> The Ecclasiast looked under the sun, but there was something he didn't understand. Something that wasn't right. Something that was not as it was supposed to be. And here is what the Ecclesiast didn't understand. Here is what nobody understood. Not then. Not in the years that followed. Not now. It was not the swift who won the race. Not the strong who won the battle. Not the wise who earned the bread. Not the men of understanding who gained the riches. Not the men of skill who gained the favor. And here is what I found: to any story of success, there is an element of unpredictability and chance.
(There are really just two possible outcomes: either the article is right or in, say, two years, we will be all writing and talking like this, as in humans learning from mediamatically reinforced human feedback.)
Shoot me now.
I am a bit of a luddite in this domain and have so far managed to resist the lure of using the generator to expand my thoughts, and I still catch myself writing "it's not just an X it's a Y" and other generator type tells. If it infecting my patterns it is totally entering the wider subconscious as "How to write" (Sighs)
Despite its bizarre look, the sentence is evocative and eloquent. It does make me get a clear mental image from the very first word. It leaves little room for roaming and guessing, as it firmly nails elements one by one, and, by the time I reach the end of the sentence, I get the full meaning almost immediately.
This sentence is not randomly written; this is crafted with intention. TBH, it would take me hours, if not days, to write a sentence this much condensed and easy to understand. I seriously like it.
Perhaps, this is more about context -- which style to use in which situation. I'm only guessing here, but, since Orwell is offering an interpretation, he probably chose to be more clinical. He probably had a point to make and didn't want to risk vagueness up-front.
It's like having to sit through a party with acclaimed academics: every single one is so full of themselves, they will constantly one-up each other by belittling everyone in their workplace s.a. to make you feel how great of an intellect they possess and how much more they would accomplish, had they not been surrounded by all these bumbling idiots.
It feels great to use, direct your machine minion to fill out your thoughts for you, but holy hell does it suck to be on the receiving end. Least of all is the disrespect, they don't care enough to even talk to you but worse is having to try and reason through that big incoherent blob.
Probably to only reasonable thing to do is to try and get your own mechanical agents to produce summaries. Inventing the lossy expansion algorithm(like compression but things get bigger on the wire), And we wept.
Now I am all depressed because it is probably inevitable, apparently thinking is hard and in general people are all to happy to outsource it to the machines.
Apparently, even though they want to spew AI prose everywhere, they want it read by humans, not by other bots, so when a few holdout places are insisting that prose be human authored they fight very hard against the rule.
A 5m search got me the following:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49410941
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411042
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49059571
This thread, in particular, stands out - reader makes the claim that Pangram found that the US constitution was 100% AI generated, when others tried they found 0% (or close to it) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48378191
I feel that if one doesn't want to send that message, they shouldn't be attempting to convince others that rejection of AI prose must stop.
I feel that if you want humans to read your stuff, those humans insisting that you write your own stuff is not an unreasonable position to take.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
(I'm guessing Zinsser's comments are from "On Writing Well", which you can also find online even though it is still under copyright.)
It's a bit of a pet peeve when people include quotes on a blog post without linking or otherwise references their source.
>iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Orwell himself routinely ignores it, even in the first sentence of the essay:
>Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.
The second clause could be rewritten in active voice by changing it to "but people generally assume". But this would make the writing worse, and Orwell, as a good writer, probably didn't even consider the option of making it worse, and therefore didn't notice the passive voice.
Passive voice is an essential tool for all good writers of English. I always give the example of the opening of Pride and Prejudice [0]:
>It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
The joke doesn't work in active voice. If you attribute this acknowledgement to some specific group of people then it's simply false, not a comedic exaggeration.
For example, nobody would seriously suggest avoiding the passive participle in a sentence like "Put the broken plate in the bin". ("Put the plate that someone broke into the bin"?)
You’re peeved with good reason. It’s the blog equivalent of posting a screenshot of an article to social media. People, please post your sources! In the age of misinformation, that’s more important than ever.
Firstly, some parts of the RLHF involve human graders on the LLM's performance. I suspect their general bias towards a punchy, persuasive writing style could come from what biases the graders towards preferring that response, especially in shorter segments and when the grader is not focused on writing style
Secondly, later parts of the finetuning involve reinforcement learning on achieving certain tasks which are automatically graded: stuff like coding tasks. I think this can create a kind of feedback loop where the style drifts further, and you get the kind of LLM tics which are even more extreme (it might be that they incidentally help somehow with the actual tasks, or it might be a drift that comes from the grader also now being an LLM or some of this finetuning happening on output from other models). The more recent claude models seem to suffer from this a lot, moreso than earlier ones.
Is there something about tuning for desirable qualities that forces LLMs to have this voice?
I also have to say that the first strikes me as being written by someone that might be smarter than I am, the second as being written by someone significantly less intelligent than I, yet somehow placed by society in a position of authority over me.
> the first strikes me as being written by someone that might be smarter than I am
This is why Joseph Smith tried to imitate the language of the King James Bible in the Book of Mormon, albeit not very successfully.
I also don't have a problem with large words as long as I'm well familiar with the words. The length of a word has nothing to do with the complexity of its meaning. We just have a limit to the number of pronounceable combinations of 5 letters.
Does that make sense?
The second transcribed considerable information bandwidth through intentionally structured word choice for maximal density.
I think the second requires deeper concentration, but is still quite readable compared to the kind of low-content engagement / SEO stuff one read on the internet even before LLMs
For example, the Lexham English Bible:
> I looked again and saw under the sun that the race does not belong to the swift, the battle does not belong to the mighty, food does not belong to the wise, wealth does not belong to the intelligent, and success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all of them.