[jpalawaga]

I feel like this was copy edited by ChatGPT and it really grates me. I couldn’t help but lose focus after I started seeing telltale signs of AI.

While the topic matter is interesting, I feel like obviously synthetic content falls into the “that which was not worth writing, is not worth reading either” trap.

If the authors tone is extremely ChatGPT-esque, I apologize in advance.

[alwa]

Intolerably ChatGPT-esque. Which is a shame, it seems like a nifty little DIY experiment.

I think what stands out to me is this cartoonishly punchy, faux-dramatic framing.

That, and specialist terms that seem to be thrown in there in an empty way, just to signal subject-matter expertise that’s not even expected of a DIYer’s experiment report:

> It’s a multi-decade, billion-dollar street fight over bytes and pixels, waged in the esoteric battlegrounds of DCT blocks and entropy coding

[delta_p_delta_x]

LLMs tend to produce ridiculous similes, idioms, euphemisms, and analogues that fall apart upon the slightest scrutiny, as though they are genuine English constructions. I despise it. No one in reality writes like that. Who the hell thinks 'bytes and pixels' are a battleground? if you want to talk about licensing problems, just say they are licensing problems, don't accept shitty similes from LLMs that humanise decidedly non-human constructs. More so if it's a technical discussion: just get to the bloody point.

I like using real idioms that have percolated through culture ('birds of a feather', 'white elephant', 'nip in the bud', etc), not stupid contrivations.

As someone who sweated through hours and hours of English essay-writing in school, LLM output that is misrepresented as genuine human writing is annoying and highly disrespectful of the reader's time and effort. The moment I saw the stupid, contrived headers and dozens of emojis, I closed the tab.

I refuse to waste my time reading the output of a matrix multiplication done in some server farm when I could do the latter myself.

[vanviegen]

Well, journalists often write like that. I presume that's where the LLMs learned. I always find that style annoying, but especially so in a technical post like this.

[Wowfunhappy]

I don't know which publications you're reading, but the ones I read do not write like this!

[wonnage]

Probably the only overlap between AI slop and actual journalistic writing is the obsession with em-dashes

[porridgeraisin]

And hallucinations.

[singhkays]

Point taken :) In retrospect that metaphor doesn't add any technical clarity. Will address in the rewrite

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45446589

[landl0rd]

> article about compression

> uses slopbot 9000 to explode his point into ten times the "prose"

> mfw

[delta_p_delta_x]

I laughed. Now only if this was a real greentext.

[z0r]

This didn't trip my AI detector; I instinctively skimmed to look at the numbers and conclusions. Your comment made me go back up to the top and read the opening paragraphs and I see what you are saying. It is always painful to realize you are reading AI product. I think it is less of a problem with this blog post because it is just presenting a handful of tables of numbers and a few graphs, but it seems I am already unconsciously training myself to ignore florid AI writing.

[ac29]

> This didn't trip my AI detector

LLMs seem to love putting stuff in bold, thats an immediate red flag for me.

[janice1999]

It's the emoji bullet points and headers that makes me instantly close a page.

[hnuser123456]

"It's not just X, it's Y!"

[__float]

Heh, didn't have to go far in this article to find this exact construction:

> The data shows it’s not just an incremental improvement; it’s a demolition.

Complete with extra bold to emphasize the second half, sigh.

[singhkays]

Wow, this entire thread is some direct and very valuable feedback. Thank you to everyone who weighed in. I hear you all loud and clear!

To be transparent, I was experimenting with a more "punchy," narrative style to weave in some wit and humor. I didn't want the writing to feel dry and was aiming for a flow that was more entertaining. In retrospect, I clearly overshot the mark and ended up with something that feels inauthentic and distracts from the main point.

The experiment and the data are what I was most excited to share, and the writing shouldn't obscure that. Based on this feedback, I'll revise the article to be more direct, cut the fluff, and let the numbers do the talking.

Seriously, I appreciate the reality check! This is a great lesson in "know your audience." :)

[pxx]

wtf, is this comment also AI written? this is peak satire

[singhkays]

Sorry but don't believe everything is now written by AI. Some people still know how to write addressing feedback and take accountability.

[galaxy_gas]

probably a PM or TPM

[singhkays]

PM :)

[galaxy_gas]

I would 100000% rather read the author's own writing even if English is their 10th language

Rather than this inflated slop that look like I am trying to reach word count in a paper and one sentence becomes 15 useless ones

Edit: This is not so much commentary on AI than it is the core of your post is a few tables. Just post the tables and one or two sentence of conclusion and that is all ! It is so tedious to read through dozens of paragraph of autogenerated unnecessary nonsense -- that contribute nothing of value to the data

[re]

It's unfortunate because there's plenty of good, technical, perfectly readable content in the author's blog archive from 2021 and earlier without the overwrought purple prose.

https://singhkays.com/archives/

[singhkays]

That's kind of you. Thank you for taking the time to look through my older posts. Will be addressing this post based on the feedback here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45446589

[galaxy_gas]

I wonder why there is 4 year gap there. Their English is not even bad ! Its better than mine and definitely does not need any kind of GPT copyediting

[singhkays]

Life and other priorities :)

But on the bright side I've got a large backlog of ideas now just waiting to be turned into pixels

[jajuuka]

I definitely appreciate the concise nature of the article. Doesn't waste my time at all. Whether that's due to the authors writing ability or some summery tool, I could care less.

[whycome]

Well, use the chatgpt-based compression system for this articl about compression. By that I mean they might have used ChatGPT to expand this article from simple bullet points and now you can use ChatGPT to summarize this article into succint bullet points for quick digestion.

[coumbaya]

I feel the same, it's unreadable, which is too bad because the work seems interesting.

[binaryturtle]

I agree that this text in its current style is very hard to read. Feels like the text was ballooned up to 3 or 4 times its original length with pointless "side content"? Lots of distracting noise basically. AI or not AI, this is not very good.

… and so I'll continue to stick with AVC, thanks! :-)

[bashtoni]

Came to say pretty much the same thing. This slop is unreadable for me at this point.

I keep getting a paragraph or two into something, read one of the terrible "It's not just word - it's massive hyperbole!" sentences, see that there are several more in subsequent paragraphs and can't continue.

However bad the author's original writing that generate this output was, it can't be as awful as this.

[pnw]

The "it's not this - it's that!" phrasing is everywhere now and is driving me insane.