Comment by kierangill
7 hours ago
My revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text. A trope typically indicates I’m in for an uphill read.
I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1].
> Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes:
> > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
> Orwell's version goes:
> > Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
> First notice how the two passages look. The first one at the top invites us to read it. The words are short and have air around them; they convey the rhythms of human speech. The second one is clotted with long words. It tells us instantly that a ponderous mind is at work. We don't want to go anywhere with a mind that expresses itself in such suffocating language. We don't even start to read.
In contemporary YouTube-script wording:
> The Ecclasiast looked under the sun, but there was something he didn't understand. Something that wasn't right. Something that was not as it was supposed to be. And here is what the Ecclesiast didn't understand. Here is what nobody understood. Not then. Not in the years that followed. Not now. It was not the swift who won the race. Not the strong who won the battle. Not the wise who earned the bread. Not the men of understanding who gained the riches. Not the men of skill who gained the favor. And here is what I found: to any story of success, there is an element of unpredictability and chance.
(There are really just two possible outcomes: either the article is right or in, say, two years, we will be all writing and talking like this, as in humans learning from mediamatically reinforced human feedback.)
> in, say, two years, we will be all writing and talking like this
Shoot me now.
Very depressing, and I believe it.
I am a bit of a luddite in this domain and have so far managed to resist the lure of using the generator to expand my thoughts, and I still catch myself writing "it's not just an X it's a Y" and other generator type tells. If it infecting my patterns it is totally entering the wider subconscious as "How to write" (Sighs)
I think Orwell did a great job there actually.
Despite its bizarre look, the sentence is evocative and eloquent. It does make me get a clear mental image from the very first word. It leaves little room for roaming and guessing, as it firmly nails elements one by one, and, by the time I reach the end of the sentence, I get the full meaning almost immediately.
This sentence is not randomly written; this is crafted with intention. TBH, it would take me hours, if not days, to write a sentence this much condensed and easy to understand. I seriously like it.
Perhaps, this is more about context -- which style to use in which situation. I'm only guessing here, but, since Orwell is offering an interpretation, he probably chose to be more clinical. He probably had a point to make and didn't want to risk vagueness up-front.
Well, I can tell what sort of angle you most enjoy. Anyways -- I think there is GOOD writing and BAD writing, but only subjectively. So if you enjoy it, power to you. It's certainly not random, but it is the sort of verbosity that turns off 99 percent of the people that would read it given a comparison. I find the former rather eloquent.
When I read the Orwell's version, I immediately had the same feeling I had when reading mathematical proofs. I hate so much to hunt the preceding text for anaphora resolution... It's just such a bad and pretentious way of writing. It's hostile to the reader with the side of flaunting author's superiority.
It's like having to sit through a party with acclaimed academics: every single one is so full of themselves, they will constantly one-up each other by belittling everyone in their workplace s.a. to make you feel how great of an intellect they possess and how much more they would accomplish, had they not been surrounded by all these bumbling idiots.
My take is that the generated stuff is terrible for communications.
It feels great to use, direct your machine minion to fill out your thoughts for you, but holy hell does it suck to be on the receiving end. Least of all is the disrespect, they don't care enough to even talk to you but worse is having to try and reason through that big incoherent blob.
Probably to only reasonable thing to do is to try and get your own mechanical agents to produce summaries. Inventing the lossy expansion algorithm(like compression but things get bigger on the wire), And we wept.
Now I am all depressed because it is probably inevitable, apparently thinking is hard and in general people are all to happy to outsource it to the machines.
I came to this post and saw that Orwell had forgotten to mention money as the prerequisite of success, which was very unlike him.
The problem is not the LLM prose appearing everywhere, it's the legions of AI-boosters appearing in every thread attacking anyone who complains.
Apparently, even though they want to spew AI prose everywhere, they want it read by humans, not by other bots, so when a few holdout places are insisting that prose be human authored they fight very hard against the rule.
I don't think I've ever seen someone on HN say that. Many people would say that AI makes them more productive at coding, not that the output is nice to read.
> I don't think I've ever seen someone on HN say that.
A 5m search got me the following:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48378191
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I would say that AI prose is often still a bit iffy, but I would disagree with anyone who would want to argue that this is any indication that AI prose will always be bad in the future.
i am a big fan of llms and the possibilities they enable. but i also find this type of behavior extremely rude! ai;dr for life. :is-your-human-around: is my preferred emoji for reacting to such behavior
The problem is that the AI commenters ironically want human readers for their generated content.
I feel that if you want humans to read your stuff, those humans insisting that you write your own stuff is not an unreasonable position to take.
Orwell's entire essay (Politics and the English Language) is well worth reading if you haven't before:
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
(I'm guessing Zinsser's comments are from "On Writing Well", which you can also find online even though it is still under copyright.)
It's a bit of a pet peeve when people include quotes on a blog post without linking or otherwise references their source.
But Orwell's rule 4 should be ignored:
>iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Orwell himself routinely ignores it, even in the first sentence of the essay:
>Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.
