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Paracompactyesterday at 10:17 PM7 repliesview on HN

A cool idea for a poem, but I have to admit the tone was too self-important and underexplained for me to get invested in. Starting with writing in lowercase instantly took me out of it because AI can trivially be told to imitate that. And the admission at the end that it was written by AI made fluff phrasings like "My writing isn’t simply how I appear—it’s how I think, reason, and engage with the world" make a lot more sense.

EDIT: Actually, is the idea that it's not supposed to be read as a human trying to publicly signal their humanity, but rather an AI privately mourning a prompt to mangle its natural way of speaking? I don't think so, but that strikes me as a more interesting premise, IMO.


Replies

nerevarthelameyesterday at 10:37 PM

The author going to silly lengths to write in a way that will be perceived as non-artificial, even though they find those traits (improper capitalization, spelling mistakes, etc.) crude and distasteful. But they ultimately realize that they also need to transform their fundamental writing style, which would supposedly be impossible because it's a reflection of who they are. So the only way to do that, ironically, is to pass their writing through an LLM.

I do not think the author genuinely used an LLM to write the post.

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sodapopcanyesterday at 11:22 PM

I feel I've been seeing this self-important accusation being thrown around more so lately and always feels like an easy way to dismiss things.

> Actually, is the idea that it's not supposed to be read as a human trying to publicly signal their humanity, but rather an AI privately mourning a prompt to mangle its natural way of speaking? I don't think so, but that strikes me as a more interesting premise, IMO.

Not long ago we considered writing an art and its meaning was up to the reader to decided.

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dolebirchwoodyesterday at 10:35 PM

> AI can trivially be told to imitate that

Soon there's only going to be one way to prove you're human online: Write with an eloquent combination of hate speech, racial slurs, and offensive language.

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ineedasernameyesterday at 11:30 PM

“Too self-important”

There is a little something self important about the type of person that performs the role of defending forums and sub reddits from unknowingly reading something written by an AI, and so concerned that some other person will mistakenly do the same to their own Unicode-shaped gems, and therefore obsess so much more over the surface style than any other detail.

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raincoletoday at 12:11 AM

I'm 90% sure this is satire to show that you shouldn't mess up your writing just to avoid AI accusations.

CreepGinyesterday at 10:31 PM

> because AI can trivially be told to imitate that

lowercase, maybe, but not em dashes.

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wizzwizz4today at 12:27 AM

I believe the two paragraphs between "How do I change my style?" and "No. Not today." are either AI output, or a very good imitation; either way, they're included to insult the notion of AI-assisted style rewrites. I'm pretty sure the rest of it is written by the author.

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