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".
You can already do that in your agents.md file, of course, or ask for a re-write and dodge the sameness.
I'm sure it's trivial for somebody who has studied communication or contemporary linguistics, just as it's trivial for me to ask an LLM for tenant-isolation using row-level security in an app
Reading what I did get out of it was just a bit uncanny valley strangely enough. Very much had some "hey there fellow kids" energy.
But you know what you like, and you know what bothers you, and the good news is that you don't have to one-shot a solution. You can create a skill and refine it over time. As you test and/or use it, identify copy you don't like and tell the LLM what you prefer instead, and ask it to distill and generalize that feedback into the skill.
Writing is similar. I enjoy well written texts, but that doesn't mean I can write them myself, or can tell an AI how to write in that way.
Right, but you know what you like. The point is that you can tell the chef "too spicy" and send back the plate until you get what you want. He can then remember that, since you're his favorite regular.
I just went through this with a release notes skill. I brainstormed with the LLM about what I wanted, edited initial results when I saw something I didn't like or could be made better, than asked the LLM to capture that in the skill. Now I almost never need to touch it.
Worked like a charm. This is the prompt I used[3] to write a version for the company I own with my wife, if it helps anyone. The personal version, which lead to the `jamenizer` skill, is very similar, but has some personal details in it.
[1]: With her permission, obviously.
[2]: https://github.com/blader/humanizer
[3]: https://paste.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/303a18228bcd8520e55a76d5...
Why do you assume I would do anything against my wife's will?
And I never said anything about "optimizing myself out of existence", this comment was still written by me and no LLM touched it.
But when writing comments on code or editing articles, reviews, and whatever long-form writing I give an LLM to review or edit, it's nice to know it'll keep my writing style, voice, and tone.
I'm already obligated to use LLMs at work, otherwise I might lose my job, so why wouldn't I want to have it write in a way I can actually understand?
Respectfully, that is how one talks about their pet or their kid but not their partner.
But this is not my beer, but by god this platform.
The fact that you're doing that with your wife, with her consent, is no different. The real value is in keeping you grounded by someone outside tech.
Fortunately it won't come to that, because there is a real world outside of this bubble.
So the "radical normalists" will be just normal people, and the application of force will not be terrorism but democratically legitimized.
Why would they add it now? This has been a solved problem since GPT3.5, just prompt it to write in a different style and/or never use specific phrases.
The reality is that for 99% of people and use cases, they just do not fucking care. They're either using chatgpt as a 1:1 chat interface where the AI style is fine, or they're sending off homework/generating reports to send to their boss/etc, which they know will never be read and just summarized by an AI anyway, so what's the point.
They're supposed to do the grunt work, but the meaning and the connection is a humans-only thing.
Style permeates all aspects of writing: word choice, sentence structure, literary devices, pacing, plotting, characterization, dialog, theme, etc. Its a culmination of these things that is reinforced over again every sentence, paragraph, and chapter for potentially hundreds/thousands of pages.
I don't see how a prompt could reliably "tune" all of those different variables over such a large context window without it feeling like a surface level facsimile at best.
Human language isn't verifiable. If I ask for something "dark and gritty", there are endless outputs that are indeed "dark and gritty" yet completely miss the style I had in mind.
Wrapper app startups designed to tune the tone of a model are all over; virtual romance partners, creative writers/editorial help...
We all started out with prompts like "you are an expert in X" before dumping them in agents which you pointed out already solves your problem
What you describe is already implemented in various ways
For the illiterate, sure. Where do you think LLMs picked them up from?
Most people use the - at most, or rephrase.
One rarely if ever should write at a level that's above high school reading for day to day articles and tasks.
I've written for a large computer magazine, you know what the target is? It's John: A 21yo man taking ~CS classes and with some disposable income. Not a lit major. John has no idea what that wide - is, doesn't care, and wouldn't understand fancy writing anyway.
A total, artificial lack of em dashes can in itself be perceived as another sign of AI writing.
I’ve already seen that trick snuck in by newer models. “I won’t use em-dashes; I’ll use semi-colons!”
Also, if all LLMs would write in the style from the article, in how much time that would be the recognised LLM style people would get sick of? I suppose longer? But even the current style of LLMs was palatable when they first came out.
and needs no system prompt
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".
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.
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 next step I'd suggest is asking the LLM to use shorter words when available.
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 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?
"Does it matter what anything innately is, beyond the effects it has on you?"
For example: Suppose you were given a human companion with a robot brain that was your ideal friend. They made you laugh and you enjoyed every moment you spent with them.
Does it make it any less impactful/genuine to you that they're not a "real" human, or is your felt experience the only meaningful end-measure?
For me, it's the latter.
The average AI post is likely a carbon copied reddit comment from 2011, that is to say, "no".
The end result is that comment sections aren't enticing to join in on, just read. Which is perfect for ad impressions.
^^ this is my new most-hated tic. I see it everywhere now.
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.
If you limit the sample size, you end up finding more. For example, on my project when I tested 350 strings at once it failed to find 15 strings with "ai slop" that testing 10 strings at a time did find.
I want my boss to know I'm a Good Boy using AI.
(*defeated chuckles and gazes towards my Claude session*)
It stil contains a triple construction, but ranks much cleaner on slop-cop.