Because they're self-aware perfectionists and are actively working to stop it, because they reach for all kinds of tools like grammar checkers and AI, but they're aware that using those will make the post lose "their" voice, or the human element of the post.
And that's, I think, a valid choice; you can choose to use all the tools and make something gramatically and stylistically as close to perfect, but who would want to read something as dry? That's for formal writing, and blog posts are not formal.
Reading what you write for editing does not make a text lose your voice. If anything, it amplifies it, you get to ensure that what you intended to say was said.
Not reading what you write smells more like laziness.
Same thing for spell checks, grammar checks, and even AI usage. If you use things lazily, the result will be lazy as well.
Instead of asking for an AI tool to write your thoughts in your place, you can write it yourself and ask it to criticize your text, instruct it to not rewrite anything, only give you an overall picture of text clarity, sentiment, etc.
But that of course would require more work. Asking ChatGPT to produce a text based on a lazily written, bullet point list of brainfarts is probably easier.
> instruct it to not rewrite anything, only give you an overall picture of text clarity, sentiment, etc.
LLM cant really do that. It can help you produce correct sentence where you struggle to create own, but it does not have capabilities to do what you suggest.
LLMs definitely can do this. The output tends to be overly positive though, claiming that any sort of rough draft you give them is "great, almost ready for publishing!". But the feedback you can get on clarity, narrative flow, weak spots... _is_ usually pretty good.
Now, following that feedback to the letter is going to end up with a diluted message and boring voice, so it's up to you to do with the feedback whatever you think best.
I never ask the LLM to evaluate my text in terms of being good or bad. Instead I try something like this:
"In this section I tried to explain X, I intended to sound in Y and Z fashion, and I want a reader to come out with ateast W impression. Is the text achieving these goals? Do I communicate my ideas clearly and consisely, or are they too confuse and meandering?"
I typically get useful feedback. I preface specifically asking it to not rewrite, simply pointing the bits that it finds faulty and explaining why.
Of course the prompt is different is I am writing, for example, technical documentation, or if it is an attempt at creative writing.
What? LLMs are very capable of doing sentiment analysis. Hell, it's basically one of the things it actually excels at - understanding tone, nuance, context, etc.
I used it many times for exactly this, with good results. It points out ambiguous contructs, parts that are dissonant from the tone I intend, etc.
I have no idea why you think that LLMs can't do that lol
Sentiment analysis for the purpose of categorizing reddit comments, sure. For the purpose of giving you advice about nuance, overall clarity and tone of own long test, no.
I tried it myself, and it did actually a good job.
There's nothing magical about a long text you write yourself vs a stream o reddit comments in a thread. It's all sentiment analysis on text. It can extract ambiguity, how ideas are connected in the context, categorize and summarize, etc.
You should try it and see it for yourself. Feed it some large text of a single author and ask it to do those things, see if the results are satisfactory.
If you use grammar checker as a grammar checker, it wont make you loose your voice. It will make you use correct grammar.
> you can choose to use all the tools and make something gramatically and stylistically as close to perfect, but who would want to read something as dry
If it is dry, then it is not stylistically perfect. Per definition, dry writing is just an imperfect writing. Stylistically perfect writing does not have to be dry and usually is not dry.
What happens here is that people use "stylistically perfect" when they mean "followed a bad stylistic advice".
I see both sides here. Wanting to preserve your natural voice is valid, but editing and using tools don't necessarily take that away. In fact, they can help make your intended message clearer. It probably comes down to how much control you keep over the final result rather than wheater you use tools at all.
What annoys me here is that people say "I use AI as style checker to make my writing better" or claim that good writing is unfairly judged as being by AI ... and then proceed to describe inferior writing results they achieved with AI. None of what author wrote there signals that the way he uses AI made his writing better. His use of AI made his output inferior. And not just in a the "loosing own voice" way worst, but literally in the "the final text is less effective writing".
I do not mean this comment to be kick against AI. It is very good for some stuff, it is less good for other stuff. What annoys me is someone calling output superior while actually complaining about it being inferior.
Hey, maybe that llm needs to be used differently to achieve actually good writing results.
If you can devise a tool that can detect AI generated content, you can use it to filter data. But the harsh truth is that "gold standard" training data is from before 2022 or whenever the cutoff was.
And even that needs to be curated because before AI tools there was bot content filling up the internet.
...and even without bots, a lot of human authored content are low value, poorly written, etc.
There are (probably) companies out there whose business is to create, curate and improve training sets.
And if there's a way to detect that content is AI generated, then there's demand to generate content that seems more human. And we're already at a point where most people have been tricked into believing AI content was real at some point and never even realized it. It'll only get worse.
Probably the only real way to validate content is real is building a validation system into devices. Confirm when a photo is taken and send an ID to a server, then when photos are shared, its ID is compared to the image on the camera/phone manufacturer's server. For text, validate every little key press. And there are still ways to game these systems, but I would not be surprised if they're introduced to mitigate AI diffusing everywhere.
Yeah agreed. I think that's partially why I find AI still useful - It acts as a filter against a lot of the listicle style content. I then can curate and look at specific blog writers I follow for actual content.
But honestly, if google provided me with a good search, I probably would seriously reduce my AI usage when researching. E
I can see some usage for this use case - "look Morty, I turned myself into a pickle!" - but just like image / meme generators, this is like 10-30 seconds of engagement within a friend circle at best (although some might go viral, but that won't bring in much money for in this case OpenAI).
There will be (or is, I'm behind the times / not on the main social networks) an undercurrent or long tail of AI generated videos, the question is whether those get enough engagement for the creators to pay for the creation tool.
It's the same with e.g. faceapp, fun for a minute but then... then what?
And this is the challenge that these tools have - they have to have a free tier to get people to explore it, but unless they can make it a habit, those people will never upgrade to a paid subscription.
I have no figures, but if I'm being optimistic, these freemium subscription services have 10% conversion rate at best; can that 10% pay for the other 90%? For a lot of services that's a yes, but not for these video generators which are incredibly compute intensive.
I'm sure there's a market for it, but it's not this freemium consumer oriented model, not without huge amounts of investments. Maybe in 5-10 years, assuming either compute becomes 10-100x cheaper / more available, or they come up with generators that run cheaper.
Vinyl (IMO) isn't about it being retro or having "better" sound quality (whatever that means, it's mostly subjective), but about having a collectable, physical item. I think CDs were a step backwards, not because the sound quality was off but because the boxes were smaller and fragile; I've never owned any music CDs.
Digital music is neat for listening to music, but it also feels like it lowers the value of it.
The jewel cases absolutely were more fragile than the cardboard that was typical of vinyl, but vinyl itself is more fragile than CDs, though the failure modes are completely different.
The jewel case does have the advantage of being easily replaceable too though - you can transfer album art/booklets and in most cases the result looks the same as the original.
With vinyl, album artwork and the case are the same thing and damaging or destroying the case also damages or destroys the album art - you can’t really replace the case without repurchasing the record if the art matters to you.
This probably isn't the point either, but I get an almost perverse level of calm knowing that for my most favourite albums, I own a physical representation of the waveform trapped in a medium.
I very rarely listen to them in that form, but I honestly like the idea that in a post-Carrington event, zombie apocalypse or mad-max style future where electricity or electronics become scarce, I can (if desperate enough) listen to them with a nail and a cone.
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