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by quinndupont 51 days ago
The rise of AI writing has only been matched by superficial articles comprised of ideas salad that evince no deep theoretical or historical understanding. Crappy writing has and always will exist, AI doesn’t change that, it just makes awful writing grammatical.
1 comments

It has generally reduced the signal-to-noise ratio of writing, but the signal-to-noise ratio has been absolutely terrible for such a long time we’ve all adapted to better signal detection.
Because it made noise look more like signal. Essentially, that is what AI is. A noise2signal generator, but you specify how a signal should look like. Then, it makes the noise into your specifications. If you specify "make it look like good writing", it will look like good writing, but it will still be noise. It won't be good writing.
Syntactical (grammatical) text is signal but maybe not the kind of meaningful signal we all wish it was. Meaning, of course, resides in the reader, in the practice of reading (Wittgenstein etc), not the author. We used to use writing quality as a proxy for quality of meaning (thought), but that no longer works well.