[billpg]

Hi. I wrote it, and I'm a human. (Or at least I think I am.)

I did use an AI for spell-checking, punctuation, generally making it flow, but its all my text.

You think a machine is going to come up with "near pointers, far pointers, wherever-you-are pointers"?

[chowells]

"generally make it flow" is exactly the problem. It's a process of smoothing over any interesting features of the text to replace them with plastic. It's submerging the actual information you wish to convey under a layer of low-entropy noise. The whole signal may still be there, but having to find it under a uniform glossy finish is work for the reader. It's work you didn't need to delegate to the reader.

LLMs generate low-entropy text. That's their entire purpose. But good writing isn't about being as low-entropy as possible. It's about producing peaks and valleys. As a person who's been participating in human-to-human communication your entire life, you probably have a pretty well-developed sense of how to structure the flow of a piece of communication. The small arcs with their ebbs and flows of tension and density provide the reader a rough surface that gives them enough traction to easily move from point to point. Don't let an LLM smooth out all the gaps. It makes it hard for a reader to keep their footing in the text.

[saulpw]

> As a person who's been participating in human-to-human communication your entire life, you probably have a pretty well-developed sense of how to structure the flow of a piece of communication.

Not OP, but this is where you're wrong. The vast majority of people, myself included, have difficulty structuring communication for effectiveness to a wide audience. When I manage to pull it off I'm very proud of the work, but I can't just sit down and do it. Review with an LLM helps me find those places where it CLANKS, distracting the reader, taking them out of the flow. This is why every professional writer has an editor; good communication is quite hard.

[nvme0n1p1]

He's not writing the bible. He's writing a blog post about segment registers. It's fine if there's a sharp edge here or there. You're probably better at communication than you think, and your readers are probably less picky than you're imagining. An occasional sharp edge in your text is not the end of the world.

[trollbridge]

The original texts of the Bible have lots of “bad grammar” and “poor spelling”, too!

[trollbridge]

Thanks for responding. The problem is:

- the “make it flow” made it flow in an AI generated way like short paragraphs that are one short sentence.

- I now have to decide if this is entirely AI generated and thus not worth my time reading or not.

- I would prefer to just interact with you as a real person; your writing doesn’t have to be perfect for what you write to be worth reading.

[billpg]

shrug

I've reviewed what I originally wrote and I prefer the text I published. Sure, I could review it all myself (indeed I used to) but that takes time and it was becoming a barrier to actually publishing stuff. Maybe I'd have got around to finishing it in a few months.

I don't use AI to write for me. I hate people who do that.

[trollbridge]

Yeah. My challenge is how to distinguish from folks like you versus pure AI generated stuff. (I’ve added you to my mental whitelist, though, so I expect to enjoy posts from you in the future despite the AI tells in the grammar.)