LLMs and the dwindling number of people who appreciate and value language
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That explains the writing I have encountered that makes me wonder who told a high schooler they could write?
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I worry that people are so used to reading AI, especially anything longer than a social media post, that they start picking up all the tropes AI uses. For example, ending a paragraph with the flourish, “that’s not X, it’s Y!” and all the myriad other tells.
I get electric jolts up my spine when I read, "Sit with that for a moment."
Urrrrggh.
"Sit with that for a moment."
Ugh, this is one of those expressions that maybe was "cool" or sort of startling the first time someone used it, but now it just ... barf.
AI slop is so gross btw. And those "tells," whether it's the sentence where there's a subtle grammatical "offness," or something like what MA describes where you know it could only have been written by a machine because of the complete lack of understanding that's baked into it...
Like @jon-nyc , I worry that people will just incorporate all that yuckiness into their own writing. And thinking.
Sloppification of humanity, here we come.
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I just watched David Kippling's (astronomer, professor) latest video. It's timely to this discussion.
Link to video -
I've been working in publishing for twenty-three years, which surprises even me. In print, I've published novels with two publishing houses and academic books with two. I've published with three audiobook publishers. My short stories and essays add at least seven book publishers to the list and dozens of magazines and newspapers. Since most things pass from the editor who acquired the piece to copyeditors, I've worked with a heckuva lot of people whose job it is to make my prose better. I appreciate these people very much. They keep me from going out into the world with my metaphorical pants down.
These days, some of them are doing a much poorer job of it. I believe that this is because they are not themselves doing it. They are outsourcing the job to algorithms that are deeply flawed. I am trying to hold the line on this, but there isn't anything I can do about changes that happen after text leaves my hands for the last time. This isn't supposed to happen, but it does.
I have a book, Agatha Christie and the Twentieth Century Woman, coming out in January from a major academic press, Bloomsbury Academic. It is based on my doctoral research and it is very important to me. Bloomsbury has published me before, in 2022. The copyediting and proofreading process has degraded markedly since then.
I have spent more time than I like to think about with the final proof of this book. The first round of errors that I've had to fix were related to a five-page sequence of material that I knew would be hard to lay out in a way that was accurate and looked good, so I included notes in the manuscript that were intended to help. The notes were ignored, which resulted in a mess. If a human had looked at the mess or (please God) at my notes, it wouldn't have gone so far, but as best I can tell, somebody fed it to an LLM and sent the resulting disaster back for my review. This would not have happened in 2022.
On the most recent go-round, it would have been logical for me to only review the passages where I'd asked for changes, but I'm neurotic. I read the whole thing yet again. I found that making the above changes had caused the kind of errors that no human or machine should have missed. A stray comma. A missing quotation mark. An extra quotation mark. But the flabbergasting thing was that there was an inexplicable change in a totally different part of the book: I had discussed the work of Mary Evans and, for clarity, added "(no relation to the author)" right in the text. On this pass (and not any of the previous passes), this was changed to "Mary Anna Evans (no relation to the author)." So an error had been introduced and, again, a human being would not have made it, because they would have realized by the parenthetical note what was going on.
This was so out-of-the-blue that I asked for a redline so that I could check each and every change that had been made. How else could I know if something weird had been done somewhere in those 250 pages at the last minute? Well, the redline of the editor's changes doesn't show the Mary/Mary Anna debacle. It's like it appeared out of the ether. The only conclusion to be made is that somebody ran it through an LLM after they finished the job and simply trusted the machine. Like an idiot.
And this wasn't the only snafu. Earlier in the process, my editor's assistant sent me a draft book description that will go out to retailers and reviewers and will be printed on the book jacket and the publisher's website. It was terrible in a way that's hard to describe. I had to rewrite it from front to back. For one thing, it had three sentences in two paragraphs that began with participial phrases that didn't quite modify the subject of the sentence. They were like the classic example--Walking down the street, the trees' leaves were colorful--but weirdly phrased when compared to the years of student errors I've seen. They were so weird and inhuman that they had a chalk-on-the-blackboard aspect. I looked it up and, yes, this is an AI tell. Also, this draft book description used my original title of the book instead of the one the publisher gave it. This was the final giveaway. Somebody had fed the book description I wrote for my proposal three years ago into an LLM, and this is what it spit out.
