Comment by handoflixue | Hacker News Reader

Comment by handoflixue | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

My good sir, I regret to inform you that the informality of the English language has been in decline for quite some time. Possibly since that vulgar bard Shakespeare abandoned all pretense of a shared language and raised a generation that thinks words like "fashionable"[sic!!] are real words.

However, it is notable that the rules of this particular venue request one be charitable to your fellow forum goers, and thus the admonition that their preferred communication is "slop" is generally considered unwelcome.

Would that you had only been able to word your own communication is in proper vocabulary and grammar; alas, I must conclude that even as you reject modernity, you have embraced the "slop" of the past.

But to address your last sentence: OP explicitly admits to using AI in the Reddit comments, and apologizes for it. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wzw8zd/i_think_i.... If you are going to repeat this libel, at least have the decency to provide some sort of citation

is this supposed to be an example of bad writing because unnecessary bombast is definitely a sign of it

good writing is not just replacing random words with entries from thesaurus.com, it's writing for your reader. that's one thing LLM-generated text is very bad at - frequently violates the show-don't-tell rule, it lacks any interiority by it's very nature, etc

if you don't practice writing yourself, you don't develop the muscle of knowing what your reader's expectations are and you will forever remain a mediocre writer

It reads as an example of English writing that was once considered "proper". The point I see is that it shows how this complaint about AI writing is history rhyming with itself again.

There is a difference between objections to style and objections to clarity and conciseness. My complaint with AI isn't that it's not formal enough, it's that there's so much bullshit and so little content in AI-generated blocks of text.

"Slop" is generally meant as a derogatory label against anything in the AI vernacular - it is not an objection to clarity, it is a repudiation of the idea of using AI for writing at all.

It's the same tired game we play, as a society, any time a new writing style enters the mainstream. That game goes back to at least Shakespeare's era, where our illustrious bard was called out for his tendency to make up words ("fashionable" being, I believe, an actual example of this?)

No. I have read AI generated stuff that had me fooled. I'm not egotistical enough to think that it's impossible.

That being said, natural language has inherent entropy that LLMs paper over with temperature and random sampling.

That makes sense to me - the stuff that had me fooled was probably as much work as just writing it would have been.

You can get an LLM to write anything any way you want. You can also get yourself to write anything any way you want. I don't care about LLMs for writing, but I do care that people recognize vacuous and confusing writing when they see it.

How do you know who the intended readers of that comment were?

I assume myself and others like me since it is being posted on a forum where each and every comment has not only an audience but a points-based rating system

Regardless of authorial intent, everything posted here is for the wider HN audience

I will concede I had assumed a more educated audience, which could pick out reference to a particular linguistic style, rather than confusing it for a wild joy ride through thesaurus.com

Conversely, if you yourself write solely for points, then you might as well be a machine - for all reasonable virtues of truth, community, and free expression will find themselves at odds with such petty incentives. I am happy to lose a karma or two to speak my own mind, rather than playing puppet for your upvote.

you're not really writing in a 'linguistic' style, you're just doing the Claude thing of using unnecessarily long words and forcing your reader to do extra cognitive processing because you want the substance of your writing to sound more sophisticated than it actually is

there is an ironically long and obscure word describing this kind of writing:https://sites.utexas.edu/legalwriting/2015/07/27/tips-for-co...

LOL. I mean, yeah, I want it to sound more sophisticated than it actually is! That's the point. It's funny. You're supposed to be in on the joke.

But that IS a style! It's a deliberate attempt to invoke something specific: in this case, the contrast between a supposed sophisticated vocabulary, and the concepts actually being quite simple.

I don't really think of it as "extra cognitive processing", though - the whole idea is that the audience should recognize the joke, as indeed you did!

thus my original question - was this an example of bad writing?

the easy answer to this would've been yes or "unquestionably" if you wanted to keep up the Victorian writing style

Reply on news.ycombinator.com