alt Hacker NewsBut LLMs were literally evolved via RLHF to write in a way that humans find agreeable. Can't we just move past this aversion and accept "writing like an LLM" as generally good writing style advice?
Replies
The reason this particular quirk annoys me so much is that it isn't good writing advice.
Consider the two examples from this article (which may well have been human-written for all I know):
"These numbers come from OpenAI itself. There is no independent audit, no time series, no disclosed methodology, so we have no idea..."
No time series? That's non-sensical to me, it feels like that's there just to fill the quota of three things. Plus why would we assume an "independent audit" until told otherwise?
Then in the weird table, for "Institutional infrastructure" against "Personal AI safety":
"Scattered across psychology, HCI, education, and clinical informatics departments. No dedicated institute, no named fellowship, no equivalent job board."
Again, "no X" in a pattern or 3. And non-sensical - why would the fellowship be named?
It's word salad, there to fill a three-nos quota.
The difference is that these rhetorical techniques need to be used with taste. LLMs just sprinkle them everywhere to try to make their copy sound good, even when it's completely inappropriate tone-wise. They don't make higher level judgements about when to employ specific features.