed.
(All of this, swirling in a context where students are being told that they absolutely must become proficient at using LLMs to do exactly this kind of work by the highest levels of state and federal governments, as well as the leaders of the workforce into which they hope to graduate. The message to youth is extremely muddled at best.)
That 2% is a large number! Of people who will have their integrity impugned for no good reason! That's not okay!
Your calculations also are mixing assignments and students. The rate of false positives of 1/10k is of corpuses, not students. 10k students might each submit 2-3 written assignments per week. Obviously, this greatly increases the impact of the false positive rate.
And all of these numbers are dependent on lab conditions for usage, which are not the case in the real world.
> I don't think 100% accuracy is logically possible.
Yes. Which is why marketing this product as it currently is, is a deeply irresponsible endeavor.
Now, the US criminal system is not a great yardstick for justice. But it goes to show you Pangram is really good evidence that something was LLM generated. It can be an amazing tool for enforcing AI policies in schools, and there ought to be ways to use it with caveats for the rare but inevitable false positives (appeals, etc).
[0]: see page 15 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.27183 [1]: see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4034186/
First of all: says them.. Do you think they might have an incentive to boost their numbers?
Second, this is on existing text, which might be in their training data, no?
Gotta suck to be one of the 8B/24k=~300k people in the world whose writing pattern is falsely labelled as slop by this tool that people say is so accurate so customers are going to feel really sure about your alleged dishonesty about writing your own texts
This false positive rate is a double-edged sword. Please still be careful when accusing people
First is frequency. Even using Pangram's claimed numbers, the University of Georgia should expect to see several false positives every week. Remember that the metric is # of assignments run through Pangram, not number of students. A campus of 40k students will see many more than 40k assignments every week, and so should expect honest students to be accused of cheating with some high degree of frequency. You're comparing infrequent events (death penalty sentences) to high-frequency events (students submitting assignments).
And obviously, you are citing a company marketing document as fact, of which we should all be suspicious.
Second, you're using the upper bound for Pangram's claimed numbers and the lower bound cited in the NIH publication.
> at least 4.1% would be exonerated. We conclude that this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States.
The one commonality is that