Comment by alisonatwork
3 hours ago
I have the same issue now. It's especially annoying when it happens while reading a "serious" publication like a newspaper or long form magazine. Whether it was because an AI wrote it or "real" writers have spent so much time reading AI slop they've picked up the same style is kinda by the by. It all reads to me like SEO, which was the slop template that LLMs took their inspiration from, apparently. It just flattens language into the most exhausting version of it, where you need to try to subconsciously blank out all the unnecessary flourishes and weird hype phrases to try figure out what actually is trying to be said. I guess humans who learn to ignore it might to do better in this brave new world, but it's definitely annoying that humans are being forced to adapt to machines instead of the other way around.
> Whether it was because an AI wrote it or "real" writers have spent so much time reading AI slop they've picked up the same style is kinda by the by.
Structural priming [0] exists apparently.
So, for instance, I've been trying to keep my sentences short for readability; to write as I would speak out loud. After reading more AI output (work/personal projects) it's getting easier to compose short sentences. And sometimes I do a double take and wonder if this now reads like AI. And this happens even if you know that this CAN happen. It's weird.
My theory is that this style will pass at hyper scaler LLMs soon. But then arguably when LLMs converge to a "barely good enough" for general consumer (think air travel) some peculiar style will stick.
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1949395/#P4