top | item 47207440

(no title)

wolletd | 22 hours ago

I don't know...

The part you'd like to remove ("Not managing code...") may be not required to convey the objective meaning of the sentence, but humans have emotions, too. I could have written stuff like that. To build up a bigger emotional picture.

> The act of thinking through a problem, designing a solution, and expressing it precisely in a language that makes a machine do exactly what you intended.

This sentence may not be relevant for whatever you experience to be the relevant message of the text. But it still says something the remaining paragraph does not. And also something I can relate to.

Also, as LLMs are statistical models, one has to assume that they write like this because their training data tells them to. Because humans write like this. Not when they do professional writing maybe, but when they just ramble. Not all blogs are written by professionals. I'd say most aren't. LLM training data consists mostly of humans rambling.

I also sometimes write long comments on the internet. And while I have no example to check, I feel like I do write such sentences, expanding on details to express more emotional context. Because I'm not a robot and I like writing a lot. I think it's a perfectly human thing to do. I find it sad that "writing more than absolutely needed" is now regarded as a sign of AI writing.

discuss

order

lelanthran|18 hours ago

> Because humans write like this. Not when they do professional writing maybe, but when they just ramble.

I keep seeing this assertion and I keep responding "Please, point to the volume of writing with this specific cadence that has a date prior to 2024" and I keep getting... crickets!

You're asserting that this is a common way for humans to write, correct? Should be pretty easy, then, to find a large volume of examples.

wolletd|15 hours ago

Like I said: I think I write like this on some occasions.

I wouldn't know how I would search for examples. I guess you'd have to search old reddit comment threads or something. But yeah, I have no motivation to do that, tbh. It could be that it's hard to find examples because they are scattered about in countless comment threads and single posts on countless platforms. Things I rarely keep links to, things nobody indexed on a large scale before LLMs.

It may be that it wasn't a very popular style of writing, because most people don't like writing a lot and keep their texts on the internet short. LLMs exaggerate this style because they generate exaggerative amounts of text in general. The style wasn't particularly annoying in the past because it wasn't that popular. It's annoying now because LLMs flood the internet with it.

The quoted example in particular didn't appear uncanny to me. And it still doesn't. I can see myself writing like that. I'm sorry I have no example for you. But I'm genuinely unsure whether I'm oblivious to the patterns others see, or whether others see patterns because they want to see them.