But moving forward the goal should remain that writing should be comprehensible and not overly reliant on templates and other annoyances.
[edit] some good disagreements here which I appreciate. Thanks! I am continuing to think about this.
I don't think this "effort" argument for technical knowledge pieces makes sense to me. If there is something I need, I do some research and I look for signals of authoritative information. I don't really care about how much effort it takes to write a blog post.
For starters, if you're writing something yourself, it's not "zero-effort". It might be low-effort, but you still put some effort into it. And low-effort doesn't mean worthless, as you illustrate ("but if someone needed that information...").
Consider that the refrain seems to be: "I won't put more energy reading something than you put into writing it". A "quick" post takes little energy to write, and little energy to read. That's fine!
Even if, on the most good-faith scenario, someone did all the research them told an LLM to add more pizzazz for some reason, there is still a chance that the LLM hallucinate a lie here and there that the author might have skipped when proof-reading if they proof-read it at all.
I can't trust a machine specialized in generating convincing bullshit.
AI to an extent removes a lot of signals that in the past people used to figure out if the writer spent effort on the writing (length, lexicon, grammatical correctness, you name it).
Personally as long as whatever is there is not full of load bearing seams I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt even if the "voice" sounds AI (and TBH it feels the "AI voice" issues are mostly "opus pre 5.5 voice" issues, talking to gemini does not feel very "AI", same as fable, opus 5.5 occasionally has its load bearing moments but nowhere near as much.
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 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.
1. https://www.computerworld.com/article/4234688/microsoft-know...
> Can this be gamed? Teaching the AI to write less like stock Claude and stock ChatGPT? Yes, absolutely. And honestly that would be great. Because half of the irritation is that all these AI-written article sound the same!
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.
TL;DR: If you didn't put effort into writing it, you clearly don't value it enough for me to put any effort into reading it. I don't give a damn about readability.
Longer: We are now locked in a titanic, global war on attention. While once it was impossible to output content faster than it can be consumed, this relationship has inverted to the extreme. So the social norms that we evolved prior to this inversion simply cannot still apply.
While once it took tremendous resources or effort, it is now trivial and cheap to saturate my attention. And as a result, my attention is under non-stop assault.
To guard my precious attention and preserve it for the subjects I deem most worthy, I am forced to choose between what does and does not deserve my attention.
The level of effort an author invested in the creation of their work is a decent proxy to their actual assessment of its worth. I will continue to use that metric as a filter, and have found it to be helpful for maintaining the health of my mind and my relationships.
Say there was a Chinese artist in a room...
Their output does have intrinsic value yes...
AI writing is some average over all writing the model was trained on (with some RLHF on top). It is mediocre by definition.
If the context can be above average quality the result should be too as long as the AI is sufficiently smart. Especially if people iterate on the produced work to push it up in quality.
However if you don't have a good topic and don't iterate to improve the result then you get incredibly poor writing.
Essentially another layer and commodity that users will pay more for, as humans value speed and volume over authenticity.
Same reason almost no one writes with pens or typewriters any longer, as they are niche artifacts.
> Can this be gamed? Teaching the AI to write less like stock Claude and stock ChatGPT? Yes, absolutely. And honestly that would be great. Because half of the irritation is that all these AI-written article sound the same! If they're all being written with each individial's, each company's, own rules and preferences and character that'd probably be nice?
This is the opposite of how most places use the sparkle icon!
It was relaxing to see some minor typos and stylistic awkwardness in this article, I have to be honest.
I heard this from someone else today too. I'll have to think of a different icon perhaps then.
> It was relaxing to see some minor typos and stylistic awkwardness in this article, I have to be honest.
whoops
[Edit] Or are you implying that readers should direct an LLM at the entire article and expect an equivalent tool to be produced
* 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
Next we need a "Verbose useless content" detector and we'll be set up to GAN the whole internet into https://xkcd.com/810/ "Mission Accomplished".
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.
people love to openly hate on ai/assisted writing meanwhile https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector reveals a lot of it is being voted up to the frontpage