[tonnydourado]

That was an informative post but Jesus Christ on a bicycle, reign in the LLM a bit. The whole thing was borderline painful to read, with so many "GPTisms" I almost bailed out a couple of times. If you're gonna use this stuff to write for you, at least *try* to make it match a style of your own.

[vidarh]

To add a tip on how to make it match your own style: You can get decently far by pointing it to a page or so of your own writing, and simply tell it to review the post section by section and edit it to match the tone and style of the example. It's not perfect by any means, but it will tend to edit out the type of language you're not likely to use, so really to make it sound less LLM-like, almost any writing sample from a human author works.

[mplanchard]

You can also just write it.

I’d much rather read someone’s imperfect writing than the soulless regression-to-the-mean that LLMs produce. If you’re not a native speaker or don’t have confidence in your writing, I’d urge you to first ask for an edit by another human, but if that’s not an option, to be extremely firm in your LLM prompting to just have it fix issues of grammar, spelling, etc.

[erichanson]

"soulless regression-to-the-mean", damn that's quote of the day.

[vidarh]

Almost nobody recognises well written AI texts. I've seen plenty of AI written text pass right by people who are sure they can always tell. It takes very little, because the vast majority of AI writing you spot involves people doing nothing to make it clean up the style.

[vidarh]

I find it quite funny how this got downvoted. My statement is based on concrete knowledge of a project that tested this, and demonstrated quite conclusively that most people consistently fail to detect AI written text that's gone through even very basic measures to seem more human.

[seizethegdgap]

Is it really worth your time to complain about fake internet points on a comment nested 4 deep?

[mplanchard]

I did bail out because of this, despite being pretty interested in the content. I love reading, but I cannot stand LLM “writing” output, and few things are important enough for me to force myself through the misery of ingesting ChatGPT “prose.” I only made it to the second section of this one.

[darkwater]

100% agreed. Maybe this inner reaction will disappear over the years of being exposed to the GPT writing style, or maybe LLMs will be "smarter" on this regard, and being able to use different styles even by default. But I had the same exact feelings as you reading this piece.

[vidarh]

It's really simple to fix by asking an LLM to apply a style from a sample, so my guess is a lot of product will build in style selection, and some provider will add more aggressive rules in their system prompts over time.

[jillesvangurp]

I would recommend using guard rails to guide tone, phrasing, etc. This helps prevent whole categories of bad phrasing. It also helps if you provide good inputs for what you actually want to write about and don't rely too much on it just filling empty space with word soup. And iterate on both the guard rails and the text.

[multjoy]

Or, you know, just write it yourself.

[mplanchard]

It’s not even just about the style. It’s a matter of respect for your readers. If you can’t be bothered to take the time to write it, why on earth should I care enough to take the time to read it?

[vidarh]

If the content has value, I could not care less.

[darkwater]

Yes, but you need a style before :) But in TFA's author case, he actually had a few other blog posts which feel not LLM generated to use as an example, I agree.

[vidarh]

But for plenty of applications it doesn't need to be your personal style. It only needs to be your personal style if you want to present it as your own writing. Otherwise it just matters that it's well written. A catalogue of styles would work well for lots of uses.

[47282847]

„Rewrite in a style appealing to Hacker News users critical of AI slop“.

[vidarh]

I mean, there are lots of people here that writes well enough that giving it some style samples and tell it to adapt the text to "this style: [insert post]" wouldn't be the worst idea.

[consp]

I stopped at "pgit handled it.". The tldr was appreciated though as now I don't have to sieve though the LLM bloat.