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Comment by WarmWash | Hacker News Reader

Surely I cannot be the only one who finds some degree of humor in a bunch of nerds being put off by the first gen of "real" AI being much more like a charismatic extroverted socialite than a strictly logical monotone robot.

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In a way, it’s a simulacrum of a saas b2b marketing consultant because that’s like half the internet’s personality

It's funny but I'm on HN so I can't resist pointing out the joke doesn't math TFA, their argument is that the underlying internet distribution is trained away, not retained.

Maybe the real underlying distribution IS a lot of text from people just spewing out feel good words for socialising. I think that might be side effect of the fact that meaningful text is harder to make even for humans, so there is smaller quantity of meaningful text.

Or that even the people who believe they are making meaningful text on the internet, because of the constraints of the medium, are simply socializing in a different way.

Not particularly charismatic, just looks a lot like the worst kind of yapping wannabe.

Charismatic extroverted socialites dont talk that way. They do not make mistakes like that.

That's a great description of the boundary between logical deduction NLP and bullshitting NLP.

I still have hope for the former. In fact, I think I might have figured out how to make it happen. Of course, if it works, the result won't be stubborn and monotone..

The axis running from repulsive to charismatic, the axis running from hollow to richly meaningful, and the axis running from emotional to observable are not parallel to each other. A work of communication can be at any point along each of those three independent scales. You are implying they are all the same thing.

I hate it because typically that style of writing was when someone cared about what they were writing.

While it wasn't a great signal it was a decent one since no one bothered with garbage posts to phrase it nicely like that.

Now any old prompt can become what at first glance is something someone spent time thinking about even if it is just slop made to look nice.

This doesn't mean anything AI is bad, just that if AI made it look nice that isn't inductive of care in the underlying content.

> I hate it because typically that style of writing was when someone cared about what they were writing.

I dont understand these takes. The opposite is true - humans good at writing who care about writing never produced these kind of texts.

People who dont care about writing, but need to crank up a lot of words would occasionally produce writing like that. Human slop existed before ai, but it was not the thing produced by people who write well and care.

You are effectively claiming that either:

AI created unprompted the eloquent speech it uses or that AI stole the unpopular style of eloquent speech from people who didn't know what they were talking about.

Neither of which is true because you are mistaking shit posts on social media as what everyone is talking about when discussing "AI posts".

I don't terribly care about replies or other short messages in this context. Wasting 30 seconds isn't worth complaining about.

But wasting 15 minutes trying to build up a mental model of a proposed solution only to realize it never existed is another thing entirely.

I always felt like humans that were good at writing that way were often doing exactly what the LLM is doing. Making it sound good so that the human reader would draw all those same inferences.

You've just had it exposed that it is easy to write very good-sounding slop. I really don't think the LLMs invented that.

Revisionist at best.

Sure some people could write well but didn't have a clue but they failed to maintain interest since once you realized the author was no good you bounced once you saw their styled blog.

Now they don't care as they only want the one view and likely won't even bother with more posts at the same site.

Exposed, and also dominating the majority of text being “written” every day. Would we say they invented the scaling and spread potential of slop?

hahaha amazing

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