Comment by hnlmorg
21 hours ago
Some people wrote like that before LLMs polluted the water.
Just like people used em dashes before LLMs.
I used bullet points heavily before LLMs.
21 hours ago
Some people wrote like that before LLMs polluted the water.
Just like people used em dashes before LLMs.
I used bullet points heavily before LLMs.
I felt personally attacked when LLMs came out: I'm an avid user of "—", bullets, numbered lists, and the word "delve". It's been a miserable couple of years.
Many many years ago I wrote a book for Apress, and the style guide for that instilled in me a lot of practices that now make my writing feel LLM-ish to some readers:
- Use bulleted lists, but always introduce and conclude a list with prose; a list can't immediately follow a heading or end a section.
- Use a mix of long and short sentences; in long sentences with parentheticals, use a mix of commas, parens, semicolons, and em dashes.
- With multiple continuous blocks of prose that aren't naturally broken up by an illustration or heading, start a paragraph with an inline bold statement to help anchor the reader.
LLMs write like that because people wrote like that. Enough, unfortunately for my remaining love of humanity, to cause the LLMs to adopt the quirk.
I know. That’s my point.
People talk about LLM writing style like it’s a unique butterfly and humans don’t write that they. But we do. Which is why LLMs do too.
I still use bullets extensively. You can easily tell when a human writes them when they are trees instead of lists.
I don't think even that is a reliable indicator because I'm currently reviewing an LLM generated bullet tree right now.
Oh interesting. Before the LLM craze, I only ever saw good bullet trees in legalese and git commit messages. The trainwrecks were far more likely to be the rare attempt by HR in a big email or in the odd Jira epic by a PM.
I wouldn't think LLMs would have much to train on. I still see some bad ones, but I don't feel like the quality ratio or overall quantity has changed. I do see more bullet lists though.
For sure, but I don't think I'm going to give Vercel benefit of the doubt that they aren't writing their copy with an LLM.