[shitloadofbooks]

What is the name for the literary device that LLMs use where it explains something and then follows with a "pithy" "gotcha" sentence?

> > Atherton didn't have to win. A CEQA lawsuit doesn't need a strong legal theory to do damage — it just needs to introduce enough risk that funders freeze and clocks keep running. The delay is the weapon.

In my opinion, this construct is massively overused by LLMs and is extremely jarring to read. The pithy followup "The delay is the weapon." feels like Year 8 Debate Club and is very melodramatic and cringy.

It must be possible to steer the LLM away from this?

[tarpitt]

I wouldn't find it so grating if I wasn't constantly reading it. Maybe 5 years ago I would have liked this writing pattern. Same for those diagrams they include.

What it lacks is the effort it takes for a couple minutes to whittle down the writing to the essential parts and bring out the particular style of the author. Even before this wave of LLM stuff started, I knew that it's editing that makes good writing. LLMs are mostly a single-pass process. Maybe it would be improved by having a couple intermediary high-temp thinking stages. the time tradeoff is worth it if it's producing some blog or speech to be consumed by 100s or 1000s of people even if you are only improving the writing by, say, 5%.

To be honest, I don't mind the diagrams when I'm the one prompting it. Other than the fact that it is a waste of tokens, and full of clickable dialogs that waste more of my tokens.

[nine_k]

Now that LLMs can produce texts in any form, and of a considerable length, may we please stop bickering about the form, and concentrate on the content? Because otherwise we'd allow LLMs troll us: produce slop to mask where the content is lacking, and have us generate more words about the slop, ignoring the content further.

[meindnoch]

Reframing.