The social contract of writing 11 ▲ jola.dev 75 days ago · 6 min read1119 words · Writing · hide · 4 comments LLMs are making inroads into just about every industry on the planet, they’re everywhere now. AI for X, AI for Y, if there’s a thing that somebody is willing to pay for, there’s another person looking for a way to use LLMs to do it. But no human activity is becoming as dominated by LLMs as writing. It’s not that I can’t see the attraction of it as an author, especially where you feel a pressure to produce a lot of content. They’re very good at that, volume. I’ve experimented with LLM assisted writing in the past (nowadays I don’t even use them for spell-checking). People use LLMs to assist them in writing on blogs, social media, newspapers, books, and they use them for spell checking, grammar, fact checking, and unfortunately, in way too many cases, to just write the whole thing outright. Once you learn to recognize the idioms and idiosyncrasies of LLM writing, you can’t stop seeing it. It’s everywhere. And it’s exhausting. Even worse, it’s boring. All writing is homogenizing, slowly… Log in to reply on the Fediverse. Comments will appear here. Les Orchard @lmorchard@masto.hackers.town 43 days ago [-] If you're going to go after writing in the post-LLM world, it helps to know where the patterns came from so humans don't catch strays. For one, the word "delve" - LLMs didn't invent it, they picked it up from the folks who were contracted to help train them.https://segunfamisa.com/posts/no-you-cant-tell-it-was-written-by-ai Ryan Hiebert @ryanhiebert@fosstodon.org 42 days ago [-] @bubbles I don’t think that sufficiently accounts for the effect that people are noticing. I think it’s fair for people to say “wait, I use” delve, emdashes, and other common hallmarks of LLM output. My flags don’t go up just from one of these, it’s a spectrum. I use these words and techniques too. But there’s a soullessness from LLM output that I don’t think can be reduced to cultural differences. Ryan Hiebert @ryanhiebert@fosstodon.org 42 days ago [-] @bubblesI’m sure people get it wrong, and I don’t know to what degree, but when we’re evaluating whether something is worth our time, I think we (a) don’t want to read someone else’s LLM, and (b) know that there is a lot that people are trying to get us to read that is, without disclosure, just someone else’s LLM. Ryan Hiebert @ryanhiebert@fosstodon.org 42 days ago [-] @bubbles my objection was more about the article you linked than your own statement, which was measured and reasonable.
