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isolatedsystem

This article is visibly, annoyingly, distractingly in threes.

> It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.

> but to keep it alive, replayed, and reworked.

> A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions...

> A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it...

> There is a guilt that accompanies unread books, articles and blog posts

> The belief that by naming a goal, you are closer to achieving it. That by storing a thought, you have understood it. That by filing a fact, you have earned the right to deploy it.

> ...the fear of losing track, of forgetting, of not being caught up.

> Nietzsche burned early drafts. Michelangelo destroyed sketches. Leonardo left thousands of pages unfinished.

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I'm starting to notice this style a lot. Apparently there's a formal term for it, but I didn't begin to notice it until I started using ChatGPT regularly.

Granted, there are people who didn't notice the utility of the em dash until it became apparent in ChatGPT's responses, but aside from either device there is a certain vibe I'm starting to pick up from a lot of writing online that mirrors AI writing although you can't just call it that, especially if people enjoy it.

A kind of abstract solipsism that only resonates unless you consent to a platonic relationship with the author through their writing. About as close as you can get to reading something written with the aid of AI, I'd imagine.

I choose to think optimistically, in the same way as I did when smartphones put a camera in everyone’s pocket: suddenly, “bokeh” is a term with purchase in the mainstream! “Portrait mode” for every adorable baby pic! A ring light in every makeshift bedroom-dresser studio!

Everybody’s participating now, and taking pride in using more of the visual language of photography for themselves. That makes us all richer!

Now, then, that the language-bots have sensitized our collective ear to the hypnotic rhythm of a parallel-constructed triplet, the drama of a “—“, and the muscular power of a strong active voice (…that’s three, right?)—aren’t we all richer for it?

> Now, then, that the language-bots have sensitized our collective ear to the hypnotic rhythm of a parallel-constructed triplet, the drama of a “—“, and the muscular power of a strong active voice (…that’s three, right?)—aren’t we all richer for it?

That is yet be proven, comrade.

I think you raise a valid point, but I would argue that in your photography example, the content is very much still human - portrait mode and ring lights are tools that improve the output but a human framed the picture, and pressed the button.

LLM generated writing doesn't quite feel the same for me, the words are the content but they lack human touch, context, intention. The equivalent would be the photographer uploading their photo to ChatGPT and asking it to regenerate the image. The output wouldn't feel right, it is more like losing something than gaining.

I feel that your optimism is great but that the example you provided is not the same.

Everyone had the ability to write before chatgpt, they had the ability to get their thoughts across if they so wished, whereas with photography it lessened the burden of having to buy an entirely seperate device.

if I move myself into the shoes of a photographer or someone with an affinity towards photographing I kind of get that when taking pictures is a big part of your life the camera starts to get ingrained with that but for others it wasnt just a step from camera to more frictionless camera it was a step from nothing to camera.

Whereas everyone has a brain to think things and to try to communicate what they are thinking and feeling, large language models did not enable that, they did however enable lazy people to swap out the work with a robots response or malicious people to spam the internet

On the other hand:

> Every note in Obsidian. Every half-baked atomic thought, every Zettelkasten slip, every carefully linked concept map. (4, though I suppose you could argue it's 1 + 3)

> But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. (2, albeit with a 3 inside)

> Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories. (2)

> The inhabitants of the library, cursed to wander it forever, descend into despair, madness, and nihilism. (2 with a 3 inside again)

> It is associative, embodied, contextual, emotional. We do not think in folders. We do not retrieve meaning through backlinks. Our minds are improvisational. They forget on purpose. (4, 2, 2)

I think the author (either in person, or via some LLM that did much of the actual writing) is just fond of this sort of rhetorical repetition, and it happens that if you're doing that then 3 is often the best number. (Because 2 may not be enough to establish the rhythm, and 4 may be enough to feel overdone.)

I do think there's too much of it here, and specifically too many threes, but I think the underlying fault is "too much parallelism" and the too-many-threes are a symptom.

It’s called the Rule of Three. It’s a good writing practice, but it can be overdone.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)

If she tended to have that rhythm in her notes, too, no wonder it was two-thirds hoarded junk.

SCNR

I don't understand why people are saying it's LLM.

To me it's more of a stream of consciousness style of writing.

I'm fascinated by all these comments I see on HN and elsewhere where people will deny that a blatantly LLM-written article was not LLM-written, including cases where people praise it for not being LLM-written (eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44384138 ). Like, leave aside the issue of whether it's a good or bad thing (I've been doing generative text NNs since 2015, so I'm mostly for it, when done well), I'm just interested in the inability to notice.

Skimming your comments, you, for example, do not seem to be illiterate or a bad writer at all despite being ESL (although you overuse the double-sentence structure in your comments), but you describe this as being 'stream of consciousness' (it is not even close to that, look at an actual example like Joyce) and seem to think it is fine.

So I'm puzzled how. Why isn't it obvious to you that the style is so mode-collapsed ( https://gwern.net/doc/reinforcement-learning/preference-lear... )? Do you also not notice how all the ChatGPT images are cat-urine yellow? (I've been asking people in person whether they have noticed this in the Bay Area and I'd say <20% of enthusiastic generative AI users have noticed.) What are you thinking when you read OP? Does it all just round off to 'content', and you don't notice the repetition because you treat it all as a single author? Are you just skimming and not reading it?

That’s because it’s LLM.

The rule of threes is a widely known rhetorical guideline. Some people do take it a bit far, though.

Verbose, literate writers wrote like LLMs long before LLMs existed.

We taught them.

One irony now being that that form of skilled writing is inevitably and sometimes falsely accused of being machine-written.

> "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal

It takes much more skill to write concise than verbose.

That quote doesn’t apply at all. Verbose writing doesn’t immediately indicate a lack of skill, otherwise every fiction book would’ve been reduced to a pamphlet of a summary.

If you are writing to explain, being concise is a useful asset. If you are writing to entertain, or for pleasure, verbosity and flair can be better.

I don’t get the feeling the author is trying to convince anyone of doing anything. They are sharing their experience, probably writing for themselves above everyone else. They should do it however they prefer.

I was replying specifically to the statement that writing verbosely is a form of "skilled writing", which I don't agree with. Simply being verbose does not make your writing any better.

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