alt Hacker NewsMy revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text. A trope typically indicates I’m in for an uphill read.
I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1].
> Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes:
> > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
> Orwell's version goes:
> > Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
> First notice how the two passages look. The first one at the top invites us to read it. The words are short and have air around them; they convey the rhythms of human speech. The second one is clotted with long words. It tells us instantly that a ponderous mind is at work. We don't want to go anywhere with a mind that expresses itself in such suffocating language. We don't even start to read.
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I think Orwell did a great job there actually.
Despite its bizarre look, the sentence is evocative and eloquent. It does make me get a clear mental image from the very first word. It leaves little room for roaming and guessing, as it firmly nails elements one by one, and, by the time I reach the end of the sentence, I get the full meaning almost immediately.
This sentence is not randomly written; this is crafted with intention. TBH, it would take me hours, if not days, to write a sentence this much condensed and easy to understand. I seriously like it.
Perhaps, this is more about context -- which style to use in which situation. I'm only guessing here, but, since Orwell is offering an interpretation, he probably chose to be more clinical. He probably had a point to make and didn't want to risk vagueness up-front.
My take is that the generated stuff is terrible for communications.
It feels great to use, direct your machine minion to fill out your thoughts for you, but holy hell does it suck to be on the receiving end. Least of all is the disrespect, they don't care enough to even talk to you but worse is having to try and reason through that big incoherent blob.
Probably to only reasonable thing to do is to try and get your own mechanical agents to produce summaries. Inventing the lossy expansion algorithm(like compression but things get bigger on the wire), And we wept.
Now I am all depressed because it is probably inevitable, apparently thinking is hard and in general people are all to happy to outsource it to the machines.
I came to this post and saw that Orwell had forgotten to mention money as the prerequisite of success, which was very unlike him.
The problem is not the LLM prose appearing everywhere, it's the legions of AI-boosters appearing in every thread attacking anyone who complains.
Apparently, even though they want to spew AI prose everywhere, they want it read by humans, not by other bots, so when a few holdout places are insisting that prose be human authored they fight very hard against the rule.
Orwell's entire essay (Politics and the English Language) is well worth reading if you haven't before:
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
(I'm guessing Zinsser's comments are from "On Writing Well", which you can also find online even though it is still under copyright.)
It's a bit of a pet peeve when people include quotes on a blog post without linking or otherwise references their source.
Why dont they train LLMs not to speak like that? Is it some tragedy of the commons here?
english is my second, third language, and i understood the second immediately, but not the first. go figure.
It appears LLMs are much better at writing during a debate than when explicitly asked to write. The moment LLMs are tasked with composing a blog article or intro for a book they introduce all the nuances that identify the output as AI slop.
Am I the only one that finds the second one much easier to parse?
[dead]
In contemporary YouTube-script wording:
> The Ecclasiast looked under the sun, but there was something he didn't understand. Something that wasn't right. Something that was not as it was supposed to be. And here is what the Ecclesiast didn't understand. Here is what nobody understood. Not then. Not in the years that followed. Not now. It was not the swift who won the race. Not the strong who won the battle. Not the wise who earned the bread. Not the men of understanding who gained the riches. Not the men of skill who gained the favor. And here is what I found: to any story of success, there is an element of unpredictability and chance.
(There are really just two possible outcomes: either the article is right or in, say, two years, we will be all writing and talking like this, as in humans learning from mediamatically reinforced human feedback.)