If you can't spend the time to write it, why should anyone read it?
Everything I post is from my own finger tips, only to get a reply from someone using a bot. I'm tired.
100%. We're producing more content, faster, than ever before but ... most of it is just click-producing garbage that won't stand the test of time.
Maybe humans can adapt to care about generated content and treat it with the same emotional weight that human communication has. I don't know if that's good or not.
E.g. in one country, 21% of high school students do not even achieve “sufficient reading literacy”…
So the question should be - what are we going to do with this? LLM can produce texts but we as people will not be able to understand anyway…
About PISA research for example here: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/reading-ability-craters-on...
LLM generated text oftentimes just do not have the point to be understood. LLM is training you to NOT read, because trying to do close reading of LLM generated text is usually a mistake. There is no deeper there. Either it was correct on the surface things or it is a gibberish.
That's actually a legitimate question, and one I've been thinking about, as I've been using LLM tools to compile factual information based on various search tools it uses. The workflow gets sources, fact checks them, filters them according to my needs, and gives me clean urls for source information to hand off to an editor for writing a short listing. It's very hard for the editor to do a much better job at this type of writing; the real benefit of the work was in the research, which was handled by the LLM. The rest is basically just putting the facts in the right order, with some guidance on style, preferred word choices, etc. I'm not comfortable with this at all, as giving work to an LLM that a human could do strikes me as wrong. But using LLM tools gives me a big competitive advantage (for now), in the space I'm doing this in.
Where does this feeling come from? Is it just because the work is complex? We’re all (excepting maybe the amish) comfortable with using at least some automation, be it mechanical or digital, elsewhere in our lives
What’s preventing the editor from using one of your prompts/tooling and replacing you entirely?
There’s zero value in sharing ai-generated output unless your ai has access to something nobody else’s does on which to base things. If all it’s doing is web research you should share your prompt instead. That way people don’t have to deal with ai-written walls of text.
Well, they don't have the many other pieces of the business in place that makes this work meaningful. They certainly could try, though. If they succeeded, this aspect wouldn't be what made the difference, though.
Because the value of writing are not the words on a piece of paper but the idea they convey.
Politicians speech are not worth listening too because they have a copywriter polish them?
Teacher assistant homeworks are not worth to do, because they are made by a TA and not by the course professor?
Of course there are writing as: "Hey ChatGPT write me a piece around coding with LLMs" and yeah, those are not worth reading.
But most of the writing is usually, these are the ideas, this is how the idea are structured together, now let's review them and then let's get a nice prose out of it.
It often makes them less informative and a lot less sincere.
On one hand I'm like, yeah fair enough it needed writing and something is better than nothing.
On the other I know nobody wants to read it now because it's just word vomit rather than how a human would write something they'd like another human to read.
I hate it so much.
One person was arguing that they need llm because english isn't their first language and then it helps them write better and be understood. I was incapable of reading their (extremely long) email of arguments; I tried but my mind just went elsewhere as my eyes were moving through the lines.
At the very end there was a disclaimer that llm had been used to "aid" in writing that very email.
Poor guy thinks he's communicating better but all he's doing is making his emails completely unreadable. It's a sad state of affairs.
Because the information in the post could be valuable regardless of human or LLM involvement.
I treat it the same way I treat human writing: by speed reading most of the article so I can find the points the author is trying to make and decide whether I should read the entire thing.
I love reading, but I mostly read non-fiction and I'm a bit of an amateur history buff. Last time I read a fiction book I was left feeling like I was preached to by an alien about how life doesn't really matter (sci-fi authors will often do that). The state of literature is pretty dire.
Just make your own tree of material to read. You should have a couple dozen writers/journalists you admire, look at who these people read then start reading those people, then you repeat the cycle.
Don't waste your time reading anything new, most new things are bad. Most ideas we struggle with, are ideas we have been discussing since the written record was invented out of necessity.
Anything new worth reading will assuredly make your way to you if you are at all connected.
They can even retrieve articles you link to and check that you aren't misrepresenting them.
For instance, if I said the grass is green vs if I said the grass looks nice vs if I said the grass is doing well and looks how it should vs if I said in my opinion the grass is healthier than its ever been.
Is there anybody on this site who isn't?
LLMs have absolutely terrible taste when it comes to writing. I don't find their feedback useful at all, beyond trivial spelling/grammar mistakes, which you don't really need an LLM for in the first place.
Proofreading is all you need.
Edit: I do sometimes ask an LLM for a fact-check, though.
In general use today, AI primarily functions as a stupidity amplifier: it empowers dumb people to do dumb things more pervasively, with less effort, and at unprecedented scale.
We're moving into an era of artificially enhanced stupidity.
We both agree that they are poor "make it better" machines, but I also believe they are bad A/B testers and I'm using the former to demonstrate the latter.
He also uses rule of three and the phrase "load-bearing", just for fun, which elicited a wry smile from me.
Thanks OP for a pleasant start to my day!
Does anyone know about "Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace" ? Seems like an interesting book
But my all-time favorite is Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. It illustrates the variety of English sentence structures in an ordered way with a plethora of examples. The approach is not prescriptive; rather, it allows you inductively to develop a feel for the syntactical rhythms of the language.
Also, I love Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. It’s a lovely, entertaining little book, filled with Fish’s insights as an eminent literary critic. What I appreciate most about the book is that Fish walks you through a number of examples and explains how and why they work, so you can walk away as both a better writer and a better reader.
I know someone in a profession that does a lot of writing, and it blew my mind how clearly feedback was communicated by a superior. Made me wish tech people had better written communication skills. ;-;
another iteresting thing models can do is to highlight and notice themes and motifs in a piece. I find that helpful when thinking about a piece of work. Might be obvious ones, sometimes it can be subtle themes. Good for stirring your own brain.
In the extreme these can be annoying, but more often I find them kinda charming, as an expression of the author's personality.
If you want to improve your writing, read more.