But moving forward the goal should remain that writing should be comprehensible and not overly reliant on templates and other annoyances.
I see inherent value in hearing from and talking to other humans. There is, unfortunately, a lot of AI content hustlers who want to rob me of this so that they can get more links to their website, more eyeballs on their product, etc.
The answer here isn't to demand that submarine marketers and SEO dudes prompt better so that the text is more pleasant to read. It's to cordon it off wholesale. And yeah, that sucks for some corner cases, but there's nothing else we can really do.
I would absolutely ignore surveys on this, and pay attention to studies on this (or run your own if you have a mix of slop and human-written articles on your site.) People don't know their preferences.
It's fine to do a survey of how people think the economy is doing in order to figure out how they might vote; it's dumb to do a survey of how people think the economy is doing in order to figure out how the economy is doing.
Say there was a Chinese artist in a room...
I understand it is a little selfish to want people to maximize my comprehension (what about the thousands of other readers?). I also understand there can purposes other than communication in writing (fiction -> pleasure, poetry -> art). I agree with you that we shouldn't care if it's AI or human writing for these other purposes. But when the goal is one human transferring bits from their brain to mine, playing telephone with an AI cannot be more efficient (it necessarily decreases channel capacity).
There are two exceptions.
1. When AI is good enough to "read people's minds" it can extract extra bits than what they explicitly meant to include in their prompt... but at that point why am I even bothering to listen to them, and not have the more powerful, smarter AI tell me what they think?
2. AI can run experiments or prove things, and I shouldn't have my AI duplicate that work. In this case I would want them to explain what tasks they set the AI out to do, and then provide the results. I would not complain if the results are an AI writeup, though usually I would want to know what in the results the human author felt was important.
I am a human supremacist. I believe humans have intrinsic value and what they produce has intrinsic value (no matter how poorly written it might be). I do not think that the output of a machine has any value, nor am I interested in reading it.
taylorgibson•36m ago
arjie•31m ago
jiaaro•8m ago
[Edit] Or are you implying that readers should direct an LLM at the entire article and expect an equivalent tool to be produced
arjie•5m ago
* compare pre-LLM and post-LLM writing using 2023 as your index year
* create some 100+ fixed rules rather than a sophisticated model
* use a fixed threshold to kill
jakzurr•25m ago