Why is AI generated language so hard to understand?

silverFork

I have seen people saying this for a long while now. I don't know how to say this but I understand Ai stuff better than non-Ai. When I see people complain ; I always wonder why because I think that its pretty good with my own senses.. Much much better than my writing skills... My brain has been tuned by computers I suspect .

paid_dot_expert

I find AI generated language hard to understand when it is "in it's own world" and it knows what it means but can't articulate it without buzzwords and slop. A follow up "ELI5" type of prompt often sorts this out. Seems like a failure mode and you need to snap it out sometimes. Opus 5.5.

skeledrew

Nah I don't have any issue understanding, so the actual question here is why do some people find AI-generated language hard to understand?

codeulike

What do they mean by "low frequency n-grams"

sligbad

This was great to read even if just to name the stuff that I find so irritating!

noosphr

AI generated text has no human centered underlying model of physical reality and its metaphors are tortured as a result. If we had talking centipedes the results would probably be similar, but for different reasons.

jonnyysmith

Indeed. I just struggle to revise it when generating website/social media post copies, more so now than before from what I can recall.

ethanj8011

This was excellent, and one would hope they can at least try to optimize these metrics a bit.

drivebyhooting

Article seems to answer the question: because generated text has the competing objective of information density and supporting reasoning chains. But I also wonder why AI loves to add slogans, catch phrases, and witty sentence fragments. It’s grating and a dead giveaway of slop.

cmrdporcupine

My experience is: The LLM fails to "understand" or "intuit" who the audience is. It tends to reward its own recent context and its interaction with the prompt writer, rather than "considering" documents from the viewpoint of a hypothetical reader. You can often prompt them to go more in that direction but it gets tiresome. The best approach is just to write the outline and initial text in a very messy fashion yourself. And then have it clean it up and add detail. And then edit again by hand.

amelius

It's like reading legalese. Or reading patents. Terrible ... like someone put in effort to make it unreadable.

ionetan

AI has a way of using abstract language, sounding impressive and eloquent, but in reality it is mostly incoherent fluff. You can see this in humans too. Some politicians and academics are good at expressing themselves in clever ways but when you actually try to parse what they say it makes no sense what-so-ever.

anigbrowl

Consider too that AI training corpuses include vast amounts of commercial speech which is designed to numb the critical faculties and produce action; likewise they include numerous opinion articles, which are designed to persuade and often leverage rhetorical fallacies, whether cynically or as a reflection of an author's imperfect thought process.

amelius

> AI-generated text is increasingly optimized for other goals like math, code, and reasoning Yes, this is a problem. AI-generated text is used internally by the AI to instruct agents, etc. And for feedback loops in reasoning. If you optimize for the result only, the AI will increasingly speak "AI", not human.

dividefuel

As a technical writer, I believe default AI responses are optimized for what people _think_ is good writing rather than what actually is good writing. My guess is years of RLHF optimized for rater's first impressions of how well-written something was. It uses lists! It has headings! It uses fun phrases like 'smoking gun'! It's long and informative! These things are relatively fast and easy to identify and select as a preference. But none of this really covers whether the response is _useful for the audience_. If you're not the audience, it can be hard to tell what is and isn't useful.

binsquare

There's so much fluff because it doesn't care about what the user actually cares about. So there's the usual structure of "it's not x it's actually y" signs.

jannyfer

I know the paper specifically calls out Opus 5.5 and Opus 5, but I can’t see different versions of Sol, or Astra. I think the difficulty in comprehension was mostly an Anthropic problem… partly because Anthropic employees stopped reading Opus output around the time Fable came out and stopped noticing RLVR going off the rails with compression. The paper was a good read, in any case. Maybe I gotta start sending this article back to LLMs when they start compressing text too much :)

bassie123

Its because AI was not optimized for human reading, its optimized for the most amount of information in the lowest amount of context or tokens as possible. (e.g., "baseline system state transition latency validation") instead of unpacking them with prepositions ("validating the latency of state transitions in the baseline system"). For me, I can't read books at all, because I forget what was said two paragraphs before. I bet people that are good at skimming text have less problems with AI generated text.

lukev

LLMs are showing us that a lot of what we think of as cognition is actually part of the elaborate symbol system which is Language, as opposed to a property of "mind" (either biologically or artificially instantiated.) LLM-generated text is hard to understand because while it's perfectly good language that follows valid cognitive and informational patterns, it does not reflect the intent or mental model of another mind .

xnickb

I'm just glad it's not just me being stupid. Sometimes I have to read a sentence several times and then ask to elaborate because I can't comprehend.