[fluoridation]

Yeah, that's true. I don't understand why they do that. People don't write like that, we're pretty economical. It's not even that they're repetitive to emphasize a point, they just engage in horrific circumlocution. Is it, like, that the facts of the input only percolate through the network when they emit a token, so they only "think" when they're outputting something? I don't know if that's it, but that's what I would think if I caught someone writing like this, that they're writing faster than they can think, so they fill the void with vacuous noise.

[cogman10]

My non-serious assumption is that they prioritized the classic writings of 1800s authors like Johann David Wyss in their training. These authors were paid by the word, which resulted in long pointless chapters in their books just to milk money out of the printers.

[techjamie]

Much of the internet from the time the training data was initially collected wasn't much different. Consider how much blogspam and listicle SEO/ad optimized content would've been in the training data that is primarily interested in meandering for as long as possible to milk ad views.

[fluoridation]

In text? That doesn't really work. Nowadays that's become sort of a meme in video essays on YouTube, but in text you have complete control of the data rate.

Listicles and those sorts of things were pretty pointless, but they didn't beat around the bush like LLMs do. I really don't exaggerate when I say I've never seen a human write like that. Like, the moment I start reading AI responses I feel the urge to skip ahead to get to the point. I probably read at most like 10% of the words they spit out.