It's darkly amusing that while the author advises us not to let LLMs pick our words, their post includes this chunk of AI slop:
"Those rethinks are load-bearing parts of your voice. Readers won’t put their fingers on what’s wrong, but they’ll sense that you’ve become artificially-flavored."
The metaphor at the start is AI-like weirdness too: "without pasteurizing and jacking it with corn syrup." Pasteurising is good, corn syrup is bad - what the heck am I supposed to make of it? It's nonsense.
It may even have been handwritten by the author, but it's slop nonetheless.
You may be telling yourself that you're disciplined and you're just using the LLMs for review. But while you're reading their output, the slop makes its way directly into your brain anyway - and then it drips out into your writing.
The placement of the "Those rethinks are load-bearing parts of your voice" sentence in the article makes me think the author intended the word choice
I saw "load-bearing" there and instantly assumed Thomas was making a deliberate point that it's OK to use terms that LLMs have poisoned provided you use them effectively and in a way that adds to the piece.
I'm personally furious that "load-bearing" has become an LLM tell, it's a really useful metaphor!
You seem to have an eye on identifying avatars as bots, how come? You also accused me of being a bot <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47293917">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47293917
I suspect the author was thinking "homogenizing" but his brain picked pasteurizing by accident. Pasteurizing and homogenizing are both things done to milk, but homogenizing has an additional meaning of making something uniform (and more loosely it's often used to imply that you've made something generic, bland, and boring).
SupremumLimit · · focus · HN ↗
"Those rethinks are load-bearing parts of your voice. Readers won’t put their fingers on what’s wrong, but they’ll sense that you’ve become artificially-flavored."
The metaphor at the start is AI-like weirdness too: "without pasteurizing and jacking it with corn syrup." Pasteurising is good, corn syrup is bad - what the heck am I supposed to make of it? It's nonsense.
It may even have been handwritten by the author, but it's slop nonetheless.
You may be telling yourself that you're disciplined and you're just using the LLMs for review. But while you're reading their output, the slop makes its way directly into your brain anyway - and then it drips out into your writing.
yapfrog · · focus · HN ↗
simonw · · focus · HN ↗
I'm personally furious that "load-bearing" has become an LLM tell, it's a really useful metaphor!
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
gnabgib · · focus · HN ↗
simonw · · focus · HN ↗
mtlynch · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
gitowiec · · focus · HN ↗
throwthrowuknow · · focus · HN ↗
kergonath · · focus · HN ↗
Pasteurising something is making it sterile. Safer, but bland and not as interesting. I guess that’s the intended metaphor.
WaltPurvis · · focus · HN ↗