Posted by joozio 13 hours ago
And I've definitely used it when I can't remember that one stinking word that I know exists and is perfect for this occasion.
"hey robot give me every word even mildly related to $SOME_SENSE_ON_THE_TIP_OF_MY_TOUNGE" is a wildly satisfying and underrated experience.
As English is not my first language, I do run into problem where the line between fix my clumsy sentence and rewrite my thought is very thin. Same with writing "boring" technical explanation and more approachable content. I'm getting pushed back for both.
Any native English speaker who doesn’t live under a rock is very accustomed to reading and hearing English from non-native speakers and familiar with the common quirks and mistakes. English is quite forgiving as a language, we understand you. When in doubt, simplify it.
it's a couple mutually-conflicting languages in a trenchcoat; forgiveness and flexibility are perhaps its defining properties.
To the broader issue: "polish" (in any language) is only valuable insofar as it makes the ideas clearer, attests to innate qualities of the author and/or the investment of their time, or carries its own aesthetic value. As LLMs make (a certain kind of polish) cheap to produce, the value of the middle category attenuates to nothing.
this work is paramount. Without clear evidence of human filtering, a long, well formatted message/PR/doc is likely to reduce my estimate of the value/veracity/relevance of its content.
For years, even before LLMs, there have been trends of varied popularity to, for lack of a better word, regress - intentionally omitting capitalization, punctuation, or other important details which convey meaning. I rejected those, and likewise I reject the call to omit the emdash or otherwise alter my own manner of speaking - a manner cultivated through 30+ years of reading and writing English text.
If content is intellectually lacking, call that out, but I am absolutely sick of people calling out writing because they "think it's LLM-written". I'm sick of review tools giving false positives and calling students' work "AI written" because they used eloquent words instead of Up Goer Five[0] vocabulary.
I am just as afraid of a society where we all dumb ourselves down to not appear as machines as I am of one where machine-generated spam overtakes all human messaging.
That should leave you with media sources like nyt and your local library, which seems healthier to me. And maybe it might encourage a new type of forum to emerge where there is some decentralized vetting that you are a human, like verifying by inputting the random hash posted outside the local maker space.
I hope editorial departments everywhere are taking careful notes on the ars technica fiasco. Agree there's room for some kind of quick "verified human" checkmark. It would at least give readers the ability to quickly filter, and eliminate all the spurious "this sounds like vibeslop" accusations.
It does not resembles that. It is usually grammatically correct writing, but it is also pretty ineffective writing bad writing with good gramar.
Let's grab a few books off the shelf (literally).
Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has four emdashes on the very first page:
> It is also the story of a book, a book called THGTTG - not an Earth book, never...
Isaac Asimov's classic The Last Question: three emdashes on the first page (as printed in The Complete Stories, Volume I)
> ...they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face -- miles and miles of face -- of that giant computer.
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves: Three emdashes on page 1
> Much like its subject, The Navidson Record itself is also uneasily contained -- whether by category or lection.
Robert Caro, Master of the Senate: Five emdashes on page one
> Its drab tan damask walls...were unrelieved by even a single touch of color -- no painting, no mural -- or, seemingly, by any other ornament
Other pages 1s:
* Murakami - 1Q84: 1
* Murray/Cox - Apollo: 1
* Meadows - Thinking in Systems: 1
* Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov (Pevear/Volokhonsky translation): 4
* Caro - The Power Broker: 5
* Hofstadter - Godel, Escher, Bach - 3
Honestly, when I started this post I expected to have to dig deeper than page 1. The emdash is an important part of English-language literature and I reject the claim that we should ignore all writing that contains it.
Secondarily, I think there's a part of the discourse missing: the presence of a syntactic emdash in a sentence on the internet is not itself a strong signal of LLM-writing - but the presence of an actual emdash glyph (—) should raise some eyebrows, esp. in fora that aren't commonly authored in rich text editors (here, twitter, ...)
