It's simple. Human writing is short and to the point (either because they're lazy or want to save the reader's time), yet still manages to capture your attention. AI writing tends to be too elaborate and lacks a sense of "self".
I feel like this article challenges my patience and attention too much, there is really no need to focus on the pros of upgrading here. We reader just want to know how they managed to upgrade at that large scale, challenges they faced and how the solved them. Not to mention any sane tech writers that value their time wouldn't write this much.
>It's simple. Human writing is short and to the point (either because they're lazy or want to save the reader's time), yet still manages to capture your attention. AI writing tends to be too elaborate and lacks a sense of "self".
Corporate (and SEO) writing has always been overly verbose and tried to sound fancy. In fact, this probably is where LLMs learned that style. There's no reliable heuristic to tell human- and AI-writing apart.
There's a lot of worry about people being fooled by AI fakes, but I'm also worried about false positives, people seeing "AI" everywhere.
In fact, this is already happening in the art communities, with accusations flying left and right.
People are too confident in their heuristics. "You are using whole sentences? Bot!" I fear this will make people simplify their writing style to avoid the accussations, which won't really accomplish anything, because AIs already can be prompted to avoid the default word-salad style.
> Not to mention any sane tech writers that value their time wouldn't write this much.
This is a big part of why the tech is so damn corrosive, even in well-meaning use, let alone its lopsided benefits for bad actors.
Even on the “small” and more-private side of life, it’s tempting to use it to e.g. spit out a polished narrative version of your bullet-point summary of your players’ last RPG session, but then do you go cut it back down to something reasonable? No, by that point it’s about as much work as just writing it yourself in the first place. So the somewhat-too-long version stands.
The result is that the temptation to generate writing that wasn’t even worth someone’s time to write—which used to act as a fairly effective filter, even if it could be overcome by money—is enormous. So less and less writing is worth the reader’s time.
As with free long distance calls, sometimes removing friction is mostly bad.
My hypothesis is that long form content generated by LLMs tend to sound like blogspam and press releases because those are exactly the kinds of things they were trained on. Most content generated by humans for public consumption is ANYTHING but succinct.
Their style is much more direct if you just ask them a question or to summarize something. (Although whether the answer is accurate or not is another matter.)
