Comment by antonvs
2 days ago
It’s the repetitiveness of style, the attempt to make everything seem as impactful as possible, the use of short sentences (too much Hemingway in the training data?), and obvious patterns like “it’s not this, it’s that” and several others.
Real human writing doesn’t follow such strict rules. When the same small set of rules is applied over and over throughout a text, it becomes obviously strange and machine-like.
Wikipedia's own "Signs of AI Writing" page distills it nicely:
I blame RLHF entirely for this. Nobody used to talk like AI speech before.
What's weird though is how consistent it is, even across models to some extent. Were the RLHF people given a really specific style guide?
While I agree that no-one used to write like that as a whole before, all the elements can be found in different places. Short sentences to avoid discouraging poor readers. Maximally impactful statements are commonly used in marketing or other business communication that's focused on selling what it's saying. A bullet-pointy style is used in many kinds of business communication. Etc.
It makes me wonder if part of what happened was a kind of melding of common styles from several different kinds of writing.
So is it the LLM or us that's getting the RLHF? /s