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Comment by kgarten | Hacker News Reader

One could also use butterflies to write ;) https://xkcd.com/378/

The problem is, that LLMs worked very well for me to improve my writing. Especially as I'm not a native speaker, it was a great way to improve the legibility of my work.

I want a tool that helps me improve my writing. A tool I can learn from. Not a tool that switches out "bananas" to "airplanes."

I'm was using Claude Opus and now Fabel extensively for editing my texts and I find the recent updates abysmal. Not sure if it's due to the Text Watermark.

Before Claude was great in sharpening the meaning in my writing, it's now close to unusable.

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I'll be interested to see if people can actually pick out which text is watermarked and which isn't once they introduce it. It won't switch "bananas" to "airplanes". It'll switch "I really enjoy eating bananas" to "I love eating bananas" or similar

To that point, given a corpus of writing from person A and another from person B, I have no doubt it’s easy to train a classifier to determine who wrote what. In fact I believe law enforcement agencies already have these classifiers.

The only difference here is that Anthropic is actively trying to make the watermark undetectable.

They're not trying to make the watermark undetectable, that would defeat the point of a watermark. They're making it detectable, but not make the text obviously watermarked

Undetectable by a human reader. Come on, give the post a charitable reading.

That’s my point of the post … I had the feeling that the English text editing skills of Claude went significantly down in August.

I was frustrated at first not knowing what they are doing.

After I read this post, (seeing they introduced it in August) I think it has to do with the watermarking.

Try it on a paragraph … the connections between sentences feel clunky now.

I will play with it more and see if that’s really the case (the watermarking making the text edits worse).

> After I read this post, (seeing they introduced it in August) I think it has to do with the watermarking.

The power of confirmation bias…

> Try it on a paragraph … the connections between sentences feel clunky now.

We might have a definitive explanation at some point, but there are about a dozen possible reasons for something like this. For starters, is this something really significant and not something you notice because you are looking for it (again, confirmation bias)? A bit like some people still lose their minds when they see a dash, even though statistical analysis showed that they are not a significant marker of AI-generated text?

I’m frustrated since August with the results from Claude for English text editing … I didn’t look for that. It’s just a fact.

This is not about em dashes …

You're hallucinating

This is an excellent use case. It made learning German much easier. I write what I think is correct, then get a fixed version.

When writing in English though, I use it more like a dictionary. If you want to write past a certain level, an LLM works better as a metaphor and idiom search engine.

I also like to ask it to generate 20 ways to say the same thing. It’s a great way to simplify or smoothen sentences without losing your voice.

As a writer, Claude’s metaphors are trite and obvious 90% of the time. It also has a terrible penchant for an immediately recognizable emphatic voice that makes even the best outputs super cringe. But people do not notice and do not care. In our bubble and John Gruber’s bubble we really overestimate how much people must care. Truth is, we’re in this predicament because statistically speaking the people who hive a fuck are a rounding error.

They really are. This is why I prefer the volume approach. I might not accept any of the ideas it spits out, but it often guides me in a direction I was not considering.

I know that most people don't care, but my online presence is a search query for interesting people, so I care about what I put into it.

Interesting, are you being literal about requesting 20 ways of saying the same thing? It seems pretty excessive and I'm actually impressed that asking an LLM to rewrite a statement 20 times yields output that isn't excessively redundant. Does the LLM do a pretty good job reading your mind, or do you still find yourself manually piecing together pieces from the 20 suggestions into a satisfactory sentence?

Yep, I literally ask it to say it in 20 different ways. Sometimes a sentence structure or a combination of words will just work better. The goal is usually to simplify a sentence without losing meaning.

I don't expect the LLM to read my mind. The unit of work is too small for intent to matter, and I'll just steer the next recommendations in a direction as needed.

Most of the suggestions are crap, but they can contain the seeds of a good sentence.

And this beats just writing the piece yourself?

I can’t speak for them, but I do this occasionally. Every now and then among the propositions there are one or two that did not come to my mind and that are actually quite good. I still write the whole thing myself, I just ask for advice occasionally.

How did you understand this as not writing the piece myself?

> improve the legibility of my work.

Nitpicking here in a way that I would usually avoid, but it is relevant to the conversation being had and it seems like you might appreciate the information... "Readability" would be the more correct word to use here instead of "legibility".

Legibility is close enough for me to know what you mean based on the context, but it really applies to the visual presentation and how easy something is to read at a symbolic level (whether someone's handwriting or font choice is good or bad impacts legibility, whether someone uses good grammar or not impacts readability).

> One could also use butterflies to write ;) https://xkcd.com/378/

This comparison is frankly absurd.

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