LLM Voice

fnoef

i noticed something similar yet different. because, sadly, most of what i read today is llm output (the chain of thoughts, or the summary at the end of a big chunk or work), i tend to "adopt" this style in my writing, hence, writing as an llm without using one. humans are an amazing creatures at copying stuff and adapting to our environment

AnimalMuppet

> But if I want to communicate with humans, my humanity has to shine (or at least ooze) out of my prose. Yeah. I want to be able to touch a human being (or at least have one touch me) through the words. LLMs poison that, even if a human prompted the LLM. Translation... I think I object to translation less than Martin does. There's a human back there, and they're writing all the words, and then an LLM is translating them. The LLM may not translate them perfectly, but they aren't going to introduce "load-bearing" when it wasn't there. The bit about using LLM when you're writing for a bureaucratic process rather than a human was interesting, at least to me. I hadn't thought of it that way before, but I think it makes sense.

esafak

One reason it grates is that it is our brain's way of telling us that there is nothing to be gained from engaging the material; it is trite.

yawnxyz

> As more people delegate writing to LLMs they will also delegate thinking and comprehension to LLMs. I don't want to do that, where's the fun of writing then? I enjoy cooking from scratch, and I really don't like frozen foods, microwave/TV dinners, or even DoorDashing but we're past complaining/arguing/shaming folks who don't cook every meal from scratch you know what, I don't prefer eating it, but if my next door neighbor loves microwaving frozen $3 burritos, then go ahead to some people, food is art, creativity, life to others, food is fuel also applies to writing and thinking

chzblck

There's a fine line between using an llm to write a personal blog vs using it to help you come up with an account plan on why you want to sell to a company that will be used internally.

ctrlt

personally, i'm for LLM and AI usage in writing if it helps the writer communicate ideas, their stories, and triumphs in ways they may never have been able to before. I just had one of my posts removed from the front page here which was disheartening because it feels as though what was judged was prose rather than the technical insight in to a niche problem, which seems counterintuitive considering i've always thought of Hacker News being an inclusive place for the technical and engineering skills rather than their level of the english language.

PaulKeeble

I just can't seem to stay interested and read LLM text. It just seems to lack going somewhere, its information density is often really low and its full of odd isms that I don't find very interesting to read. I don't have a good radar for detecting the various LLM particular speech patterns but everytime I have an issue with an article there is always people talking about how its clearly AI written. I find the same thing with written results out of AI "research", it is a slog to read through it and most of it can be skipped even if it can sometimes be useful its an unenjoyable read.

jordanpg

> In time it may be that LLMs will be so good that we can't tell the difference. I have to believe that we are within a couple of years if not months of this. This problem is too well-known to not be a major focus of the frontier labs' efforts.

paultag

Couldn't agree more with the post. I wrote down a few of my thoughts a few weeks ago at https://notes.pault.ag/why-write/ -- I find myself scanning text to see if it's LLM before I actually engage with the content. It is getting harder to do by the day, and has slowly moved from a mental exercise (look for specific markers) into a "gut feel" based on how the pieces fit together.

epgui

It’s also just… disrespectful to the human reader. Quite plainly.

abootstrapper

I’ve started embracing my grammar flaws and typos. Emails and chats may get a proof, but only from me or another human, then I send it. I’ve deleted Grammarly because I think the flaws make the comms more authentic in the age of AI. And of course I’ve dropped my use of the em-dash after being accused of being AI myself.

