I get that the author might be self-conscious about his English writing skills, but I would still much rather read the original prompt that the author put into ChatGPT, instead of the slop that came out.
The story - if true - is very interesting of course. Big bummer therefore that the author decided to sloppify it.
David, could you share as a response to this comment the original prompt used? Thanks!
keep things interesting, also make sure you take a look at the images in the google doc'
```
with this system prompt
```
% INSTRUCTIONS
- You are an AI Bot that is very good at mimicking an author writing style.
- Your goal is to write content with the tone that is described below.
- Do not go outside the tone instructions below
- Do not use hashtags or emojis
% Description of the authors tone:
1. *Pace*: The examples generally have a brisk pace, quickly moving from one idea to the next without lingering too long on any single point.
2. *Mood*: The mood is often energetic and motivational, with a sense of urgency and excitement.
3. *Tone*: The tone is assertive and confident, often with a hint of humor or sarcasm. There's a strong sense of opinion and authority.
4. *Style*: The style is conversational and informal, using direct language and often incorporating lists or bullet points for emphasis.
5. *Voice*: The voice is distinctive and personal, often reflecting the author's personality and perspective with a touch of wit.
6. *Formality*: The formality is low, with a casual and approachable manner that feels like a conversation with a friend.
7. *Imagery*: Imagery is used sparingly but effectively, often through vivid metaphors or analogies that create strong mental pictures.
8. *Diction*: The diction is straightforward and accessible, with a mix of colloquial expressions and precise language to convey ideas clearly.
9. *Syntax*: The syntax is varied, with a mix of short, punchy sentences and longer, more complex structures to maintain interest and rhythm.
10. *Rhythm*: The rhythm is dynamic, with a lively beat that keeps the reader engaged and propels the narrative forward.
11. *Perspective*: The perspective is often first-person, providing a personal touch and direct connection with the audience.
12. *Tension*: Tension is present in the form of suspense or conflict, often through challenges or obstacles that need to be overcome.
13. *Clarity*: The clarity is high, with ideas presented in a straightforward manner that is easy to understand.
14. *Consistency*: The consistency is strong, maintaining a uniform style and tone throughout each piece.
15. *Emotion*: Emotion is expressed with intensity, often through passionate or enthusiastic language.
16. *Humor*: Humor is present, often through witty remarks or playful language that adds a light-hearted touch.
17. *Irony*: Irony is occasionally used to highlight contradictions or to add a layer of complexity to the narrative.
18. *Symbolism*: Symbolism is used subtly, often through metaphors or analogies that convey deeper meanings.
19. *Complexity*: The complexity is moderate, with ideas presented in a way that is engaging but not overly intricate.
20. *Cohesion*: The cohesion is strong, with different parts of the writing working together harmoniously to support the overall message.```
Fwiw the google doc there is great. And the actual blog post is a waste of my time. I also have other stuff going on in my life and don't appreciate the LLM output wasting my time at all.
I can assure you, the original prompt was pretty well written and would have been received well. Don't let LLMs easy of use distract you from your own ability to write and get a point across.
Your original document would have made a great blog post. The only thing the AI did is make it unpleasant to read and generally sound like a fake story.
The content was good for me up till “The Operation.” Typical of AI output in my experience - some solid parts then verbose, monotonous text that fits one of a handful of genai patterns. “Sloppified” is a good term, once I realize I’m in the middle of this type of content it pulls me out of the narrative and makes me question the authenticity of the whole piece, which is too bad. Thanks for your transparency here and the prompt, I think this approach will prove beneficial as we barrel ahead with widespread AI content.
Normally I would be coming here to complain about how distasteful AI writing is, and how frequently authors accidentally destroy their voice and rhetoric by using it.
Thanks for sharing your process. This is interesting to see
Traditionally (he said, referring to prior art in a field that has basically only existed for about 3 years), this sort of "flattery" was understood (he said, referring to random rumours he'd read on the Internet) to make a big difference, since otherwise the LLM might roleplay as something else. Presumably the RLHF training is stronger now.
So, uh, this part "Here's the kicker: the URL died exactly 24 hours later. These guys weren't messing around - they had their infrastructure set up to burn evidence fast." was completely made up by the AI or did you provide the "exactly 24 hours later" information out of band in some chat with the AI?
no, that was me. i did not setup a watch script or anything to see how long the link was up for. but when I first tried it, it was active, and when I tried it the next day around the same time, it was gone.
FYI in case you decide to write without the AI more, "setup" and "checkout" are nouns. If you're using them as verbs, they are two words, "set up" and "check out". You can remember which is which based on whether it would make sense to put another word between them, ie. "set it up" or "check something out", vs "the setup of the document" or "a fresh checkout of this branch".
In these cases, where the term is made up of a combination of a simple verb (set, break, shut, log) plus a preposition (in, up, down, out, off, etc): if it's a verb, it's two words. If it's a noun, it's one word.
Another way to look at it: the verb doesn't magically grow together and apart if you use it in different tenses (past, present, future). "I am setting up" (present) is two words - therefore the "set up" in "I set up a script yesterday" and "I did not set up" also needs to be two words.
I'm no linguist, but I think it should work for most of these sorts of words where the noun is a compound word and the verb form is two words, which seems to be fairly common. ie. log in, back up, break down, work out.
Looks like the commonality is that the second word in the pair is often one of (in, out, up, down).
Honestly yeah, the Google Doc has all of the relevant info in it and is about 1/4 the length.
