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Comment by rossy | Hacker News Reader

> but models have become increasingly good at writing.

That's not the impression I have. HN has almost daily articles bemoaning the use of AI to enhance or pad-out human-to-human communication and the comments almost universally agree that the output is bad, using AI to communicate is rude, and they'd rather read the human-written prompt than the AI-"enhanced" version.

I'm not aware of any model that has solved the AI writing problem. Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 improve on Fable 5 and Opus 5, but neither are good. They all seem to overuse jargon, misuse literary devices and write ill-fitting metaphor. They all produce prose that is dense and hard to read, but sparse on actual information. Even non-techy people can identify AI writing.

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HN readers are not average people. elsewhere i see people using AI to write without any blowback. maybe they don't want to ruffle feathers, but they are engaging, whereas i prefer to just skip over AI generated posts.

What about just labeling you silently as useless? How do you know that this doesn't happen?

this. My not-at-all technical partner often comments to me that whatever youtuber is reading from an ai script and just turns off whatever we're watching. I assume similar happens in other areas.

For her its rarely the specific tells ("not-x-but-y" etc) but rather its bad metaphors and analogies that get her.

Most people don't care what the other person thinks about their email so long as their boss thinks they are doing their job (and their boss is usually the one paying/telling them to use AI) and the other side responds. Should they? Probably, but everyone should probably do a lot of things we don't.

I feel a tinge when I see an AI written email that is longer than it needs to be/boring to read but I still need to engage whatever it was they were emailing about anyways.

that's what i do, but the posts still get engagement, and it's the same level of engagement as the non-AI posts by the same people, which tells me they are not put off by the AI-writing.

Not my experience at all on non-technical online spaces. For example, people try posting AI garbage on sports message boards and everyone dunks on them for posting slop.

These spaces are filled with people barely technically literate enough to post and AI is still viewed very negatively

If you build a nice writing guideline, you can impersonate Mark Twain if you want with any model.

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