A model trained to minimize statistical prediction errors is going to sound ... predictable (aka boring). A (good) human author tries to keep their writing interesting, while an LLM strives for predictable instead.

It's not just predicting content but also the form/shape of the response, highly shaped by RLHF preferences, which seems to encourage longer form responses which need padding with filler to generate the "preferred" amount of verbiage.

It seems most of these models have been trained to interpret questions as wanting a long-form authoritative/comprehensive-sounding response (even when midwit filler is all it has to offer), rather than initiating a short-turn conversation which would better allow you to steer the conversation. Apparently Muse is much better in this regard, but so far I've resisted signing up for any Meta/FaceBook service, and not inclined to break this winning streak!

Don't these sort of conflict with being "aggressively pro AI"?

> how awful everything is to read lately > flooded with AI generated content, all of it terrible > everything sounding identical and everything being a rambling unconcise mess.

I can see the benefits of AI and enjoy using the technology - but, like many have said, it's wreaking havoc on the "content" that's out there nowadays. Gotta take some bad with the good, I suppose.

Agree but also want to point out that this started with the SEO boom of the last decade where sites started rambling so they would keep you on the site longer and get more SEO "points", they were articles meant for a robot to catch humans.

AI has made it even worse and lots of content on the web, for both these reasons, is not worth you time (now wonder users don't read most of the text on our apps!)

I suspect it’s partially an average / regression to mean.

If you built a model only based on long form journalism and The New Yorker voice, including both the template structure of the article and the grammar and syntax, the model would replicate the patterns it is built upon. You could do the same for high vocabulary rap.

When you stuff all of English or all of human thought into it with somewhat equal weight, including very technical writing the sum is a lack of style and elegance and personality.

The second problem is that writing often doesn’t happen linearly. You write bookends and fill in, edit and revise. You sort of know where you’re going and can then make decisions how to get there. Language models may benefit from being redesigned to perform passes. Select a template of some sort, fill in the mad lib, then run a detail pass, then run a persuasion / emotion pass, then run a style pass. Current model writing very much sounds like I would expect autocomplete to.

> it's a mixture of everything sounding identical and everything being a rambling unconcise mess.

For me it's mostly the latter, which is a natural consequence of LLM writing. When the (time) cost-per-word goes down, there is less incentive to keep signal-to-noise ratio high, so it ends up verbose and bloated. I also believe that this is (at least partially) upstream from everything sounding identical: take two articles on two different subjects - when SNR is high, there isn't really much room for them to become similar (The ingredient list for a risotto will never read the same as the ingredient list for pizza), but when 80% of them is fluff, they can blend together more easily (To take the recipe comparison, this would be the background/story part above the recipe), especially when written by the same LLM

> sounding identical

In AI-generated entertainment, the names "Marcus", "Chloe", "Sterling", "Meridian", and "Apex" keep appearing. Those aren't common names, but LLMs seem to prefer them.

The part I find grating is the attempts to punch everything up. ("It's not X. It's Y"). Like, its a react badge component, it doesn't need punching up. You didn't find the smoking gun in a murder mystery, just a misplaced CSS rule.

How is someone "aggressively pro AI"? This is the first time I read such concept.

This applies to code btw, it's so much nicer to read a human made pull requests. It's also much faster as people tend to be lazy and produce denser code.

I’ve got the same bright red line for 2023. E.g. I treat a handful of youtube channels with long electronic jams almost like oldies at this point - keep listening to the same stuff from at least two years ago because it’s the authentically good stuff.

Do you have some personal financial or other incentive to be “aggressively pro AI”?

to AI verbosity and weird use of diction is natural, to humans it makes it hard to parse. The number of time i start reading long winded AI written design docs, and i just can't get into the flow after reading a few sentences and have to keep re reading certain sentences.

LLMs have made the internet unreadable. It used to be just Google search results were SEO-gamed empty prose, but now it's every blog post, news article, product announcement ... everything. I've stopped reading basically everything online except user comments on a few websites. It's the last place remaining to actually connect with other human minds, but even that seems like it won't last forever.

Personally, for blog posts, documentation (unless I flat out vibe code the entire thing) etc are all written by me by hand. If the model can save me hours of "oops that was really dumb of me" why can't I take time to read and document things by hand? I think everyone's embracing AI in the wrong ways. Maintain your knowledge of things, and keep the documents nice. There's still room for letting your agent manage agent specific docs, but for the humans, just write it yourself, ask the model for feedback and tweak it by hand. Let the machine talk to the machines.

Gentle reminder that most AI token spend is used for TPS report type writing not Cutting edge fiction writing. Creative writing, or general human-to-human communication was never really the target. It's not surprising the first majority use of this was code.

Endless headlines like, "aArON SORkIn SAYs hE WiLL Never UsE ai to WRite" doesn't change that base fact. No one asked him to, other than clickbait journalists.

If you find this hard to believe, just think about relative market sizes.

> I've also noticed how awful everything is to read lately.

Yeah, thanks dude. We appreciate your efforts to enshittify everything.

Edit: Sure, downvote, but the parent comment is really not very different from "arsonist puzzled and upset that so many buildings have burned down".