js2

> I'm wary of them, partly due skeptism about their accuracy, but also because it rather misses the point. Here, this reader wondered whether "to" was omitted intentionally to emphasize lack of LLM involvement. Then, on a second read through to find the sentence again, I noticed the first paragraph is also missing a period on its final sentence. Which just goes to show: we can all use editors and proof readers. (According to the acknowledgements section, nine humans read drafts.) Now, I don't want to intentionally leave typos in my writing, but for me it's preferable to LLM-voice no doubt. > But I also would prefer rather a genuine human's clunky prose to the smooth but soulless LLM. Amen. This reminds me of a bit from Kitchen Confidential about how Anthony Bourdain would prefer a simple and plain home cooked meal over an ornate restaurant meal any day of the week. I read because I want to hear what a human has to say. It's the errors and malapropisms and style that give a unique and human voice. Doesn't this contradict my earlier statement about not leaving errors in my own writing? It turns out I'm perfectly tolerant of errors in anyone's writing but my own. (I should probably bring that up with a therapist.)

martythemaniak

I'll repost a comment I made a while back describing the process I use, which I think balances AI in keeping your voice. If you care about your voice, don't let LLMs write your words. But that doesn't mean you can't use AI to think, critique and draft lots of words for you. It depends on what purpose you're writing it for. If you're writing an impersonal document, like a design document, briefing, etc then who cares. In many cases (scientific papers, legal documents) you already have to write them in a voice that is not your own. Go ahead and write these in AI. But if you're trying to say something more personal then the words should be your own, AI will always try to 'smooth' out your voice, and if you care about it, you gotta write it yourself. Now, how do you use AI effectively and still retain your voice? Here's one technique that works well: start with a voice memo, just record yourself maybe during a walk, and talk about a subject you want, free form, skip around jump sentences, just get it all out of your brain. Then open up a chat, add the recording or transcript, clearly state your intent in one sentence and ask the AI to consider your thoughts, your intent and ask clarifying questions. Like, what does the AI not understand about how your thoughts support the clearly stated intent of what you want to say. That'll produce a first draft, which will be bad. Then tell the AI all the things that don't make sense to you, that you don't like, just comment on the whole doc, get a second draft. Ask the AI if it has more questions for you, you can use live chat to make this conversation go smoother as well, when the AI is asking you questions, you can talk freely by voice. Repeat this one or two more times, and a much finer draft will take shape that is closer to what you want to say. During this drafting state, the AI will always try to smooth or average out your ideas, so it is important to keep pointing out all the ways in which it is wrong. This process will help you with all the thinking involved being more up-front. Once you're read and critiqued several drafts, all your ideas will be much more clear. Then, sit down and write your own words from scratch, they will come much easier after all your thoughts have been exercised during the drafting process.

gravity13

Just do what I do: capture everything I've ever written and ask AI to cobble together what I said using my own sentences. No more LLM voice! Every now and then you might get a nonsensical artifact or two, but that's the price you pay for better groceries.

dpmitu

I recently read DDIA for the first time, and I was surprised by how enjoyable it was after reading AI slop for a year.

BurritoKing

As someone who is aggressively pro AI, I've also noticed how awful everything is to read lately. It's always so hard to put my finger on the exact thing, but it's a mixture of everything sounding identical and everything being a rambling unconcise mess. I find I routinely start reading interesting posts and just .. stop part way, abandoning it. A site I read stories on has been flooded with AI generated content, all of it terrible, and it just makes me retreat to things created before 2023 as a way of filtering it all out.

thinkingemote

It's hard to define and pin point what a "voice" is. Think about how you would describe the difference in voice of Tolstoy vs Dostoevsky, or William Gibson compared to Thomas Pynchon. You might have to read a lot of a writer to be able to notice their voice. You might even notice how a short story by an unknown writer resembles the voice of another. Or think about reading something that might be stuff you could say in your own words but not actually in your own voice. Or maybe the opposite is a better example for you? That's what some poetry is about. The gap between voice and word. Stylometry is the study and measurement of text, so that can go some distance to quantifying the difference between voices and can help to programmatically identify a human voice but I feel that because a voice comes from a person, the recognition is also mainly a human response. At another level its about communication, person to person with the intention and desire to communicate something. LLM text output may seem uncanny as it's hard to emulate the intention and desire and empathy present in genuine human communication. I would be interested in reading what poets say about LLM voices. I wonder if many LLM labs employ them?