Within the year, this kind of bastardized language will be ubiquitous. People will stop noticing. Languages change, so is this a problem? Well, it is if the resulting text no longer says what the writer intended to say. And it's really a problem if the resulting text doesn't make any sense and the reader is forced to ignore it or live with the cognitive dissonance.
Languages change, so is this a problem? Well, it is if the resulting text no longer says what the writer intended to say
Why do people not care about language?
I suspect most of the time it is because people feel it's not worth their time.In text/instant messaging conversations, people get straight to the point.
E.g., "lunch at 12:30, meet at Panera?" "can't do 12:30, how about 1?"
No "beautiful language," no real need for AI, most people just type or dictate it, the words say exactly what you mean.Then there are emails ... you have to write more words than are absolutely necessary to say what you really want to say. Instead of simply saying "review the attached report, check numbers on page X, send revision or confirm the numbers are good by COB," most people feel compelled to provide context about about the report, explain why they want the numbers on page X checked, explain why the COB deadline is important, etc. Now that you have to write more words than you believe are necessary, the urge to delegate to AI to generate those extraneous words for you gets a little stronger.
Then there are letters, academic papers, presentation slides, formal reports, books ... you need to put in more and more extraneous words than those necessary to convey what you believe is essential.
Take academic research papers, for example. Instead of just writing your method, results, and conclusions, most journals/conferences expect an "introduction/background" section, an abstract, a conclusion section, maybe a section on "why you think your stuff is new/important" ... Now you have to repeat your key contents a few times (e.g., your key results may have to appear three times -- in the abstract, in the result section, and in the conclusion). The introduction/background section is mostly you recounting someone else's stuff, little to no originality. With expectations for all these extra words that do not speak to what you really want to convey, the urge to delegate to AI gets stronger.
Similar incentives structure for corporate reports/papers/slides. Often lots of boilerplates, lots of fillers because the template says so, because of policy, lots of hedging and disclaimer language to CYA, etc. The urge to delegate to AI gets even stronger.
It just gets worse as the documents get more formal (e.g., regulatory filings).
I don't have a solution for this. I hope people learn to focus their energy on manually drafting/tweaking the parts that are most important, the parts that convey novel/original things, and that people learn to identify and focus these parts when they look at written communications. The rest will continue to exist because systems/institutions require it or because people expect it, and I am resigned to accept those formal/performatory bits to be overtaken by AI slop.
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I've read recent articles where companies that embraced AI for things like emails and internal reports are bemoaning the time being wasted because AI writing is so verbose. It seems like the algorithms could be tweaked for that, but I really don't know if it's possible.
Absent something in the code that privileges succinctness, an LLM has no incentive not to write long. The text is generated almost instantly. Why waste resources slimming it down for the convenience of human beings? It's more efficient to just let slop be slop.
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I still haven't had time to look for the article, but your point triggered a question I can't answer. I'm told that the algorithms don't have the kind of memory that we use for writing, They predict the next word, but they don't plan the whole piece and they don't recall what's already been written when they get further into the piece. This means that a fully LLM-written novel will not and cannot have the kind of coherent throughline that a (competently) human-written novel would. (It also calls into question whether it's actually a novel, since a novel has narrative constraints that differentiate it from a book-shaped pile of pages. I have not done a lot of reading in narratology and I haven't read a fully LLM-written novel, so I can't say much more than that.)
Anyway, when I think through how I'd go about writing, say, an email when I've been told to keep it under 200 words, it's a multi-step process. I plan what I'm going to say, I say it, I check the word-count constraint, I check to see if I said what I'd intended, and I edit accordingly. I'm not sure current models do that kind of thing very well. It may be that it's a sufficiently recursive process that such a process would multiply time and energy demands to an extent that would make writing succinctly difficult.
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