(option-underscore, or option-shift-dash if you prefer to think of it that way)
On iOS, you can type it by simply holding down on the "dash" button then selecting the em-dash from the list of options it presents. It may also correct double-dash to em-dash a lot of the time, not sure.
I have used the correct em-dash everywhere I can for over a decade, which amounts to nearly everywhere.
You're trading ability and competence for convenience.
should be:
>Although 80% of the content was my own writing, the fact that it was run through an LLM engine for grammar and vocabulary cross-checking meant that it failed the "probably written by AI" metric, and it was rejected.
1. 80 % -> 80%
2. in -> through
3. a LLM -> an LLM
4. enginee -> engine
5. cross-check -> cross-checking
6. cross-checking, -> cross-checking (removed the comma)
7. made it failed -> meant that it failed, (or "made it fail" depending on whether you want to preserve the past tense or preserve the word "made")
8. probable -> probably
9. by AI " -> by AI"
10. ; and it was -> , and it was (no need for a semicolon when linking with a conjunction like "and", and I would consider another word or phrase such as ", and, as a result, it was rejected" to emphasize the causal relationship between the clauses)
Relying on AI for editing seems to have atrophied the author's writing if that is what he or she thinks is worth publishing on a blog like this. I would suggest practicing editing your own work and not even thinking about passing it through AI (especially when you were told not to use any AI!) to edit for a while. Given that English is not your first (or even second or third) language, I would also suggest having a native speaker with some demonstrable writing skill review your writing and give feedback on how to make it more idiomatic. For example, writing being "run through an LLM" rather than "run in an LLM" is a relatively subtle difference compared to the others, and it's very very common for preposition mistakes like this to show up when writing in another language than your first. I am still hopeless with French prepositions.
Just like hand made items are popular for their imperfections.
Personally, I'll just continue to use my own voice. I try to correct spelling and grammar mistakes, and proof-read my writing before posting.
It's not perfect, and my writing can at times be idiosyncratic, but it's my voice and it's all I've got left.
But don't be mistaken in thinking that those mistakes make it better, it just makes it mine.
eg: https://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=SAAM-2011.6_1
from: https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/mandara-79001 https://www.museumofglass.org/ltlg
I want real humans giving real human opinions not ai giving their best opinion on what is the most "rewarding" weighted opinion
The structured thing you mention is the one that bugs me most. I genuinely think that most human writing would be improved by having more of the "signposts" that LLMs overuse. Headings, context-setting sentences, bullet points where appropriate, etc. I was doing "list of bullet points with boldfaced intro for each one" before the LLMs were. But because the LLMs are saturating their writing with it, we'll all learn to take it as a sign of glib superficiality and inauthenticity, and typical good human writing will start avoiding everything of that kind, and therefore get that little bit harder to read. Alas.
And I was just noticing that my home-built blog render pipeline produces dumb quotes and that was embarrassing to me. Needs to be fixed.
(Counterpoint, dumb quotes are 7-bit clean and paste nicely... Hmm.)
I wrote a plugin for my blog that converts all hyphens (surrounded by whitespace) into em-dashes.
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Dec/a-proclamation-regardi...
(That Wikipedia table shows that too by the way.)
1. There was a lot of slop pre-AI. In fact I’d say the majority of published writing was bad, formulaic, and just written to manipulate your emotions. So in some sense, I don’t really think pre-AI slop had more value. It’s just cheaper to make now.
2. AI has prompted me to study more off-beat writers that followed the rules of language a little less frequently. This includes a lot of people from circa 1890-1970, when experimenting with form was really in vogue.
3. Which brings me to my third point, which is that no matter how much the AI actually knows about writing, the person prompting it is limited by their own education and knowledge of writers. You can’t say, “make me a post in the style of Burroughs” if you don’t know who Burroughs was, or what his writing style was. So in a sense there is an increased importance to being educated about writing itself. Without it you’re limited in your ability to use AIs to write stuff and in your awareness of how much your non-AI written work is influenced by AI writing.