tptacek

Broken record: LLMs are exceptionally useful writing critics if you know how to hold them correctly, but you can't use a single word they suggest to you --- the better the LLM's word choices seem, the more likely the LLM is infecting your voice. Better, by a lot, to prompt the LLM not to suggest any words, but just offer objective critiques.

jamesdutc

People have been talking about the importance of curation for more than a decade. Because many good ideas are not immediately obvious good ideas, in an environment at risk of information overload, we need some way to quickly vet ideas to see whether they are worth investing the time to consider them. (It is often the case that the best ideas require considerable investment of time and effort to be judged as good, and, it's also often the case that this determination can be made only at the very end of such a process.) “Don't judge a book by its cover,” sure, but, historically, there have been superficial markers of care and attention that we've used to these ends. These are obviously very flawed signals, but, you know, maybe if you took a lot of time to craft a message, I don't feel that bad if I waste a bunch of time trying to decode it. These markers—attention to detail (e.g., spell and grammar checking,) clear-structure (e.g., “bottom line up front,”) and typographical flourishes (e.g., smart quotes and em-dashes and extended unicode like diæreses…)—were an indication of some modicum of quality control and care. I, myself, used to brag about or show-off having set up .Xcompose keybindings ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xorg/Keyboard_configuration... ) which was just rare enough across the general population to be noteworthy. All of this that was once somewhat expensive is now cheap or basically free. Even if I make a point of going back to a pre-UTF-8 Usenet style (or even intentionally insert run-on sentences or misspellings or grammatical errors,) the cost of an LLM to style-transfer its output to match this is barely much of anything. All it means is I wrote one prompt for the first draft, and then one more prompt for the refinement. Additionally, some LLM habits are actually good habits. Putting the bottom-line up front (in bold, even!) is a great habit in a business e-mail! Decision-makers genuinely struggle with reading through long paragraphs of detail! Unfortunately, the problem with the LLM output is that it takes good, valuable, superficial or structural habits that it can cheaply apply, and it drapes those around inane, banal, cloying, muddy, meandering meaninglessness. Today, we can maybe still judge a book by its cover, because even one more prompt worth of refinement is still too much effort, but I don't think that's amounts to much, since the frequency and loudness of complaints of LLM writing means that model trainers are going to train their models to adapt to whatever signals we use for quick vetting. I am skeptical whether this training will concurrently improve the novelty, innovativeness, or other intangible qualities of the actual message. (With the models, as they exist today, and as we use them today, at least in the field of software development, I see extremely poor capability at generating innovation… Personally, I don't even like the quality of the Python code they spit out, but they sure do type real fast, and, like, pejoratives aside, unexciting, mediocre, corporate-y code does have a real place in the world.) So what happens when the economics of production in the medium significantly outpace the capabilities of production in the message? The LLM can write a comment nearly indistinguishable from any given human… except when you actually take the time to read through it, it's just inane drivel. Thoughtless and a waste-of-time. And there's basically no way to manage your investment of time and effort to tell one way or the other.

Terr_

All human communication is based on internally simulating the presumed mind that was/will-be at the other end. Even now, some part of your brain--however subconscious--is building a tiny sketch of me with assumed beliefs and motivations, and you're using it to predict and interpret the next words. But what happens when everything is persistently, subtly wrong ? When we cannot smoothly map the text to a simulation? An inner-sim keeps throwing errors and mis-predicting what comes next is unnerving and draining. Like talking to a human who is not currently sane. Sometimes I imagine LLM text like a plastic animal model put out to confuse local wildlife, where it hits just enough instinctive triggers that they try to mate with it before leaving in frustrated bafflement. ______ Half-Life 2, Dr. Kleiner: "Never fear, Gordon, she's de-beaked and completely harmless. The worst she might do is attempt to couple with your head. Fruitlessly!"