One thing I wondered is whether high prestige writing is encoded into the models, but it doesn't seem far fetched that there's various linkages inside the data to say "this kind of thing should be weighted highly."
Thanks to LLMs I learned that using the short binding dash everywhere is incorrect, and I can improve my writing because of it.
The approachable tone of popular print media also preselects for the casual, highly-readable style I suspect users would want from a bot.
I guess in the past if you'd shown me a passage with em dashes I'd say it looks good because I associate it with the New Yorker and Economist, both of which I read. Now I'd be a bit more meh due to LLMs.
I don't have evidence that that's true, but it's what I assume and I'm surprised it's not even mentioned as a possibility.
When I studied author profiling, I built models that could identify specific authors just by how often they used very boring words like 'of' and 'and' with enough text, so I'm assuming that OpenAI plays around with some variables like that which would much harder to humans to spot, but probably uses several layers of watermarking to make it harder to strip, which results in some 'obvious' ones too.
But the watermarking layers is a fascinating idea (and extremely likely to exist), thanks!
It wasn’t just Ev - I can confirm that many of us were typography nuts ;)
Marcin for example - did some really crazy stuff.
https://medium.design/crafting-link-underlines-on-medium-7c0...
Hostile? That’s definitely a take. Curious what you’re thinking there.
Not that most websites are any better. My favourites are basically the ones that just show a default "sorry but this content is blocked in your region" text.
Probably the second most annoying thing on the web today is when you click a link that looks interesting but the page you land on almost immediately says you have to do or pay something to actually read the thing the referring page implied. I don't even start reading a Medium article now if I can see that pop-up below - it's just an instinctive reaction to close the tab. I wish people wouldn't link to articles in walled gardens and search engines would remove those articles from their index - or if that's not reliable then exclude entire sites. Those walls break the whole cross-linking model that made the web the success it is and they waste people's time on a global scale.
I recognise that my position may be somewhat hypocritical because I'd rank AI slop as #3 and maybe #1 and #2 are making some kind of attempt to avoid supporting AI slop. But then I'd propose a more draconian solution to that problem as well - one involving punitive penalties for AI companies that scrape others' content without permission to train their models and possibly for anyone else using models that are tainted.
If you feel you’re entitled to everyone else’s labor - I dunno what to tell you.
On the other hand, if you value your own time so little that the only amount you're willing invest in the quality of what you read is $0 - I also don’t know what to tell you.
Either way, I hope you figure it out.
Medium (at least what it is today) tries to bring down the friction of making valuable content available at a reasonable price.
The alternative solutions the web has been to come up with is to take the valuable content and lock it up in hundreds of silos (Substack, etc), leave residual low value content marketing available, and then cover most everything else with a browser melting level of “adtech”
I’m also not affiliated with twitter or Elon at all, so not sure what the rest is about.
That explains a lot…
And so AI models are prone to using them because they require less computation than rewriting a sentence.
iansteyn•6h ago
jasonvorhe•4h ago
Your readers won't care about the dashes as long as the texts read like they had human origins and you have something to tell.
keiferski•3h ago
whynotmakealt•1h ago
I don't understand the purpose of using LLM's to write articles unless someone wants to be the middleman of slop and if that's the case, I'd rather cut middlemans and get slop directly from the AI models, instead of pasting the output of what chatgpt generated, give me the prompt and maybe temperature/other settings if need be to make it more reproducible but the prompt itself could be enough smh
I am not saying you should change your writing style, but at the same time, you have to understand, if someone writes like AI, Chances are that we are too tired of looking too deep into it to find if its written by AI or not, we are tired of it & so you must understand our or anybody's frustration if they call out someone's writing as AI.
For those using AI to write articles/etc. : If you are passionate about something, write about it, write what you want, how you want and you will be proud. But if you use LLM, you will constantly be called upon and frankly, it reduces the purpose of writing.
For code, there is a debate that code is just an means to an end (which is to do stuff like scripts etc.) but there is no end to writing, for what? for more views/etc., there is no point in getting such attention or anything considering it would just be negative attention if I or anyone found AI writing.
Not sure why people use AI text generation for articles etc. Idk.
This is my alt but when I had first started out on HN, I thought my english was fine but then somebody pointed it out and I try to fix my grammar and now its second nature to me writing.
I would be curious to know the reasons as to why people write text stuff with AI in the first place. It doesn't make sense to me since the other side would use their slop to counter your slop, at that point just create a tldr post, why strech an article in more words than unnecessary (I feel like I also write a lot of filler words / yap personally but alright, atleast you know a human is writing this), I don't get the point of writing longer if you aren't even writing it, is it to get SEO or, is the end goal money like all things?
DonHopkins•21m ago
For example, your post could have been just one paragraph and said the same thing. Do you purposefully write so verbosely as a virtue signal of authenticity?
And no, readers can't always ask the LLM to reproduce the same slop, because they don't have the verbose original source text that it's condensing, and even if they did, they would not bother reading it, because it's tl;dr.
Nobody wants to read pages of repetitive human generated slop, either.
eastbound•4h ago
Cmd + Shift + “-“ = —
Let’s spread the word until everyone fancy uses them, and then those who criticize text for coming from LLMs will be ridiculed by our ridiculous skills.
Etheryte•4h ago
latexr•4h ago
withinboredom•2h ago
nandomrumber•4h ago
lm28469•4h ago
topaz0•4h ago
So I think you can keep using em-dashes without being associated with LLMs as long as you reserve them for particularly effective/tasteful occasions.
krzrak•4h ago
Now I find myself intentionally adding typos and other msitakes, and using less sophisticated language, just to not be accused of using AI.
matsemann•4h ago
TheOtherHobbes•1h ago
Ironically, AI writing is too literate. It reads like clunky pastiche to literate readers, but it's still using words and constructions less literate readers haven't seen before.
hdgvhicv•3h ago
topaz0•2h ago
(Edit: corrected (unintentional) typo)
TheOtherHobbes•1h ago
You can customise the default style over an impressive range. Most people don't, so most AI writing is distilled essence of Failed LinkedIn Marketer, even when that style conflicts hilariously with the content.