[losvedir]

I really like Oxide's take on AI for prose: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576 and how it breaks the "social contract" where usually it takes more effort to write than to read, and so you have a sense that it's worth it to read.

So I get the frustration that "ai;dr" captures. On the other hand, I've also seen human writing incorrectly labeled AI. I wrote (using AI!) https://seeitwritten.com as a bit of an experiment on that front. It basically is a little keylogger that records your composition of the comment, so someone can replay it and see that it was written by a human (or a very sophisticated agent!). I've found it to be a little unsettling, though, having your rewrites and false starts available for all to see, so I'm not sure if I like it.

[ssiddharth]

My biggest sorrow right now is the fact that my beloved emdash is a major signal for AI generated content. I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second.

[manuelmoreale]

> I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second.

Wrote about this before [0] but my 2c: you shouldn't pause and you should keep using them because fuck these companies and their AI tools. We should not give them the power to dictate how we write.

[0]: https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/on-em-dashes

[Lalabadie]

For what it's worth, whatever LLMs do extensively, they do because it's a convention in well-established writing styles.

LLMs have a bias towards expertise and confidence due to the proportion of books in their training set. They also lean towards an academic writing style for the same reason.

All this to say, if LLMs write like you were already writing, it means you have very good foundations. It's fine to avoid them out of fear, but you have this Internet stranger's permission to use your em dash pause to think "Oh yeah, I'm the reference for writing style."

[archagon]

To quote Office Space, “Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.”

[catoc]

Exactly this! I love(d) using em dashes. Now they’ve become ehm dashes, experiencing exactly that pause — that moment of hesitation — that you describe

[gnat]

We're in the brief window of time when AI's writing style is the weirdness. It's an artifact of the production process, like JPG blur, MP3 distortion, autotune's rigidity. And it didn't take long for those things to become normalized, in fact for them to become artifacts that people proudly adopted and embraced. DJs release tracks built from MP3s samples instead of waves. Autotune is famously a 'sound' that was once something to be subtly added and never confessed to, but which now genres and artists lean into rather than away from.

Long story short: I think emoji in headings and lists, em dashes, and the vile TED Talk paragraph structure of "long sentence with lots of words asking a question or introducing a possibility. followed by. short sentences. rebutting. or affirming." are here to stay. My money is that it gets normalized and embraced as "well of course that's how you best communicate because I see it everywhere."

[tkzed49]

I've gone back to using two dashes--LLMs typically don't write them that way.

[eYrKEC2]

I used to enjoy the literate usage of the word "literally".

You'll get over it.

[4b11b4]

Also, unfortunately I have in my global instructions to never use em dashes...

[nxobject]

What I do – and I know this isn't conventional style – is use ex dashes. (Or, you could use spaces between em dashes, as incorrect as it is.)

[wiseowise]

I use it to trigger false positives in haters – why not?

[user____name]

My history teacher thought me to use "8==3" instead, the Romans used it to sign their graffities.

[kyralis]

This is the modern day "I can tell that's photoshopped because I've seen some 'shops in my day." The sooner we stop glorifying the people who think they're magical LLM detectors, the better, frankly.

[itisuseless]

The correct thing to do is to use an en-dash with spaces. ;)

[Lio]

You can still use them — it’s just that they have a new purpose; getting things ignored by AI detection or AI;DR.

Now you can ask for outlandish things at work knowing your boss won’t read it and his summariser will ignore it as slop — win.

[Bukhmanizer]

You’re absolutely right. I hate AI writing — it’s not that I hate AI, it’s that it makes everything it says sound a specific combination of smug and authoritative — No matter the content. Once you realize it’s not saying anything, that’s the real aha moment.

\s

[steveBK123]

The problem with Ai writing is that its a waste of everyones time.

It’s literal content expansion, the opposite of gzip’ing a file.

It’s like a kid who has a 500 word essay due tomorrow who needs to pad their actual message up to spec.

[AnimalMuppet]

Well, LLMs can be either side of that. They can also be used to turn something verbose into a series of bullet points.

I agree that reading an LLM-produced essay is a waste of time and (human) attention. But in the case of overly-verbose human writing, it's the human that's wasting my time[1], and the LLM is gzip'ing the spew.

[1] Looking at you, New Yorker magazine.

