> In my defense, only the technical parts are AI.

A defense would be "I just used it for spellchecking" not "I just used it for the meat and the important parts people care about, the rest is mine!"

Yes, that was a weird defense; essentially, he used it for the actual interesting parts of the article.

You can't unslop the slop, you should write as you normally do but use AI to review and reframe it. Don't fix AI; let AI fix your writing.

So most of it?

Complaints of AI are like a form of friction that eventually goes away. Either AI will undergo a change to create more approachable material, or in general people's tastes will change as they accommodate the style and get used to it. Or some mix of the two. As young people continue to grow up reading AI generated content they will likely begin to find that person written content from before AI grates on their nerves. More, they'll even ask AI to reword documents into preferable AI-like styles.

As an older person, AI grates on me, but I found the meat like "It is a triple store written in a vocabulary of 181 entity classes and 278 predicates: every row is a subject, a predicate and an object. The subject is an entity (a person, an app, an event); the object is either a plain value (a name, a handle, a date) or another entity, which is where the graph gets its edges. The predicate is the interesting part: it says what kind of relationship the system believes holds between the two" quite approachable.

So it was like a meal where I just have to push, say, mushrooms aside as best I can to get to what I like. And there was a time I would have refused the entire plate because I truly abhor mushrooms. I blame watching Matango as an impressionable child.[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOpbTaX6HWQ

It is funny to me how slop enthusiasts argue from the past and the future to deny the present state.

"Slop is here to stay so you better get used to it because slop is inevitable and you will be left behind."

It is both already a cemented permanent presence and destined to arrive by an unbreakable prophecy at a date TBD.

If you came away thinking I was enthusing about AI slop, it's probably because I was too subtle in comparing it to a food I abhor while saying there are tidbits, non-slop tidbits, that I could appreciate. Apologies for that human generated mischance!

I'm actually rather bemused to see mainly young folks, arguing against LLMs and ML, and seeing more experienced folks, embracing it.

I'm pretty experienced, and have found LLMs to be quite useful.

Like any new tool, there are deficits and peculiarities, but these are becoming less of a concern, and the utility of these tools is advancing rapidly.

We get it. You are saying that in the future there will only be mushrooms to eat and as a result everyone will enjoy mushrooms.

Now think about how much you hate mushrooms.

Do you see the problem with your argument?

>Complaints of AI are like a form of friction that eventually goes away.

This. Already there is evolution in AI-related comments here.

For example, a year ago they often featured remarks like "I know AI when I see it: here are unmistakeable 'tells.'"

Then there would be a lively back-and-forth about the validity of the stated giveaways.

Such "How I know it's AI"-type comments no longer appear.

This has not been my experience. People talk about LLM-isms (Claude-isms especially) all the time. "The absolute shape", "load bearing", "seams", "smoking gun", genuinely empty preambles, constant sloganesque phrasing. If you're seeing it less in conversation, it's not because it's improved.

Genius-level response. And honestly, that's valid.

"It's not X, it's Y" is still the most obvious one. Abuse of passive voice is another. We stopped talking about it because it gets boring to say the same things over and over.

Sorry your comment got dinged. I assume the reference to age triggered that. Ageism is a very, very real thing, hereabouts.

I think it was insightful and relevant.

I’m sorry you feel defeated, but such attitudes won’t help.

Help what?

Help improve or restore the quality of content.

Been doing that for decades. This is just another tool.

Check out my work. I don’t hide it.

[delayed]

> but it may be fine for you or a small group that is familiar with the subject.

One of the problems with LLM writing is that the "small group" is very often only itself, maybe including the prompter. Details of the prompts or implementation or internal chain-of-thought nits leak out into prose, divorced from context.

Many READMEs are now littered with proud declarations of the removal of Foo, with any explanation purged with it. It exists in this project, too. A header of one graph is "Where each fact came from, decoded out of the bitmask." Why should the audience care about this implementation detail at this location? Just label it "Sources" and move on.

[delayed]

It's already technically possible for LLMs to generate all kinds of styles of text. In fact older models are better at it. It's the newer models that are nearly impossible to steer. This makes me less hopeful for the future. There is apparently some incentive for Claude and ChatGPT to lock in these very recognizable patterns.

Interesting for me it's the opposite. I care about this so I let AI do it since LLM are better writer than 99% of people. I'm not so arrogant to think I'm a writer of that caliber.

You are. I promise you. Almost every single person is a better writer than an LLM. You're wilfully sabotaging yourself.

LLM are terrible writers though. Worse than most humans unless they have some mental disability.

Maybe LLMs are better writers than the majority of people, but that's only because the majority of people just don't write. If you have any level of competency, you are a better writer than an LLM, because good writing requires empathy. It required thinking about what the audience knows, what they want to know, what kind of writing they are comfortable with, and so on.

LLMs fail at those things.

It's not possible to un-AI text, only replace it wholesale.

Suggestion for next time: "Review my prose for accuracy, grammar, appropriate strength of claims, etc. Flag any issues for my attention. Do not provide text; this work should not contain any AI-written content." That'll turn it into a very good check that doesn't take your voice away.