Posted by joozio 16 hours ago
Ha. Well I guess you did, _this time_.
Can we not just ask an AI to correct our spelling mistakes and leave the rest alone?
How is the author complaining about the quality of their own writing while admitting to not even bothering reading what they wrote, let alone editing it?
(Also, why would using a LLM based grammar checker trigger an AI writing detector? Did it end up rewriting substantial parts of the original submission?)
And that's, I think, a valid choice; you can choose to use all the tools and make something gramatically and stylistically as close to perfect, but who would want to read something as dry? That's for formal writing, and blog posts are not formal.
Not reading what you write smells more like laziness.
Same thing for spell checks, grammar checks, and even AI usage. If you use things lazily, the result will be lazy as well.
Instead of asking for an AI tool to write your thoughts in your place, you can write it yourself and ask it to criticize your text, instruct it to not rewrite anything, only give you an overall picture of text clarity, sentiment, etc.
But that of course would require more work. Asking ChatGPT to produce a text based on a lazily written, bullet point list of brainfarts is probably easier.
Plus, "lazy" would actually be just using AI to edit the writing.
LLM cant really do that. It can help you produce correct sentence where you struggle to create own, but it does not have capabilities to do what you suggest.
LLMs definitely can do this. The output tends to be overly positive though, claiming that any sort of rough draft you give them is "great, almost ready for publishing!". But the feedback you can get on clarity, narrative flow, weak spots... _is_ usually pretty good.
Now, following that feedback to the letter is going to end up with a diluted message and boring voice, so it's up to you to do with the feedback whatever you think best.
I never ask the LLM to evaluate my text in terms of being good or bad. Instead I try something like this:
"In this section I tried to explain X, I intended to sound in Y and Z fashion, and I want a reader to come out with ateast W impression. Is the text achieving these goals? Do I communicate my ideas clearly and consisely, or are they too confuse and meandering?"
I typically get useful feedback. I preface specifically asking it to not rewrite, simply pointing the bits that it finds faulty and explaining why.
Of course the prompt is different is I am writing, for example, technical documentation, or if it is an attempt at creative writing.
I used it many times for exactly this, with good results. It points out ambiguous contructs, parts that are dissonant from the tone I intend, etc.
I have no idea why you think that LLMs can't do that lol
There's nothing magical about a long text you write yourself vs a stream o reddit comments in a thread. It's all sentiment analysis on text. It can extract ambiguity, how ideas are connected in the context, categorize and summarize, etc.
You should try it and see it for yourself. Feed it some large text of a single author and ask it to do those things, see if the results are satisfactory.
> you can choose to use all the tools and make something gramatically and stylistically as close to perfect, but who would want to read something as dry
If it is dry, then it is not stylistically perfect. Per definition, dry writing is just an imperfect writing. Stylistically perfect writing does not have to be dry and usually is not dry.
What happens here is that people use "stylistically perfect" when they mean "followed a bad stylistic advice".
I do not mean this comment to be kick against AI. It is very good for some stuff, it is less good for other stuff. What annoys me is someone calling output superior while actually complaining about it being inferior.
Hey, maybe that llm needs to be used differently to achieve actually good writing results.
The problem is that it has a pretty high false positive rate. Maybe it thinks it's AI because there are absolutely no spelling mistakes. Or maybe you're French and you use latin-roots words in English that are considered "too smart" for the average writer.
And the problem is that people run those tools, see "80% chance to be written by AI", and instead of considering that 20% is high enough to consider you don't know, will assume it's definitely written by AI.
Grammarly has seriously started rewriting whole paragraphs recently, I have been having to reject more and more "prompts" where in the past I would accept them almost by default because they actually were Grammer checks.
Personally, I would recommend them to simple use any old editor with spellchecking enabled. That suffices for most writing where you just want to keep your own voice. To me, the red crinkly line just means that I should edit that word myself. In the rare case where I'm stumped on the spelling I'll look at the suggested edit of course, but never as a matter of course.
Computers, digital text, and digital information distribution/transportation have made writing and thoughts cheap. Arguably due to what we are surely all aware of, humans rarely value that which is cheap, whether monetarily or in effort and consequential qualities. What people seem reluctant or maybe unable to acknowledge is that predating the current AI Slop, was what could be called Human Slop, low quality, low effort, careless output that was cheap; regardless of whether AI slop now outperforms.
It is why you are justified in pointing out that even in the post complaining about AI Slop, the human has apparently abandoned what would have been common practice in just the recent past, using basic spellcheckers or simply reviewing what was written and also practicing with deliberation; the art and skill of writing, grammar, and sentence structure.
No one is perfect and that is also what makes anything human, somewhat inexplicable and random variation. However, it takes a certain refinement before unique human character becomes a positive quality and is not just humans being sloppy ... human slop.
https://www.literaturelust.com/post/what-writers-need-to-kno...
> Every NYT bestseller from 1960 to 2014 falls in the seventh-grade level spread, from 4th to 11th.
> ...
> Since 2000, only 2 bestsellers have scored higher than 9th-grade readability.
> ... ...
> The bestselling authors of our time are writing at the 4th-grade level.
> > “8 books tie for the lowest score,” a 4.4, just above 4th-grade level. Prolific, well-known authors with huge sales: James Patterson, Janet Evonvich, and Nora Roberts.”
> These three authors have written a combined total of 419 books.
The article here is still full of AI slop, and so many people in the comments are defending the author. Blows my mind.
you are missing the writing era, which is gone. whatever we have now will slowly congeal into cold grue that will get a name or names
the madness of bieng chastised for speakerphoning and disturbing people gulping the slop
what do we call that?
What it is going to be is a 'Slop Decade' - a much better label if you insist on having one.
"Save during the summers and you'll make it through the winters".
Several subreddits became AI slop submission repositories and their human engagement dwindled. Some subreddits that were inundated with AI slop implemented policies that ban it, and it seems to work well.
Strict no slop policies work, and surprisingly, so do rules that require AI submissions to be tagged as AI. Forcing slop slingers to tag their slop does a good job at discouraging said slop, it turns out that admitting your slop is slop is embarrassing or something.
Or maybe there'll be the elite enjoying the world, while the rest of us have to work manual labor. But at least it'll be AI systems ensuring our compliance!