Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by delta_p_delta_x 258 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.
I don't know which publications you're reading, but the ones I read do not write like this!
Probably the only overlap between AI slop and actual journalistic writing is the obsession with em-dashes
And hallucinations.