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Because they're self-aware perfectionists and are actively working to stop it, because they reach for all kinds of tools like grammar checkers and AI, but they're aware that using those will make the post lose "their" voice, or the human element of the post.

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.

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Reading what you write for editing does not make a text lose your voice. If anything, it amplifies it, you get to ensure that what you intended to say was said.

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.

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Great! That's a good thing. Embrace being human sometimes.

Plus, "lazy" would actually be just using AI to edit the writing.

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> instruct it to not rewrite anything, only give you an overall picture of text clarity, sentiment, etc.

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.

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It sounds like you haven't tried.

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.

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Btw, this is precisely what I implied.

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.

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What? LLMs are very capable of doing sentiment analysis. Hell, it's basically one of the things it actually excels at - understanding tone, nuance, context, etc.

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

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Sentiment analysis for the purpose of categorizing reddit comments, sure. For the purpose of giving you advice about nuance, overall clarity and tone of own long test, no.
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I tried it myself, and it did actually a good job.

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.

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If you use grammar checker as a grammar checker, it wont make you loose your voice. It will make you use correct grammar.

> 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".

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I see both sides here. Wanting to preserve your natural voice is valid, but editing and using tools don't necessarily take that away. In fact, they can help make your intended message clearer. It probably comes down to how much control you keep over the final result rather than wheater you use tools at all.
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What annoys me here is that people say "I use AI as style checker to make my writing better" or claim that good writing is unfairly judged as being by AI ... and then proceed to describe inferior writing results they achieved with AI. None of what author wrote there signals that the way he uses AI made his writing better. His use of AI made his output inferior. And not just in a the "loosing own voice" way worst, but literally in the "the final text is less effective writing".

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.

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There is no reliable way to detect AI writing. It probably trains on texts known to be AI, on texts known to be written by humans, then classify the text according to this training.

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.

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Exactly. Depending on what nutrians I've been consuming, the Indians/intelligence in my head could also be artificial. Perhaps that's why I fail those captcha tests most of the time.
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> 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?)

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.

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What makes you think that? I presume that's just the authors (sarcastic) way to say "beware: may contain typos and grammatical errors".
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There are a bunch of typos in there which jar a bit ('deterioted'), but I guess that makes sense for this specific article.

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.

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The problem here, the overarching issue is that the subject complaint about AI slop is actually a bigger issue that has been plaguing America in particular for many years now, and of which the AI slop era is only a current top. The qualities of American writing have clearly been on a precipitous decline for a very long time now, predating AI slop and even spell checkers and computers.

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.

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> The qualities of American writing have clearly been on a precipitous decline for a very long time now, predating AI slop and even spell checkers and computers.

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.

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Whenever I read something from roughly the first half of the 20th century (I'm not sure where the cutoff point is, it seems to the 1960s), I'm struck by the quality of the writing. I'm not sure what happened, but it's pretty clear that at some point we stopped taking ourselves seriously.

We see the same thing in how people dress. People used to write "respectably", and they used to dress the same, and in TV interviews they spoke with great care and deliberation.

Then we threw all of it down the toilet.

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Yes, these people are so unbelievably stupid that think others more intelligent than them can't tell when they use AI to write their stuff. And then they act so annoyed when they get exposed... It's unbearable.

The article here is still full of AI slop, and so many people in the comments are defending the author. Blows my mind.

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