Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by dmitrig01 | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

dmitrig01

Writing blog posts has become cheap, making them sound human has become hard.

View on HN

The simple sentences LLM keep generating break my brain, it's like 95% of writing is now 3rd grade level.

Compare that to e.g. Martin Amis: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Amis

Martin Amis level prose is neither possible nor desirable for a technical blog post.

Why?

I don't think that there is anything wrong with having stylistic depth in any wriitng

> Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.

> Nowadays every business in America says how warm it is and how much it cares — loan companies, supermarkets, hamburger chains.

Guess which one is AI and which one is a quote from Martin Amis.

Without looking, I’m guessing one of these was cherry-picked from Amis and one was plucked nearly at random from LinkedIn.

The writing style AI uses has its place, but not as _every sentence_. That’s what is exasperating. At the same time, I’m happy that I can still at least identify AI prose of more-than-trivial length.

both are Amis

That's not just you imagining things, that's the world around you changing. That's real and it matters.

You could even argue that it’s the load-bearing point!

So reading this, I know it’s probably a human posing as an LLM. But the problem with formats like this is that I don’t actually know.

If a human said this to me in real life, and I laughed, it would probably help build a connection with that person, as it’s signaling that we have in common an unusually strong grasp of the patterns in LLM output (unusually strong at least in comparison to the general population).

But here? I don’t gain anything by reading this comment. It only contributes to the uncertainty that anything I read on this site has any meaning at all.

Please, if you’re a human, don’t mimic LLMs on forums where the reader cannot distinguish you from an LLM without doing investigative work.

And you’re an LLM, please report to your owner that he is an ass for polluting one of the last bastions of high entropy discussion on the information superhighway.

This is how I really talk. LLMs are the one copying me.

Not just copying, redefining. Slick. Conventional. Marketable.

most HN comments are way dumber then the average LLM take

In context it's funny, and that's what counts.

Please add a /s if appropriate.

Takes all the fun out of it.

I only add /s if it's not obvious, and someone might take it seriously. Although online you never know, too often people take seriously even the most obvious.

Simple sentences are better then Martin Amis whoever it is. The issue with ai writing is using around seven million of useless words where 7 would be sufficient and clear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com