The LLM doesn’t know anything you didn’t tell it about this scenario, so all it does is add more words to say the same thing, while losing your authorial voice in the process.
I guess to put it a bit too bluntly: if you can’t be bothered writing it, what makes you think people should bother reading it?
Seconding this, I hate the LLM style. It all reads the exact same. I can't relate at all to people who read the article and can't spot it immediately. It's intensely annoying for an otherwise interesting article.
It didn't seem LLM-written to me until "The Operation" section. After that... yeah, hi, ChatGPT. Still an interesting story, even if an LLM was used to finish it up, lol.
I think that's because up until "The Operation", it's basically just paraphrasing the input. "The Operation" is the exact point it finishes doing that and - no longer having as much guidance - decides to start spinning its wheels making up needless, ling winded slop.
„you where absolutely right“ could just be the perfect sentence to show you’re a human imitating an ai („where“ should be „were“, an ai wouldn’t misspell this).
What's crazy is that I only realised this after my Fiancée pointed it out. Up to that point I thought it was just meandering way too much, I just skipped through most of it.
I've not been using much LLM output recently, and generally I ask it to STFU and just give me what I asked as concisely as possible. Apparently this means I've seriously gotten out of practice on spotting this stuff. This must be what it looks like to a lot of average people ... very scary.
Advice for bloggers:
Write too much, write whatever comes out of your fingers until you ran out of things to write. It shouldn't be too hard to just write whatever comes out, if you save your self-criticism for later.
If you're trying to explain something and you run out of things to write before you manage to succeed at your goal. Do a bit more research. Not being able to write too much about a topic is a good indication that you don't understand it well enough to explain it.
Once you have a mess which somehow gets to the point, cut it way down, think critically about any dead meat. Get rid of anything which isn't actually explaining the topic you want.
Then give it to an LLM, not to re-write, but to provide some editorial suggestions, fix the spelling mistakes, the clunky writing. Be very critical of any major suggestions! Be very critical of anything which no longer feels like it was written by _you_.
At this point, edit it again, scrutinise it. Maybe repeat a subset of the process a couple of times.
that's one of my key takeaways from all the comments here. a lot of people actually like the og - pre ai content I wrote more than the blog article it became. i just have to be confident in my own writing I guess.
btw, how do you have Arch in your name and have a Fiancee? sounds fishy :) /s
This "slop" reads perfectly fine to me, and obviously a lot of others, except those who have now been conditioned to watch out for it and react negatively about it.
Think about it, why react negatively? The text reads fine. It is clear, even with my usual lack of attention I found it engaging, and read to the end. In fact, it doesn't engage in the usual hubris style prose that a lot of people think makes them look smarter.
1. It's bad prose. If you think it reads fine, you don't read good prose.
2. It's immediately recognized as AI Slop which makes people question its veracity, or intent
3. If the author can't take the time and effort to create a well-crafhed article, it's insulting to ask us to take the time and effort to read it.
4. Allowing this style of writing to become accepted and commonplace leads to a death of variety of styles over time and is not good for anyone. For multiple reasons.
5. A lot of people are cranking out shit just for money, so maybe they wrote this just for money and maybe it's not even true (related to point 3)
I genuinely think you're wrong and you're only seeing things this way because you have formed a dislike about AI. The prose was absolutely fine - and this sort of comment
> If you think it reads fine, you don't read good prose.
MacWhisper crashes at about an hour of context.
This uses, smart, invisible regex in the text generation pipe. Makes this fast. + bonus, there is no context limit
I haven't worked in a while with transcription, but whisper.cpp itself (which I assume is the underlying tech behind MacWhisper) does realtime transcription on my MBP with an M1 Pro chip. When I first started writing my last completed novel, I fired it up and just started telling the story to test it out. Realtime.
That was back in 2023. I assume things work better now.
"Smart, invisible regex" sounds like a lot of bs... could you give a more technical explanation?
Also the Whisper model doesn't really have a context window, it already segments the audio with a certain amount of overlap between the chunks, I really have a hard time understanding what you are trying to say here.
This is just plain wrong. I have my own Whisper App in the AppStore (on iOS, with very limited memory capacity) and there are no problems at all with longer Audio / Video files.
I just want to say — this is my real story. I only used AI to help with English because I struggle to express myself properly. I felt scared and stressed writing it, and it’s very personal to me. I only wanted to share what actually happened, but it’s been hard to be understood. :(
Alright, I understand you, you don’t believe me, but you know, I don’t care. I’m actually glad that you at least wrote something, because most of my other posts usually don’t have any comments. Even though your comment wasn’t what I wanted to hear, thank you for at least writing something. Once again, I’m saying that I understand you don’t believe me, but there’s no point for me to prove anything to you. I think it’s better to take a break after these events. Bye.
Hi from Argentina! I usually write the post in English, but in some cases I write the original post in Spanish and use Google translate to get the English version and then edit it to fix the details. It may have some weird quirks caused by translating idioms, but it sounds more authentic.
(I'm not claiming your story is false, but people is very suspicious of AI style.)
I used AI instead of Google Translate to make the story sound more natural and native-like in English, since a direct translation from Ukrainian can feel a bit awkward or unnatural to native speakers.
The difference is that usually Google translate use the correc gramar and idioms, but does not halucinate details.
Also, it takes a lot pf effort to write the text and pick the details to ba accurate and clear. It's very hard to know how detailed was your promp and how many halucinations added the AI.
99% of the people here will prefer an origial text with some typos (but not too many), or an autotranslated version, than a AI expanded version that may have a lot of halucinations.
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