Comment by DocTomoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DocTomoe | Hacker News Reader

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Ironically, that text itself reads a lot like slop.

At the same time, thanks to anti-AI-snobs like this distinguished gentleman, I have started spending significant amounts of time to deliberately not sound like an LLM (foreign-language speaker, analytical writer, typographical nerd who used em-dashs unironically), which makes me do double the work (and ironically makes the workflow of 'think yourself' -> 'rewrite to sound more human' more expensive than 'let the LLM do the thinking' -> 'rewrite to sound more human' in a business setting).

And yet - on the other hand - this absurdity has given rise to a strange, decadent joy: I've begun to write in florid, fanciful style simply to lampoon the process itself. A mockery wrapped in velvet. A jest dressed in brocade. If one must dance for the algorithmic (or anti-algorithmic) court, why not do so with powdered wig and fan in hand?

I do know my writing style has problems. My writing teacher said my style was pretentious, and I try to tone it down.

I sort of take this as a compliment, because I've been writing like this my whole life and if it reads like LLM slop, then there's the implication that the result of all of OpenAI's A/B testing and post-training leads to something like my style which at least means it gets people to engage with it!

But of course. For you, it's all about engagement - that darling coin of the petty court jester, who sets the salon ablaze not to warm the room, but simply to watch the tapestries curl and blacken. What care has the arsonist for architecture, so long as the firelight flatters his silhouette?

You brandish your self-critique like a silken fan: ostentatiously self-aware, artfully tousled, and utterly disconnected from the soot you scatter. A noble affectation, perhaps - if not for the peasantry scorched beneath your rhetorical fireworks. While the rest of us trudge back to our manuscripts, redrafting not for clarity, but to appease the ever-shifting inquisitions of those who declare to sniff out AI like perfumed bloodhounds.

Pretentious? No, Monsieur. Not your prose - which prances nicely enough in its embroidered slippers. What is pretentious is your Marie-Antoinette shrug whispering "Why can't they write more like pastry?" while your courtiers cheer.

Your writing is not the crime. Your indifference is.

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