[woopwoop]

I like the idea that various communications media have implicit social contracts that can be broken. In my opinion, power point presentations break an implicit social contract that is held in handwritten talks: if it's worth you displaying a piece of information, so that I the listener feel the need to take it in or even copy it down, it has to be worth your time to actually physically write it on the board. With power point talks this is not honored, and the average power point talk is much, much worse than the average chalk talk. I bet there are lots of other examples.

[smithza]

Go thee to the land of government contracting and see thou how well thine ideas hold up.

[account42]

Well the thing with powerpoint presentations is that the listener doesn't have to write them down and can instead use the copy you share with them if they need a future reference.

And it should still be worth for them to listen if you don't suck at presenting and don't just read the text from the slides.

[jimkleiber]

In 2020 at the start of covid, I did an experiment I called Project 35 where, for 35 days straight before my 35th birthday, I wrote 3 times per day, for 10 minutes each, I livestreamed it and whatever I wrote I would put directly into a book with no edits. While I didn't invite many people to join the calls (maybe fear, maybe just not wanting to coordinate it all), I found the process to be more raw, more human, and less perfect than 10x edited writing. It also helped me get better at typing in the moment and not rewriting everything, especially for social media, HN, and other places.

Anyway, it's at https://www.jimkleiber.com/p35/ if you wanna check it out, all sessions posted as blog posts, I think there's a link to the ebook (pay-what-you-want) and there may be audio (I recorded myself reading the writing right after each session).

If you check it out, please let me know :-)

[usefulposter]

LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (Cantrill)

≈

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. (Brandolini)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law

[mikestew]

Years ago I wrote something similar to test a biometric security piece that used keystroke timings (dwell and stroke) to determine if the person typing the password is the same person who owns the account. Short version of a long story is that it would be trivial to get data for AI to reproduce human typing. Because I did it years ago using something only slightly more sophisticated than urandom.

[riknos314]

Man failing that device's check because I'm sleep deprived or drunk would be a world of pain lol

[comboy]

> https://seeitwritten.com

Fun, I'd make playback speed something like 5x or whatever feels appropriate, I think nobody truly wants to watch those at 1x.

[miniatureape]

I had a take on this same thing a number of years ago. Much simpler, but the idea was just to see it at a glance. https://miniatureape.github.io/sprezzatura/

[benob]

You could totally make a believable timing generation model from a few (hundreds) recordings of human writing. Detecting AI is hard...

[hinkley]

Based on the programs I was nudged to as a child, it was a surprise to no one but me that I scored higher verbal on the SATs than I did math, which I would have told you was my favorite subject. Despite the fact that French was my easiest subject. I can still picture the look on my french teacher’s face if I’d have mentioned this in front of him.

There are a lot of people like me in software. I’m tempted to say we are “shouted down”, but honestly it’s hard to be shouted down when you can talk circles around some people. But we are definitely in a minority. There are actually a lot of parallels between creative writing and software and a few things that are more than parallel. Like refactoring.

If you’re actually present when writing docs instead of monologuing in your head about how you hate doing “this shit”, then there’s a lot of rubber ducking that can be done while writing documentation. And while I can’t say that “let the AI do it” will wipe out 100% of this value, because the AI will document what you wrote instead of what you meant to write, I do think you will lose at least 80% of that value by skipping out on these steps.

[etler]

I don't like AI writing because it's bad writing. It's convoluted and inefficient and doesn't get to the point. If someone writes something that feels like AI, it doesn't matter if it was or not because it's still bad writing. I'm not talking about having a cliche here and there, but rather when the text is just incredibly inefficient.

[onionisafruit]

I like the idea, but personally I would rather be thought a bot than show that I’m a human idiot who takes three tries to spell basic words.

[hidden80]

I respect Oxide a lot. And here, too, with their non adoption of the marketing term (AI) for LLMs, ML.

[michaelcampbell]

ai;dr is the new "looks shopped, I can tell by the pixels".

[cnees]

Re: unsettling Perhaps it could replace any characters that will go on to be deleted with astrisks.

[unglaublich]

This can only be fixed by authors paying humans to read instead of the other way around.

[mystraline]

To be fair, Oxide is a joke.

They want all this artisnal hand written prose under the candle light with the moon in the background. And you are a horrible person for using AI, blablabla.

But ask for feedback? And you get Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde. Aka ghosted. But boy, do they tell a good story. Just ain't fucking true.

Counter: companies deserve the same amount of time invested in their application as they spend on your response.