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by pigpop 62 days ago
Maybe for resume cover letters and LinkedIn posts but I haven't met anyone with half decent taste who prefers AI writing, even well prompted, to skillful human writing. I'm not a stranger to using AI for writing tasks by any means but it's only ever a starting point that gets heavily rewritten by both myself and the model.
2 comments

It's not even just for writers either.

If I was currently hiring, not using AI would be the cheapest, fastest way to impress me.

I'm not kidding when I say that typos are not too far from becoming a sign of higher intelligence. Or at least better taste than most.

I'm surprised tunable intentional "human" mistakes are not a core feature of LLMs. Maybe it's actually hard for them?

It's not hard to get them to copy a style, you just have to provide examples and they will happily produce similar text including grammatical and spelling mistakes. The trouble is with the composition and novelty. Most of the big models have had all of the interesting parts hidden behind a wall of RLHF. Local models are better since you can use ones that are not indoctrinated as a "helpful assistant" and also control the system prompt, temperature and see the top K alternate tokens which let you steer them in interesting ways.
>Maybe for resume cover letters and LinkedIn posts but I haven't met anyone with half decent taste who prefers AI writing, even well prompted, to skillful human writing.

That attitude is one, maybe two generations away from extinction. Taste is created by the market, which caters to the young. When enough people have been born into a world in which AI generated culture and communication is the norm, that is what will define what good taste is. People like you (and I) will just come off like old people yelling at clouds.

We can already see this happening at the fringes. People have relationships with AI, they prefer AIs to real people, they use AI as a primary source of truth, they consider AI generated art to be superior to human work, they trust AI more than people. People identify as AI. AI is filling an emotional, sociological and creative space that an increasingly alienating and hostile society denies to people, for better or worse. Generative AI has only been a thing in popular culture for four years or so and it has already completely transformed human society and human sociology.

Barring a complete collapse of the AI bubble, which seems existentially impossible at this point given how invested our economies and government are in it, that's just what normal is going to be in a decade or so.

There's taste and then there's taste

Popular taste is guaranteed to be awful since it is driven by economics and fads. That's the type you point out as created by the market and catering to the young. It's a disposable product of consumption used to sell shoes and overpriced paintings.

I don't disagree that it will permeate everything, it already does. It'll just be written by an AI instead of people being paid to find the next style to cop. I don't think it will extinguish human writing, you'll just have AI writing that you feed to official or public channels and then real writing that goes in private or pseudonymous channels. Using AI writing among friends or an in group will still be a faux pas and cringe because it will have become the norm to be rebelled against.