I don't understand why this is a feature and what it brings other than shout "you are being watched by random others".
Exited the site before ending the first block.
Sorry - I've been playing with WebRTC and Trystero (https://trystero.dev/) and added it to my blog as an experiment. Of course didn't expect my blog to become a bit popular on HN and for the cursors to be super annoying. Turned them off by default!
Is it still capable of writing an essay about AI writing tics or has the very means of producing said tics, even when the model is asked to do so to demonstrate, now abitterated?
Models have proclivities, and many people use the same model.
Imagine all books on earth were written by just 5 people - and worse, they could not remember what they had written yesterday. You would quickly get tired of reading the same flourishes and patterns over and over.
Whatever style models currently in use have, that's what people are going to be tired of, and it's what they're going to recognize as "AI style".
Applause earned. Neat results especially out of such a small model.
Separately we have overlap between AI slop styles and right for the situation writing styles which this highlights.
Using the new CRM example, the clean version looks like a millennial student who rambled on a page, and the AI slop version looks like a draft I could send for PR to corporate managers. I buy the former looks more real, but it also looks sloppy and doesn’t work for most of my use cases.
When I was in school, the structured essay style of the “slop” examples was encouraged and I see it continue to resonate in corporate. The cleaned up versions here def have use cases - reviews for example.
Main point - different styles for different situations and our AI slop versions vs humanized versions both overlap different areas of the “ideal” we continue to look for.
Side note but the multi-user cursors was a super cool feature, not sure it was relevant to this article but would love to see it on more interactive pieces (a la The Pudding, etc.)
Why would you support this sort of projects?
LLM text should be spottable for as long as possible, otherwise human communication and expression on the internet will be killed.
In what sense will it be killed? I don't plan to stop writing my own messages or notes, just because AI can write, and I seriously doubt many other people who prefer their own voices will change either.
I stopped using reddit entirely because it's bots talking to other bots on threads posted by bots, I stopped making posts at the start of this year because I no longer know if a human being is ever reading them. I then deleted the account.
I am increasingly feeling that way about HN, too. If this is all the equivalent of a videogame conversation with an AI, why am I bothering to put the effort in?
1) there's some value in internally generated text (automatic documentation, autosummary) being less aggravating
2) there are assistive applications — speech generated from sign language and touch panel communication etc. — and those users deserve a tool that can communicate for them in a way that has controllable or even personalisable outcomes.
3) a process of de-sloppifying text might also help train thinking clarity.
Communication is a means to an end, a tool, not an end in itself, or something with intrinsic/unassigned value. Why would we want more energy wasted on focusing on the packaging (or worse, how the packaging is made) by drawing attention to it, instead of helping directing it towards that which actually matters?
for https://slopwash.com I’ve started approaching this more as an eval problem than something to go post-training for. I’m excited to be trying these new Jev-type models in more of a harnessed approach. maybe some heavy LLM to measure preservation of intent
I would use that turn of phrase (needs no XYZ) — but maybe not in the context of system prompts, perhaps. Though I don't know; sometimes a flourish is a nice thing.
You might be right that the clash of that vernacular pattern and technical language is a "tell", but AI did learn this stuff from actual people; a lot of the time Claude reminds me of an actual person who worked for a firm I worked for in the 90s, who wrote in an annoyingly gnome-wizard style.
Ultimately it's the volume of these problems that is the tell.
A human could write either. The former is just slightly more formal and concise.
Before AI, I used to write everything in somewhat formal phrasing mostly because I enjoyed it and a tiny bit because I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that it made me sound smarter. Post-ChatGPT, I noticed that most LLMs had a writing style fairly similar to my own, so I changed my writing style to appear less formal in most circumstances. While I'm not anti-AI, I'm always fearful of being mistaken for a bot.
That's just a regional/educational quirk. Classically-educated folks and older Brits are both quite likely to use the "needs no" version.
Most "LLM voice" quirks come from actual human writing styles, even if Claude et al have managed to distil those styles into something pretty horrific.
On the other hand, the way you can tell the title line was at least edited by a human, is the missing comma before "and needs no system prompt".
Why kill the em dashes? They are a legitimate mark — one that I have been using for years. On a Mac, you quickly get used to pressing shift-option-hyphen. Em dashes are typographically correct and should be used.
Honestly I don't see the em dash as for sure AI. It's just that it's often used in LLM tropes like the "it's not XXX — it's more" and other tagline-esque sentences.
Why are lists of three considered slop? I genuinely use it quite a bit because groups of three feel more memorable, satisfying, and persuasive. (<- list of three right there)
I was excited with the idea then got to the first example and boy that was bad. The second "de-slopped" version has no formatting and is 3 times bigger with the same level of information. This model slopmaxxxed the slop.
Its funny, even with the tics probably trained out of that blog post, my brain still turned off and skipped paying attention to it, automatically categorizing it as "AI slop".
I think is it the missing of human touch in writings that makes us think something as slop. Obviously, impersonating won't take one far I guess. One of the things I'm avoiding to use AI is for writing, because it is hard, enjoyable at the same time and is the only way for me to express what I think.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 37.5 ms ] threadImagine all books on earth were written by just 5 people - and worse, they could not remember what they had written yesterday. You would quickly get tired of reading the same flourishes and patterns over and over.
Whatever style models currently in use have, that's what people are going to be tired of, and it's what they're going to recognize as "AI style".
Separately we have overlap between AI slop styles and right for the situation writing styles which this highlights.
Using the new CRM example, the clean version looks like a millennial student who rambled on a page, and the AI slop version looks like a draft I could send for PR to corporate managers. I buy the former looks more real, but it also looks sloppy and doesn’t work for most of my use cases.
When I was in school, the structured essay style of the “slop” examples was encouraged and I see it continue to resonate in corporate. The cleaned up versions here def have use cases - reviews for example.
Main point - different styles for different situations and our AI slop versions vs humanized versions both overlap different areas of the “ideal” we continue to look for.
I am increasingly feeling that way about HN, too. If this is all the equivalent of a videogame conversation with an AI, why am I bothering to put the effort in?
1) there's some value in internally generated text (automatic documentation, autosummary) being less aggravating
2) there are assistive applications — speech generated from sign language and touch panel communication etc. — and those users deserve a tool that can communicate for them in a way that has controllable or even personalisable outcomes.
3) a process of de-sloppifying text might also help train thinking clarity.
I want my boss to know I'm a Good Boy using AI.
I would use that turn of phrase (needs no XYZ) — but maybe not in the context of system prompts, perhaps. Though I don't know; sometimes a flourish is a nice thing.
You might be right that the clash of that vernacular pattern and technical language is a "tell", but AI did learn this stuff from actual people; a lot of the time Claude reminds me of an actual person who worked for a firm I worked for in the 90s, who wrote in an annoyingly gnome-wizard style.
Ultimately it's the volume of these problems that is the tell.
Before AI, I used to write everything in somewhat formal phrasing mostly because I enjoyed it and a tiny bit because I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that it made me sound smarter. Post-ChatGPT, I noticed that most LLMs had a writing style fairly similar to my own, so I changed my writing style to appear less formal in most circumstances. While I'm not anti-AI, I'm always fearful of being mistaken for a bot.
Most "LLM voice" quirks come from actual human writing styles, even if Claude et al have managed to distil those styles into something pretty horrific.
On the other hand, the way you can tell the title line was at least edited by a human, is the missing comma before "and needs no system prompt".
It stil contains a triple construction, but ranks much cleaner on slop-cop.