Posted by chmaynard 12 hours ago
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.
> 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.)
Shoot me now.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
A 5m search got me the following:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49410941
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411042
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49059571
This thread, in particular, stands out - reader makes the claim that Pangram found that the US constitution was 100% AI generated, when others tried they found 0% (or close to it) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48378191
I feel that if one doesn't want to send that message, they shouldn't be attempting to convince others that rejection of AI prose must stop.
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.
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.
>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.
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"?)
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.
Is there something about tuning for desirable qualities that forces LLMs to have this voice?
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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
Does that make sense?
The second transcribed considerable information bandwidth through intentionally structured word choice for maximal density.
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.
Always a pleasure reading Bryan's writing; it's like Bryan is sitting there with you and saying the words (hard to convey the feeling).
I tried searching for good opensource / reasonably priced alternatives, pangram themselves even have some of their older architecture and training data on github/hugging face, but i never got that working reliably enough.
Having dealt with Enterprise Hardware(TM) in a previous job, it’s refreshing simply to see someone look at that pile of crap and go “it doesn’t have to be that way” and then actually set out to prove it.
Glad those words proved prophetic!
[0] https://rustfoundation.org/media/how-the-rust-standard-libra...
AAUGH IT BURNS
Yes, quantity famously has a quality all its own, but perhaps not where correctness checks for something this central is concerned.
I wonder if that idea could be modernized now for this.
Unfortunately, it's not a browser extension and doesn't seem to have an API. I'd make a browser extension for this myself if it didn't involve paying for expensive Pangram usage.
IMHO a big problem with Pangram in particular is that they market it as a reliable tool that can be used to catch students cheating. This can obviously have disastrous effects on young lives, because it is not as reliable as they suggest.
Per their own benchmarks, they do not achieve 100% accuracy even on text that is published on the Internet, and which is likely encoded into the models themselves.
There is validity to their goals, but that is overshadowed by the irresponsible way in which it is marketed.
(All of this, swirling in a context where students are being told that they absolutely must become proficient at using LLMs to do exactly this kind of work by the highest levels of state and federal governments, faculty leadership, as well as the leaders of the workforce into which they hope to graduate. The message to youth is extremely muddled at best.)
I'm not entirely against using AI to help content creators improve their narrative, like finding common storytelling mistakes. But that's very different than using yourself as merely an avatar for LLM content.
To me, the glaring question is: What are we doing? The act of writing exists to 1) externalize and organize one's own thoughts for the purpose of considering and revising those thoughts; and 2) share one's own thoughts with other minds.
When we hand writing to a machine, we hand thinking to a machine, denying both our humanity and our role in the conversation.
No. I have good anecdata: readers cannot reliably distinguish my own prose from LLM-written one apart from cases where LLMs use odd metaphors or one of their specific patterns. I've been specifically experimenting with that.
It's driving me nuts, I constantly have to prompt it to "explain in plain, simple English"
Schwitzgebel, Strasser, and Crosby fine-tuned GPT-3 on Dennett's corpus and asked whether readers could pick Dennett's real answers to ten philosophical questions from four machine-generated alternatives, with no cherry-picking beyond mechanical length filters. Even Dennett experts averaged only 5.1 out of 10 (well below the 80% the authors predicted), blog readers got 4.8, and lay participants barely beat chance — though experts did rate Dennett's answers as more Dennett-like overall. Schwitzgebel stresses this isn't a Turing test (one-shot text is far easier to fake than extended interaction), but argues it foreshadows a future where machine outputs are humanlike enough that their moral status becomes genuinely uncertain, motivating his "Design Policy of the Excluded Middle": build machines that clearly lack moral status or clearly have it, not ambiguous ones in between.
My own take is : don't focus on the symbols on paper. focus on the facts about the world it is talking about. Isn't objectivity all about the facts? In future AI will have all the memory about what I have already read and it will just furnish the delta new information in the blog/writing so that I don't spend time on refreshing what I already know.
It's common enough that it's training me to recognize and recoil from AI tics through sheer classical conditioning.
If a person reads AI generated text and does not notice, they by definition will not know about it.
There have been numerous cases of people accessing human created content as being AI.
There are instances where it seems relatively uncontroversial that it is AI generated, but without knowing both the amount of AI content people are exposed toand the amount that they register I don't think you can draw a conclusion of the overall state.
I do think the sensitivity to it can vary a lot: it depends a lot on how much and how closely you read the text, and how much exposure you have to LLM writing. Certainly it seems like a lot of people just don't really notice, or at least don't care much.
This is just "em dash redux." Except now we've moved on to accusing anyone who does "It's not X. It's Y." of being AI. In six months, it'll be "use of the word 'petrichor'" or something.
(TBH I think the biggest likelihood for false positives comes from heavy LLM users picking up their tics: it's a natural tendency and I've already seen a few cases where it seems like that has happened).
I'm also not reading pumpkin spice murder mysteries for a similar reason. I'm also not reading stories where everybody clapped. Actually, I'm already familiar with petrichor, so unless someone has surrounded the word "petrichor" with non-cliché prose, I'm also not going to read all that.
https://github.com/ucsandman/declick/blob/main/README.md
Please let me know if you
(a) believe this is human prose
(b) enjoy reading this prose
(c) would enjoy reading 100 READMEs like this.
https://github.com/prathish-ks/isthmus/blob/main/README.md
https://github.com/prathish-ks/isthmus/blob/main/docs/thesis...
https://github.com/prathish-ks/isthmus/blob/main/docs/host-d...
https://github.com/prathish-ks/isthmus/blob/main/docs/threat...
https://github.com/prathish-ks/isthmus/blob/main/docs/threat...
https://github.com/prathish-ks/isthmus/blob/main/docs/baseli...
But Wait, There's More!
https://github.com/prathish-ks/isthmus/tree/main/docs
What—do—you—think————is this human?
LLM writing is verbose and meandering, but people are making a much bigger deal over this stuff than necessary for virtue signalling purposes. You don't want to read someone else's LLM writing? Get a summary of the page from yours. No time wasted, no pretentious posturing, and you don't make the error of assuming because the piece was written by an LLM that there was no thought put into the subject or there's no value in what is being communicated.
This statement does not logically cohere. "We can spot it because so many people make it easy to spot." You don't see how this is just petitio principii in action?
Maybe some people stop reading LLM slop purely because it violates their moral principles or whatever but most people bail out because slop is mentally painful to read. If you are a human and you write like today’s AI find a different writing style, not because reads like AI, but because it reads like shit.
There are lots of people who belong to the above groups, sure, but at least here in Germany Nazi is now applied to basically anyone who doesn't vote green, it's ridiculous.