Comment by mpalmer
5 hours ago
I've not really enjoyed finding out lately just how few people seem to notice what ought to be unmissable.
5 hours ago
I've not really enjoyed finding out lately just how few people seem to notice what ought to be unmissable.
I think it's partly because of where they come from to the problem.
I have education/experience in both literature and coding, I have a pragmatic starting point when approaching text while also being able to recognize stylistic oddities, so I get to be the guy editing out AIsms sometimes.
But I've helped other people copywrite where their environment was all org-speak and academic writing, and AIsms don't really stand out in that case. AI is effectively "doing the right thing" writing the way it does for those tasks. Even tho the right thing is often a bad thing.
those people will also start adopting the AIsm and will become indistinguishable.
AI adopted humanisms, we just weren’t used to seeing them at the same scale we do today.
Diversity of writing styles was part of that, but I’d point to vernacular exposure as the larger component. We’re going to go through a period where we try to adapt to a form of “Universal English” for those of us who read primarily English writing.
Other languages’ readers may be experiencing the same dissonance when they come across AI-generated prose in their native language (but I’ll let others validate /reject my hypothesis).
> we just weren’t used to seeing them at the same scale we do today.
I think there's also a lot of recency bias in it. The same thing that makes you suddenly notice how many people are driving the same model car you just looked at, or how many ads there are for Turbo Encabulators after you read an article about them. A lot of the "tells" people picked out in early AI are tells because they're also really common in the material that the AI was trained on and the styles it was made to emulate. But until everyone wanted "one quick trick" to pick out AI writings, people didn't have any particular reason to need to notice those tells and so they slipped under the radar.
It's like people learning a new language according to the book. Those people sound foreign to a native speaker. If AI was trained on school books for grammar, then they too will sound odd to a native speaker even if their output is technically fine or technically more proper. I known nothing of LLM training and how weighting is applied to educational content vs other sources, but it feels like they were weighted away from modern colloquial speak and towards book grammar. The whole thing reminds me of school literature classes where the teachers comments always felt like I was being guided to a more strained sound and less natural. But what do I know. Lit was my least favorite subject which is well evidenced by my grades compared to my math/science scores.
This is right. AI is using human speech, but just doing so in a consistently peculiar way. The em-dash in particular is frustrating, because it's all over high-quality, pre-2022 academic work. But now instead of proper and erudite it's seen as AI-slop. Well, maybe if they didn't use it — all — time — ! It's even an auto-replacement in Word and can be (by one's choice) in LibreOffice, replacing three dashes (and two is replaced by an en-dash).
But when I submit a novel with em-dashes, will sloppy agents and sloppy editors be able to tell that em-dash was deliberately put there by me?