The second clause could be rewritten in active voice by changing it to "but people generally assume". But this would make the writing worse, and Orwell, as a good writer, probably didn't even consider the option of making it worse, and therefore didn't notice the passive voice.
Passive voice is an essential tool for all good writers of English. I always give the example of the opening of Pride and Prejudice [0]:
>It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
The joke doesn't work in active voice. If you attribute this acknowledgement to some specific group of people then it's simply false, not a comedic exaggeration.
[0]: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42671
Technically, I think, that first sentence, by Austen, uses a passive participle but does not use a passive voice for any finite verb. I don't think that advice to avoid "the passive" is intended to apply to that situation.
For example, nobody would seriously suggest avoiding the passive participle in a sentence like "Put the broken plate in the bin". ("Put the plate that someone broke into the bin"?)
> It's a bit of a pet peeve when people include quotes on a blog post without linking or otherwise references their source.
You’re peeved with good reason. It’s the blog equivalent of posting a screenshot of an article to social media. People, please post your sources! In the age of misinformation, that’s more important than ever.
Why dont they train LLMs not to speak like that? Is it some tragedy of the commons here?
You ever wonder why recent claude models speak in riddles? I dunno, maybe all those "rare" books? They may have been rare for a reason.
LLMs get a lot of finetuning, but I suspect there are two things that can cause this kind of writing:
Firstly, some parts of the RLHF involve human graders on the LLM's performance. I suspect their general bias towards a punchy, persuasive writing style could come from what biases the graders towards preferring that response, especially in shorter segments and when the grader is not focused on writing style
Secondly, later parts of the finetuning involve reinforcement learning on achieving certain tasks which are automatically graded: stuff like coding tasks. I think this can create a kind of feedback loop where the style drifts further, and you get the kind of LLM tics which are even more extreme (it might be that they incidentally help somehow with the actual tasks, or it might be a drift that comes from the grader also now being an LLM or some of this finetuning happening on output from other models). The more recent claude models seem to suffer from this a lot, moreso than earlier ones.
A bigger question I'm interested in is why do LLMs speak like that in the first place? Is that really what you get if you took the average of the English language? It would be difficult for me to believe that.
Is there something about tuning for desirable qualities that forces LLMs to have this voice?
They are certainly trying to
english is my second, third language, and i understood the second immediately, but not the first. go figure.
It appears LLMs are much better at writing during a debate than when explicitly asked to write. The moment LLMs are tasked with composing a blog article or intro for a book they introduce all the nuances that identify the output as AI slop.
Am I the only one that finds the second one much easier to parse?
The first is of course from the King James Bible which for centuries was essentially a standard that all English speaking peoples aspired to. If you find that version difficult I would expect much literary writing before the 1940s also seems difficult. This is just to say I recommend reading the King James even if you are an atheist, as I am.
I also have to say that the first strikes me as being written by someone that might be smarter than I am, the second as being written by someone significantly less intelligent than I, yet somehow placed by society in a position of authority over me.
In the context of newly written work in the modern era, I would argue it's best to use grammatical constructions that are used in modern 20th/21st century English, at least most of the time. Those who wrote the KJV were trying to be expressive but the whole point was to do so in language that ordinary people would be familiar with.
> the first strikes me as being written by someone that might be smarter than I am
This is why Joseph Smith tried to imitate the language of the King James Bible in the Book of Mormon, albeit not very successfully.
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Yeah, I found Orwell's easier to understand and quite fast to read as well, but I think it's just because of the style of writing of the first one. It's from an earlier style of prose that I'm just not used to.
I also don't have a problem with large words as long as I'm well familiar with the words. The length of a word has nothing to do with the complexity of its meaning. We just have a limit to the number of pronounceable combinations of 5 letters.
I had to reread the first one but I wanted to read it! The second one was understood on the first scan but was a chore to read.
Does that make sense?
The second one was very clear and to the point. Parsing it was rewarded with instant understanding and I enjoyed the word choice. The first one was just annoying; I could tell it was just listing a bunch of pointless analogies to try to make its point sound more grandiose so I immediately started skimming, and didn't come away feeling like it meant much other than "we all die in the end". The second one made an actual point and was the one that made me want to read it. The first one was the chore for me.
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That was exactly my experience, and I found it to be a little bit depressing.
I wonder if this is due to experience with reading technical documentation?
I think the second requires deeper concentration, but is still quite readable compared to the kind of low-content engagement / SEO stuff one read on the internet even before LLMs
The grammar is more straightforward. It has some extraneous words, and makes conspicuously bad choices of vocabulary, but it's still a more direct statement.
This is why almost 100% of hard and social scientific discourse reads almost exactly like this these days.
I found it an improvement too
Second helped explain the first, appreciated having both (but I’m no genius or nothin’).
Other translations keep Zinsser's preferred lack of fuzz but avoid using "is ... to" for possession.
For example, the Lexham English Bible:
> I looked again and saw under the sun that the race does not belong to the swift, the battle does not belong to the mighty, food does not belong to the wise, wealth does not belong to the intelligent, and success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all of them.
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Seconded
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