Amen.

At work our documentation isn’t just getting littered with annoying jargon. It isn’t just all the hallucinations, either. (Since when has documentation ever been 100% trustworthy?) It’s that it’s so poorly written and structured that it’s becoming borderline incomprehensible.

My company is currently considering making, “Why should I bother to read something you didn’t bother to write?” an official policy because even the executives are starting to burn out on all the time they have to spend wading through slop.

Haven't done it, but letting an AI polish a manual first draft might be the best of both worlds?

This, a thousand times. As the ratio of code to human writing necessarily [1] goes up, they become not just smarter, but more precise and technical, which requires them to use more jargon. You could say they become more nerdy. Hence, text generated by these models will become more easily recognizable, at least by default, when not asking them to twist themselves into something else via prompting — which degrades intelligence. This is a good thing, in my book, given all the slop we already have to contend with.

Of course there will be models trained on much less code and technical writing, and they will create more natural sounding prose, but they will lack the deep intelligence of frontier models. Seems like a fair tradeoff.

[1] watch the first couple of minutes on this bycloud video on scaling training data mixtures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD93kfArOik

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Agreed. The only goal of these skills/tricks/requests for humanising LLM writing is to be able to pass it off as your own, because they know it's shameful and want to avoid the opprobrium.

Some will say it's just for their own quality of life when they're reading LLM output, or "just for docs", but this is an extremely marginal use case.

> I want the ability to shame and discredit anyone passing the job of prose to a machine.

What about people who don’t speak your language well?

It's not that the writing style is bad; in fact LLMs write actually pretty well. It's just too much overfitted. And even a style that, in itself, is pleasurable to read, becomes annoying when the same figures of speech are used over and over again.

Because LLMs are pattern-extenders that have nothing to say. The training overfitted to the grace notes in good writing. And since LLMs can’t wield language with purpose or experience the feeling of the words, they use these devices arbitrarily.

I think this is the same flaw as coding agents seeing in every problem the call for a “smoke test” or the use of some unnecessary design pattern. The truest part of AI is the A.

Because you can't actually do "good writing" by repeatedly applying the supposed idioms thereof. The tiny subsegment of humanity responsible for the RLHF don't necessarily have any good taste for writing; but even if they did, it's orders of magnitude harder to communicate than to make judgments of short samples, and communicating it by making those judgments is surely impossible.

Edit: I see that you got multiple replies all basically saying the same thing in very different words. There's an exquisite irony to that, I think.

Because humans do like it, in reasonable quantities. The AI overlearns this and does it too much.

It's not that nobody likes it, in fact the problem is that people like each instance of it well enough in isolation. Millions of people think it's "good enough," so it gets amplified and repeated until every PR description starts to sound like a toothpaste jingle.

For "agentic use and coding," they are trained to take useful actions, not produce desirable natural language writing.

Maybe it’s the dead internet.

All the bots and other LLMs providing feedback, so in reality it’s reflecting the reality in a sense.

every one-hit wonder asks the same question.

we liked it until we didn't.

i hate it, but plenty of people DO like it and plenty of people talk and write like that. It’s just corpspeak, being used a lot in the valley and beyond. And all upcoming hustlers running startups now feel the need to speak like that, feeding this machine.