Discussion

13

radimm: This is exactly same struggle for me. Writing technical content about PostgreSQL and balancing my voice without sounding like LLM written is genuinely difficult.As English is not my first language, I do run into problem where the line between fix my clumsy sentence and rewrite my thought is very thin. Same with writing "boring" technical explanation and more approachable content. I'm getting pushed back for both.

asdff: Don't want to sound like an llm? Don't read llm content. Remove yourself from places where you might be liable to read it.

Arainach: It's not that simple. LLMs were trained on lots of writing, and the "LLM voice" resembles in many ways good English prose, or at least effective public communications voice.For years, even before LLMs, there have been trends of varied popularity to, for lack of a better word, regress - intentionally omitting capitalization, punctuation, or other important details which convey meaning. I rejected those, and likewise I reject the call to omit the emdash or otherwise alter my own manner of speaking - a manner cultivated through 30+ years of reading and writing English text.If content is intellectually lacking, call that out, but I am absolutely sick of people calling out writing because they "think it's LLM-written". I'm sick of review tools giving false positives and calling students' work "AI written" because they used eloquent words instead of Up Goer Five[0] vocabulary.I am just as afraid of a society where we all dumb ourselves down to not appear as machines as I am of one where machine-generated spam overtakes all human messaging.[0] https://xkcd.com/1133/

andai: > This post, is written without any tools assistance I just wrote what my brain is instructing to type (might not reread it before posting).How is the author complaining about the quality of their own writing while admitting to not even bothering reading what they wrote, let alone editing it?(Also, why would using a LLM based grammar checker trigger an AI writing detector? Did it end up rewriting substantial parts of the original submission?)

dude250711: There is no grandiose "AI era". Or it started like in 1950s already.What it is going to be is a 'Slop Decade' - a much better label if you insist on having one.

nusl: The slop decade will be a slop "rest of humanity." There's no going back from this.

keiferski: I have been writing stuff for a long time; my first internet experience was posting on forums about a Gameboy Advance game. Then in other forums, for a philosophy degree, and professionally as a copywriter and technical writer. I’ve been meaning to write up a post of my thoughts on writing and AI, but there things I’ve been thinking recently are:1. There was a lot of slop pre-AI. In fact I’d say the majority of published writing was bad, formulaic, and just written to manipulate your emotions. So in some sense, I don’t really think pre-AI slop had more value. It’s just cheaper to make now.2. AI has prompted me to study more off-beat writers that followed the rules of language a little less frequently. This includes a lot of people from circa 1890-1970, when experimenting with form was really in vogue.3. Which brings me to my third point, which is that no matter how much the AI actually knows about writing, the person prompting it is limited by their own education and knowledge of writers. You can’t say, “make me a post in the style of Burroughs” if you don’t know who Burroughs was, or what his writing style was. So in a sense there is an increased importance to being educated about writing itself. Without it you’re limited in your ability to use AIs to write stuff and in your awareness of how much your non-AI written work is influenced by AI writing.

amelius: Are there any good writing LLMs out there?I get that the mainstream ones have been RLHF'd to death, but surely there must be others that are capable?

whilenot-dev: What makes you think that? I presume that's just the authors (sarcastic) way to say "beware: may contain typos and grammatical errors".

aledevv: I want to emphasize a thought you expressed:> "..but maybe it's a good thing that most of us don't allow this technology to reframe our thoughts."No, you're not the only one experiencing this: I too had the same concerns as you: with every new thought, every new creation, I had to ask the AI's opinion, as if I were no longer able to judge, to decide, without consulting the AI (...just to be safe, you never know...).The only way to regain your creative ability is to write down your thoughts yourself, read, reread, rewrite, correct, express your opinion...What AI can't do is convey emotions.

asdff: Well that isn't what I am suggesting. I'm suggesting people ditch x. Reddit. Probably also ditch hn in the next couple months. If you can run a headless agent to post somewhere, just don't bother visiting that site, honestly a great rule of thumb right there.That should leave you with media sources like nyt and your local library, which seems healthier to me. And maybe it might encourage a new type of forum to emerge where there is some decentralized vetting that you are a human, like verifying by inputting the random hash posted outside the local maker space.

rane: In some specific work contexts, such as writing pull request descriptions, not sounding like AI is something I've given up on trying to optimize. It's simply not worth the effort for me being non-native and writing detailed PR descriptions being so arduous, and the agent already has full context anyway. Obviously any fluff or inaccuracies are aggressively weeded out but I don't care anymore about the AI voice.

shaoner: https://hemingwayapp.com/ gives you advice about your writing.This is called Hemingway because he was apparently good at communicating efficiently which made him a popular author.

thepasch: I never use an LLM to paraphrase my own voice as a matter of principle, but I’ve still been repeatedly accused of doing so because I happen to always have written structured posts, used “smart quotes,” and done that negative comparison thing (it’s genuinely not just fluff, it’s a genuinely useful way to— ah god damn it). Sigh.

internet_points: Same here, I've always used em dashes and have been called out on negative comparisons – I didn't even know they were an LLM thing. Should I read more LLM to know what phraseology to avoid, or will doing that nudge me towards sounding more LLM? :-(

Freak_NL: There are a bunch of typos in there which jar a bit ('deterioted'), but I guess that makes sense for this specific article.Personally, I would recommend them to simple use any old editor with spellchecking enabled. That suffices for most writing where you just want to keep your own voice. To me, the red crinkly line just means that I should edit that word myself. In the rare case where I'm stumped on the spelling I'll look at the suggested edit of course, but never as a matter of course.

missingdays: No technology ever became obsolete?

Freak_NL: I feel ya. I've never been accused of using an LLM, fortunately, but depending on the context I do use “smart quotes” (even in „Dutch” or »German«) and the em-dash obviously… (And that ellips fella there. It's just so simple to type with a compose key set up.)

jcgrillo: > like nytI hope editorial departments everywhere are taking careful notes on the ars technica fiasco. Agree there's room for some kind of quick "verified human" checkmark. It would at least give readers the ability to quickly filter, and eliminate all the spurious "this sounds like vibeslop" accusations.

Amekedl: depending how hard the "the brain is a muscle" saying applies, there is no way using LLMs/chatbot systems/AI is not going to deteriorate your brain immensely.

stabbles: Are grammatical errors and typos fashionable now? Reading this post it seems the anti-thesis in the LLM era is not to edit at all, but rather write down a stream of consciousness to make it "personal".

netsharc: Oh well, when the most powerful people on the planet manage to enshittify it enough, we'll be freed from AI...Or maybe there'll be the elite enjoying the world, while the rest of us have to work manual labor. But at least it'll be AI systems ensuring our compliance!

everdrive: Not joking, buy and read books. Old books are only written by people. (and the help of an editor)

simianwords: Definitely think it is. It will be glorious. We will focus more on content than on just aesthetic as people try to signal that they are not llm