Comment by treenode
8 hours ago
AI writing sucks. The punchy words, the hyperbole, the monotony and pervasiveness are all exhausting. But I can’t deny there’s one upside. People who grew up speaking and living in other languages, people whose english is poor, finally have a level playground. It’s a great equaliser of our english writing privilege.
The thing that worries me most is that it's going to redefine the way we write. We absorb language. To compensate for all this AiSpeak I consume, I need to read more literature.
What’s human writing going to look like in a few years if this trend doesn’t stop? I believe that the LLMs will catch up soon and introduce more variance and fewer words designed for impact in their language, delivering us from this AiVerse into one where AI writing is almost indistinguishable from human writing. But until then, we must read more.
The problem with AI writing isn't its style, it's the content.
It's full of fluff. Analogies that sound like something a 12 year old would make, but make no sense when you stop to think about them.
It's full of baloney that the author didn't even intend to communicate.
That's where the "soulless" part comes from. There's no consistent mind behind the writing with opinions of its own, formulated into one understandable framework it's trying to convey. It's just a mishmash of BS that only superficially resembles it, made to trick us.
In the world there have always been people who prefer to fit in and those who prefer to explore boundaries. All the people who love fitting in will continue to adopt whatever mainstream thing is happening and will continue to look and sound generic and boring.
Those who prefer exploring boundaries immediately go in the other direction and find clever and creative ways to stand out and have a unique voice. The more generic everyone else is, the more these people are driven to go the other way.
As a result, as before, the easy, generic things will be cheap and disposable and the thoughtful and creative will be valuable. If you want to be valuable you have to be thoughtful and creative, not cheap and generic.
You can easily deny this upside. Your playing field isn't level because instead of grammatical mistakes, you have the online equivalent of talking like a used car salesman.
> AI writing is almost indistinguishable from human writing
This depends on what you consider AI writing. If I dictate what the AI must write word by word verbatim, is it considered AI writing? Is it something to do about the percentage of the text generated? Does it have to do with the vocabulary the AI knows? What if I don't know any other words than the AI does? Does it have to do with the efficiency of communication?
Nevertheless, I don't think AI writing can ever be human writing. No matter if it uses the same words as a human and it's indistinguishable. This is because humans participate in a society as independent conscious actors and thus communication has meaning. The only way text can become communication is when the writer has intents, they're willing to participate in society.
> The only way text can become communication is when the writer has intents
I'm curious as to what you mean by this. I assume you don't mean it literally, as that would be trivially falsifiable (for example, the text readout on a digital caliper doesn't have "intents", yet it absolutely communicates meaning), but I can't think of another way that you might have meant it. Could you elaborate?
There is already studies that confirm your fear, I think. They found that mainstream language is changing due to AI. Certain words get used proportionally more than before, etc. Also, if you check out some reddits, it's crazy how generic many things are. Because of AI. I do agree wholeheartedly that we need to read more. And also, that AI can also be a very cool tool for giving some people more power in a way.
The em dash in particular is being used a lot more thanks to AI. It’s become one of those tells where people start to ask if it’s AI or not.
The em dash is famous but I've noticed since (I think) December every hustler suddenly at once started using drama dots.
Like... That. Rhetorical ellipsis. Like you see in a 12 year old's fanfic.
I know one of the AIs had a style change. I think Grok. But it started using drama dots so now they are everywhere.
And unlike the em dash, _nobody_ notices. _Nobody_ sees it.
2 replies →
Reddit is like 99% AI bots writing fake human-looking threads