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Comment by timmb | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why so many of these comments HN is getting are so fixated on writing style. I appreciate that stylistic traits associated with AI-written text are often indicative of contentless slop. But lots of people also write like that. To moan about writing style without even considering the value of the content just sounds cranky to me.

Anyway, I enjoyed reading the experiment, and the starting premise, and the embracing of a fairly mundane outcome. Reminds me of running various generative systems and looking for emergent states.

Shame there's no rss feed to follow along.

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I don't read Dickens because I can't stand the style despite the rest of its plot and characters. Bad style is a problem to getting into a work. A bad style can make the content hard to read.

If the author couldn’t be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it?

Because it still could have novel and interesting content?

But not novel or interesting enough for anyone to actually write anything about it?

Why should I spend my time enabling someone too lazy to do their own writing? If I want to know what an LLM has to say, I can prompt it myself.

> If I want to know what an LLM has to say, I can prompt it myself.

The flaw is assuming that the only input to this piece was a prompt. What would you prompt it with to get the content in this blog post?

Because writing is a process suited to some minds more than others. And if your bar to receiving an idea is that it came from a competent writer then you’ll be limited to ideas that reflect a certain way of thinking (and one many mistakenly conflate with intelligence).

Conversation is a different process that may be suited to other types of thinking. And so on.

It’s true that LLMs can enable unoriginal and shallow thinking to be expressed with a false veneer of original thought. But it does not follow that all LLM-written text is the result of laziness nor that it is without value.

I’m just suggesting, come with an open mind rather than judging the whole thing based on a gut reaction to style. That reliance on a gut stylistic reaction is itself lazy and has led many an intellectual community into echo chambers of groupthink.

Yea I'm curious if any of those negative commenters considered that the author is German, and English may not be their primary language — but no, apparently there is a new surefire way to detect AI content. Not forced enthusiasm. Not em dashes. Just too many sentences in a row starting with the word Not.

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