I think we should start to shift away from pure concern that a text is written by AI and toward strictly rewarding better writing. I realize that only some of this involves literal pattern matching against annoying AI ticks that grate like fingernails on a chalkboard.<p>But moving forward the goal should remain that writing should be comprehensible and not overly reliant on templates and other annoyances.<p>[edit] some good disagreements here which I appreciate. Thanks! I am continuing to think about this.
To be honest, if I am given any reason to suspect someone put less effort into writing something than they expect me to put into reading it, I'm not going to, if I have a choice. And it seems most prevalent in areas of life where you don't have a choice, so to me it feels like an abuse of of the social contract.
I could put zero effort into writing a quick post on some piece of programming knowledge. But if someone needed that information, I suspect that they would feel happy to read the sentences and not care about the process.<p>I don't think this "effort" argument for technical knowledge pieces makes sense to me. If there is something I need, I do some research and I look for signals of authoritative information. I don't really care about how much effort it takes to write a blog post.
Why do you trust something that is LLM-generated is authoritative?<p>Even if, on the most good-faith scenario, someone did all the research them told an LLM to add more pizzazz for some reason, there is still a chance that the LLM hallucinate a lie here and there that the author might have skipped when proof-reading if they proof-read it at all.<p>I can't trust a machine specialized in generating convincing bullshit.
No. There's a problem with fully-AI writing that is independent of quality: you can produce a practically infinite supply of it at nearly zero cost. This means that if we don't push back, it's simply bound to crowd out human expression. You already see this on your social media feed, if you're paying attention.<p>I see inherent value in hearing from and talking to other humans. There is, unfortunately, a lot of AI content hustlers who want to rob me of this so that they can get more links to their website, more eyeballs on their product, etc.<p>The answer here isn't to demand that submarine marketers and SEO dudes prompt better so that the text is more pleasant to read. It's to cordon it off wholesale. And yeah, that sucks for some corner cases, but there's nothing else we can really do.
When people communicate to me I want them to maximize my comprehension bitrate. AI output is usually dense in incomprehensibility and sparse in bitrate. But the prompt they fed into the AI? Much higher bitrate. And if it's hard to understand, well I can always ask my own AI to help me interpret.<p>I understand it is a little selfish to want people to maximize <i>my</i> comprehension (what about the thousands of other readers?). I also understand there can purposes other than communication in writing (fiction -> pleasure, poetry -> art). I agree with you that we shouldn't care if it's AI or human writing for these other purposes. But when the goal is one human transferring bits from their brain to mine, playing telephone with an AI cannot be more efficient (it necessarily decreases channel capacity).<p>There are two exceptions.<p>1. When AI is good enough to "read people's minds" it can extract extra bits than what they explicitly meant to include in their prompt... but at that point why am I even bothering to listen to them, and not have the more powerful, smarter AI tell me what they think?<p>2. AI can run experiments or prove things, and I shouldn't have my AI duplicate that work. In this case I would want them to explain what tasks they set the AI out to do, and then provide the results. I would not complain if the results are an AI writeup, though usually I would want to know what in the results the human author felt was important.
No, I am capable of assessing whether a text is written well. I do want to know if someone cared enough to write it themselves though. That's an important piece of metadata.
It depends on the goal of the text. I don't care if technical documentation is written by human or machine. I care if it's correct and helpful. I don't care if a letter providing emotional support for a lost loved one is a perfectly accurate, beautifully structured piece of text. I care that it's heartfelt, coming from a person that meant what they wrote. Such metadata is important for the latter, but irrelevant for the former.
About three times as many people speak English as a second/foreign language compared to native speakers, not to mention people with no English fluency at all. That's a lot of people who might use an AI writing assistant for legitimate reasons that go beyond poor character. Same as we might do if we needed to communicate in Farsi or whatever.
I don't think we should paper over "the largest theft of labor in human history.”[1]<p>1. <a href="https://www.computerworld.com/article/4234688/microsoft-knows-it-robbed-publishers-to-train-ai-it-just-doesnt-care.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.computerworld.com/article/4234688/microsoft-know...</a>
The article talks about this too:<p>> Can this be gamed? Teaching the AI to write less like stock Claude and stock ChatGPT? Yes, absolutely. And honestly that would be great. Because half of the irritation is that all these AI-written article sound the same!
A lot of the annoying AI writing is actually good writing patterns done far too often. Rule of three is something every writer should use but not three times in one paragraph, etc.
That's a fine ideal, such as writing that doesn't use phrases like "moving forward." Similarly grating even if it's not an "AI tell".
No thank you.
Yes, definitely. The search for a way to root out some kind of ephemeral origin or quality besides what is reflected in the text is fundamentally pointless and doesn't improve anything.
> I think we should start to shift away from pure concern that a text is written by AI and toward strictly rewarding better writing.<p>I am a human supremacist. I believe humans have intrinsic value and what they produce has intrinsic value (no matter how poorly written it might be). I do not think that the output of a machine has any value, nor am I interested in reading it.
No, absolutely not. We will continue to value output that purely shows human thinking and effort.
Will we? I will value output from people I personally care about, because I want to know more about them. But what about the other 8 billion people? Do you value their output <i>because they are human</i> or for some other reason?<p>Say there was a Chinese artist in a room...
I'm fine with AI writing as long its not bad. The issue is that its far easier to produce large amounts of poorly made AI writing over well made AI writing.
Why?
Same reason I value home made cooking, home made furniture, and my kids drawings. Not everything is about the result itself. The process is important to me. Knowing that there is a human on the other side matters. In fact, learning that there is/isn't changes my perception entirely.