I can't tell who's teaching who anymore

I was considering adding a permanent disclaimer to every blog post on my site about it not being AI written. Then I relented. Because I don’t have to explain to strangers on the internet that I wrote it myself. I like writing, and even if it is imperfect at times I’m okay with that. But I do catch myself editing my own words multiples times a day. Because I'm less sure if that sentence structure is truly mine or a side effect of me conversing with LLMs so much.

I'm trying to counter this by trying to read more fiction, but for every page that I read, I'm probably reading 50 pages or so of LLM output. So I think this is a battle I'm going to lose out on in the long term. And I can probably only delay the inevitable.

But yeah, I don't like beginning to lose or doubt my own writing voice one bit.

There are two main subjects covered in this and it makes no sense. The first 3/4s deal with the reshaping of language, then the last 1/4 go to talk about Tailwind's layoffs, due to search engines/LLMs upfront providing answers. I don't see the point of the article because it never concludes the two subjects in unity.

The whole dashes debacle never made any sense, because many people are aware if you press and hold the hyphen "button" on your mobile touchscreen, it presents you options with different lengths you can choose from. That it was ever used as a signifier of LLM-written text meant that it can only show a false positive. For the last 20 or so years, a lot of web designers and content creators were "trained" on Elements of Style and other "best practices" cookbooks. People knew when to use what type of dash through these sources, as it gave a bit more of an elegant look to the presentation.

> I take out em dashes and replace them with commas or full stops

Yeah that's your problem. I like my em dashes. You don't need to be ashamed of your style just because it got mainstream. Doesn't matter whether it's AI or a fashion fad. It's like liking a music band before it gets popular on tiktok.

Inbred degrades DNA biologically.

Inbred stems from less variety.

If you hang out with the same person, you degrade in personal quality.

If you learn at the same spot, same places, same people all the time, your learning degrades.

Same for the AI, they inbreed and they degrade.

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I purposefully hangout with people (not all the time still) outside of my circle for that exact reason.

I used to joke about a hypothetical programmer with so much mechanical empathy that he would oppose fuzzers because a program would find it very uncomfortable to be fuzz-tested.

It now occurs to me, non-humorously, that’s what this person and many others are going through with AI: it’s a multi-year fuzz test of their sense of self, their methods for ideation and expression, and their ethical principles on attribution and intellectual property.

I used to be a big dash lover in my writing. Now I shamefully cull them as well. For my personal blog I don't care that much, but for university essays etc where they explicitly disallow AI formulation I just worry they'll get the wrong idea.

Mm. Same on the em-dashes.

Hopefully one of the only ways I'm in a top-10-HackerNews-user list is #7 user of em-dashes before ChatGPT was relased: https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...

I guess one irony is that while there's many people here bemoaning LLMs as "nondeterministic", for prose in general it would be much better if they acted like such complainers meant rather than the non-determinism being in such a narrow band as to be an instant cliché.

It should be simple to fit a style-filter onto an LLM. Curious why we still don't have that, and why everybody is using the default.

teaching whom

In my country, Korea, genre fiction communities are huge. So AI-related writing has become quite trendy lately.

In Korea, people call the AI writing style "쇠맛 the taste of metal.(or metallic taste)" They say it tastes like a machine.

When Koreans generally define the metal taste, they usually put it something like this: "The plot is terrible, but the sentences are really excellent and refined."

Generally, unless you're using a fine-tuned local model, sentences with that metal taste are considered refined. So there's this irony where people say writing not done by AI lacks refinement.

In fact, even very famous Korean authors have been caught using AI, but people didn't really notice—they just felt the prose had become very elegant.

Anyway, I'm rambling, but the thing is, AI sentences were basically "learned and erudite" by default. When I entered grad school in Korea, I was taught where to use hyphens, told these were "things you need to learn when writing papers," and learned language techniques while being taught how to write papers—and AI uses those techniques really well. So it's ironic.

It's just a shame that in order to avoid writing with that metal taste, you have to avoid the very vocabulary that used to be recommended.

This hits a note. It has so many aspects.

People who made something their professional life goal to become good at something have their work marked as AI, and even worse, like effortless or slop. Just because a tool has been trained to match that good style or type of output. A good system (tailwind) is not used directly anymore because the LLMs take all the wind of their sails by embedding the knowledge in the model.

This happens all without any form of attribution or compensation.

It’s not nice. But I don’t know what to do about it.