Dr Zoyander StreetFeb 21

Instead of defending the use of LLMs for polishing up your writing, we could be advocating for unpolished writing. Blog posts with spelling errors and awkwardly repeated words. Emails that sound a bit less warm and professional because you forgot the preamble of "Apologies for the late reply, hope you're well! Thanks for the thing last week".

If there's no budget for a human editor, why should the text meet a "professional" (middle class, formally educated) standard? Dyslexic people can just write how they write and people can deal with it. Autistic people can just say what they mean to say and not waste energy on the double empathy gap.

We can learn to read for a more inclusive world, instead of wasting the planet's diminishing resources masking our differences.

Show threadFurtheringFeb 21
@zoy I work with writers who are not native speakers. These days, I sincerely cheer them on when they have the courage and determination to express themselves without using the LLM crutch even when they know they'll make errors. Bring on the quirks and the correct-adjacent phrasing. There's so much humanity in it, and I find it absolutely beautiful.
Show threadJennifer C J Radtke
@Furthering @zoy It is beautiful. When I read emails etc from people I know well, I hear it in their voice, with their accent. It would be very disconcerting to read something from them that didn't match how they speak. That would particularly be the case for communications that are really about relationships, rather than imparting information - congratulations, commiserations, seeing how folk are doing. We absolutely _need_ the humanity of our individual expression.
Feb 21 at 8:07amWeb
Show threadFurtheringFeb 21

@RadtkeJCJ @zoy 100% this. Even when I'm correcting for clarity or grammar, I want to make sure that the person's voice remains.

An individual voice is becoming increasingly more precious.

Show threadMre. Dartigen [maker mode]Feb 21

@RadtkeJCJ @Furthering @zoy Plus, maybe I'm a freak but sometimes I like to struggle a bit with a text.

I have a notepad held onto my copy of Sacred Games with a rubber band, where I wrote notes on all the unfamiliar slang terms and references. It's taken me much longer than usual to read it, but so much atmosphere and tone would be lost without it! If all that was stripped out, it wouldn't be Mumbai noir anymore, it'd just be noir set in Mumbai, and not nearly as interesting or fun to read. (And clearly there's plenty of agreement that it's a good novel, since it got a Netflix series.)

Show threadFurtheringFeb 21

@dartigen @RadtkeJCJ @zoy

Doesn't sound freak-like to me at all. If a book doesn't challenge me and teach me new words, new ways of looking at the world, and various expressions, what's it for?

This is one reason I have a hard time with many, many books published in the past few years. It's just so much literary pablum.

I'm partial to this N+1 editorial, which asks us to learn to distinguish between LLM output and human writing:

"Notice the poverty of the latter’s [LLM output's] style, the artless syntax and plywood prose, and the shoddiness of its substance: the threadbare platitudes, pat theses, mechanical arguments. And just as important, read to recognize the charm, surprise, and strangeness of the real thing."

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the-intellectual-situation/large-language-muddle/

Charm, surprise, and strangeness -- give me that a million times over. Charm, surprise, and strangeness. Please.

Large Language Muddle | The Editors

The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the humanities? Yes — and every student gets their own personal chatbot. The second coming of the Trump Administration has exposed the civic sclerosis of the US body politic? Time to turn the Social Security Administration over to Grok. Climate apocalypse now feels less like a distant terror than a fact of life? In three years, roughly a tenth of US energy demand will come from data centers alone.

n+1
Show threadMre. Dartigen [maker mode]Feb 21

@Furthering @RadtkeJCJ @zoy Also the format flattening - I don't have a ton of examples of books where the typography is an important part of the story itself or equally as meaningful as the content off the top of my head, but the one that always comes to mind is House of Leaves. (I think some of the Lemony Snickett novels did some interesting things with typography as well. I haven't had a chance to read a lot of others that do much with the typography that I can recall as standing out to me. Though some of the adventure novels I read as a kid that included a lot of puzzles definitely used some special typography to make those work. And ofc Discworld using font changes to convey some particular character voices.

From what I've seen a lot of LLMs tend to flatten formatting when fed text. Or they don't like it and won't parse the text at all. And I'm sure that comes across as 'don't do that' to less confident writers using LLMs, just as much as the flattening of the content of the text is discouraging.

Show threadFurtheringFeb 21
@dartigen This is an aspect I hadn't thought about/been aware of. The first book that comes to mind with imaginative formatting is The Raw Shark Texts!
Show threadMre. Dartigen [maker mode]Feb 21

@Furthering I'm not sure if all LLMs do it or are as bad for it, but the fact that I've been told twice now in as many months by different employment consultants to not use any kind of formatting beyond font size and bullet points in my resume (so aesthetically it looks *awful*) because LLMs can't parse text in a table or in columns does not make me confident that it's gotten any better or going to get any better.

(Again, might be some of my spicy brain showing, but as much as I know resumes need to be easily readable and short, I also appreciate a well-presented and aesthetically pleasing document. Makes it more memorable as well. But I guess humans don't read resumes anymore.)

Show threadFurtheringFeb 21
@dartigen Oh, that makes complete sense!
Show threadmathewFeb 21
@Furthering @dartigen The first one I thought of is “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman”. 1759, so also probably the first chronologically.