>Or maybe I am just not used to reading novel.
If you're not even used to reading novels, how can you judge the results of writing one? That is one hell of a confession for someone who's trying to write fiction.
Indeed. A significant part of gaining skills in creative writing is learning to 'read as a writer'. How to examine classic texts to understand how to develop scenes, characters, narrative styles, etc.
The latter is prevalent in LLM writing. Imitating "poetry" without the feelings is something that the default, "aligned" chat models with reinforcement all do in one way or another. It's hard to get even a technical essay without empty emotional language.
And I'm only speaking for myself, I like reading novels, but it's perfectly possible to have a slop-meter without doing so.
My own signal-to-noise ratio in writing is also often bad, but with today's "frontier" LLM output I feel there's a specific tendency towards this harmless, emtpy, flowery language full of false dichotomies and rhetorical devices devoid of any purpose to communicate.
A model trained and fine-tuned to generate divisive Reddit threads sure has different tendencies.
But for the friendly assistants, there's often this solipsism and pseudo-poetic aspect.
Related, although just tangentially: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-claude-bliss-attractor
And, regardless of the generation aspect:
An essay that starts with
> On bronze pirates, cloudy days, and the roads we do not know we are walking
just sounds pretentious to me and doesn't spark my interest.
For traditionally published works, it's trivial to exclude LLM-written content, just look for anything published before Nov 30, 2022.
If we hadn't removed the gatekeepers everywhere (and I know there are problems with them, too), then all that technology would not be able to do much harm.
It might also have to do with incentives. The incentives in our economy are not to help and advance society, the invisible hand nonwithstanding.
A sane default previously; as news changes and the status quo also, but it makes you even more likely to encounter slop now.
The artificial stuff often has an odd taste, but boy it sure is quick and convenient.
* this is a hypothetical scenario. I don't know any guaranteed human-only digital forums.
Whereas I haven't seriously reflected on my social media consumption habits for over 15 years, and over the years I'm getting more and more annoyed at social media.
Not to be a bit misanthropic, but there's something seriously wrong with my social media usage, especially when I know there's a real human on the other side, combined with ever increasing annoyance towards commenters and just the feelings I get after reading social media.
It may be dopamine / self-help related, but no actually, I think all of that is part of the issue (discovered that in high school when it was taking off). Something about the way I'm fundamentally interacting with the medium seems so horrible and icky the more I mature.
Niche hobbyist forums are still safe, for now. There's just not enough commercial interest in petroleum lantern restoration to make it worth anyone's time to poison this particular well.
Even some larger niche hobbies like the saltwater aquarium community seemspretty safe for now (though it also helps that many forums have members who visit each other to trade corals and admire each others tanks).
A weaker theorem can be postulated that any such filter provides a second order sufficient condition.
This means we can filter content by account creation date, for example, by hiding all posts and comments from accounts created after the digital death event. This won’t always guarantee human-only content but certainly more than otherwise.
But then we wouldn’t be having this most definitively human-to-human conversation, right?
What's are the dates for images and video? Nano Banana Pro and Seedance 2.0?
And code? Opus 4.6?
You only notice plastic surgery when it's bad, but that doesn't mean all plastic surgery looks bad...
There's also the question of whether people are even trying to disguise AI content, and how effective that disguise is. Are you or I missing the AI-generated text that just has a veneer of disguise on it?
If you follow this thread up you will see the context is 'people who want to read content written by humans.'