My biggest problem with writing for AI is that AI still likes its own writing the best. Every essay feedback I ask for has it pushing to make things more anodyne, bullet-point, empirical, anti-lyrical, business memo of an article with no digressions or explorations which is what makes good writing good! All for the theme of doing so, just noting this annoyance.
I think the idea of writing for immortality into a statistical machine is interesting, when you compare it John Keats trudging through the moors thinking about immortality in verse or any other Romantic. I suppose all of us writers are seeking it in some form or another. Though, it's hard to imagine asking for the 'best unknown' writer right now, since so much of an LLM output is is based on built up pattern recognition. Hence every single time I ask for a non-traditional literary chapter I get back Jennifer Egan's powerpoint chapter in A Visit From the Goon Squad. It's maddening - every single time. The model can't go to the edges of its training data to get those unknown gems, but in a few years, who knows?
idiocy on many levels; least but decisive: because present AI is a passing capitalist scam. Anything like actual artificial intelligence will be quite different. Read Gary Marcus or Ed Zitron
Yet another cloyingly uncritical take on AI and writing. As if it wasn’t enough that people are using LLMs to write — and in so doing denaturing the human thought, experience and emotion that goes into the craft — Mr. Oliver espouses writing for an audience made up entirely of LLMs, creating some kind of perverse ouroboros of capitalist futility. One can only deduce that he has very little appreciation for the value of the written word.
Writing for AI reminds me of writing to enhance searchability. "Quick - add keywords to the first sentence...the first paragraph," the marketing mavens advise. Yet, squeezing them in can sometimes turn an elegant phrase into something cumbersome. Alas. it is the wave of the future...and I do like AI for research. It's particularly good at elucidating industry knowledge.
My biggest problem with writing for AI is that AI still likes its own writing the best. Every essay feedback I ask for has it pushing to make things more anodyne, bullet-point, empirical, anti-lyrical, business memo of an article with no digressions or explorations which is what makes good writing good! All for the theme of doing so, just noting this annoyance.
Do you ask Claude?
I ask all three, dislike them all for different reasons, but pushing to the median is common to all, albeit in different ways.
I find that I pick and choose the feedback I take, which is often the case with human editors and writers
Yeah same, just … tired of mediocrity not just being offered but preferred
I think the idea of writing for immortality into a statistical machine is interesting, when you compare it John Keats trudging through the moors thinking about immortality in verse or any other Romantic. I suppose all of us writers are seeking it in some form or another. Though, it's hard to imagine asking for the 'best unknown' writer right now, since so much of an LLM output is is based on built up pattern recognition. Hence every single time I ask for a non-traditional literary chapter I get back Jennifer Egan's powerpoint chapter in A Visit From the Goon Squad. It's maddening - every single time. The model can't go to the edges of its training data to get those unknown gems, but in a few years, who knows?
Is an LLM even *capable* of "liking" something? (Per your Kagan-Kans quote that some future superintelligence might "like" your writing..)
idiocy on many levels; least but decisive: because present AI is a passing capitalist scam. Anything like actual artificial intelligence will be quite different. Read Gary Marcus or Ed Zitron
Yet another cloyingly uncritical take on AI and writing. As if it wasn’t enough that people are using LLMs to write — and in so doing denaturing the human thought, experience and emotion that goes into the craft — Mr. Oliver espouses writing for an audience made up entirely of LLMs, creating some kind of perverse ouroboros of capitalist futility. One can only deduce that he has very little appreciation for the value of the written word.
Is the source "American Conservative" or "American Scholar"?
Whoops
Writing for AI reminds me of writing to enhance searchability. "Quick - add keywords to the first sentence...the first paragraph," the marketing mavens advise. Yet, squeezing them in can sometimes turn an elegant phrase into something cumbersome. Alas. it is the wave of the future...and I do like AI for research. It's particularly good at elucidating industry knowledge.