[eurekin]

Oh, I know exactly what you mean. I use plannotator with claude a lot and have much better time, since I asked for a specific styleguide.

I used "CD era MSDN reference and Raymond Chen blogging style" as a starting prompt for the styleguide and my work ability to digest AI plans raised a lot.

Couldn't recommend it more. Humble, insightful and respecting the reader

[8organicbits]

> respecting the reader

When people say LLM slop is disrespecting the reader, I don't think they are complaining about style.

[elxr]

They are, and I am. While I don't use the words "LLM slop", I do have the urge to instantly stop reading any piece of writing that was obviously default Claude output with no effort to make it sound even remotely human written.

I'd rather read natural sounding, non-repetitive, and actually useful LLM text than the majority of reddit comments (including the serious ones) for instance.

[eurekin]

That's where the annotation in plannotator helps.

I'm asking to scan projects on gitlab, go through some docs to find more grounding material, write a subarticle (in the same style), scan logs on the test env, issue some curls, etc.; until the whole article is digestible - in the "backing knowledge graph" department.

[shepherdjerred]

Respecting the reader means:

- Understanding what you wrote

- Verifying correctness of any claims

- Putting in at least as much effort writing as your audience will reading

- Not sharing generated content if you can't do the above. If you must, then explicitly disclaiming your use of AI

It does not mean "prompting AI better"

[argee]

> Putting in at least as much effort writing as your audience will reading

This is the big one.

> Ideally not sharing generated content if you can't do the above. If you must, then explicitly disclaiming your use of AI

This is the reason why people get mad about AI generated open-source PRs and repositories. Rather than contributing thoughtfully to the commons, you make it a dumping ground when you do this.

[13415]

Very funny.

[qntmfred]

that's precisely the objection most people have whether they realize it or not.

slop just means "I don't like this style"

when AI writes more reliably in a way that people do like, they will stop calling everything AI does slop.

[8organicbits]

I may complain that I don't like the way a sleezy con man talks, and I may be able to detect his communication patterns, but that doesn't mean I want the con man to speak in a different way I can't detect as sleezy. I don't want to talk to the con man.

Obfuscating LLM output to trick the reader into thinking it wasn't LLM output is not respectful.

[eurekin]

Disclaimer, I only use it to grow the "knowledge hub".

It's a single git project at my $USER home, that is referenced in global memory. It contains as much information about work things, as possible, to be productive.

I found that, if I allowed Claude to create the notes, it actually became more and more useful, but without the guideline, I just could barely get through reading it manually.

I'd never publish anything with such origin.

[mannanj]

I think you are forgetting about the decency and dignity part of "respect".

Yes there's a quality component to the role of communication in how it respects other people.

There's also honesty, transparency, truth and vectors along the dimensions of "Are we claiming and presenting the truth or are we bending facts and creating impersonations and warping reality?" Most AI is used for the latter today: people are having AI's write their words and speech for them and then the AI says things as though it were the human like "I said xyz" when the AI is NOT the human who did those things. That's lying and deception and disrespect to the reader.

[Melonai]

Exactly! See this is what I don't get about the Claude/GPT-style writing that's so prevalent everywhere and why it annoys me even more. It's just so easy to get rid of it, that's why it feels even more disrespectful when I still see it everywhere in full force, just a few sentences is enough to get rid of so much of the extremely obvious tells, sometimes even a "Don't write like an AI" in the prompt leads to completely acceptable results. Everywhere I use LLMs I put a tiny style-guide with instructions such as yours, and the results are just so much more pleasant I barely understand why it seems that almost everyone else seems incapable of it?

The obvious response is of course, they're just completely unbothered by it. Why change it if it doesn't even matter (to me)? I presume the set of people who use AI like this for writing and the set of people who are annoyed by it are largely not overlapping, and there is a possibility that a lot of the text I read and think sounds human, might be written by an LLM with a style-guide like mine. Still though, if 5 words genuinely can reduce annoyance by a lot of people who read your article, why does it feel like so many people haven't picked up on it yet? Or is the LLM writing highly loved & popular amongst other people perhaps?