Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation.

[0gust1@merveilles.town]

@cstross Neural networks, by mathematical nature, are lossy information-compressing artefacts !

[phil_stevens@mastodon.nz]

@cstross No surprise that we see the textual equivalent of mad cow disease.

[pkraus@berlin.social]

@malice @JdeBP @cstross That's fair. However, repeatedly including certain types of sentence construction - appealing or not - makes it look dodgy. Or just trolling.

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@pkraus @malice @JdeBP I've been reading The Reg since 1997 or thereabouts. Their house style has history behind it, not LLMs. (I suspect they'd cop to trolling from time to time, though.)

[noodlemaz@mstdn.games]

@cstross ironically got a Google cloud genAI and ML ad right in the middle of that.

[jmj@hachyderm.io]

@cstross hmmm, that might also explain why AI seems more effective for code.
For the most part you want a reversion to the mean in code. Novel solutions are only needed at the cutting edge where you trying to make the computer do something that’s not been done before.

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@Jmj Yes. Also I suspect the semantic expressiveness of programming languages is far narrower than that of human languages: they're more precise, but it's much harder (though not impossible!) to write poetry in them. So there's less risk of losing something unique by generating output that tends to occupy the middle of the bell curve.

[perigrin@ack.nerdfight.online]

@cstross @Jmj I mean I think one could make a coherent argument that programming *is* poetry: reduced syntax, enforced structure, heavy use of metaphor…

It’s just most programming topics make Vogon poetry look exciting.

[rowat_c@mastodon.social]

@cstross "Model collapse", Shumailov, Shumaylov & Papernot (2024), Nature : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y

[jmj@hachyderm.io]

@perigrin @cstross but I think in the code case the subtle semantics of the words and combinations are less likely to be the important or desirable aspects, whereas in poetry it’s likely that those aspects are precisely the desired meaning.

[kelleynnn@mas.to]

@Sassinake @cstross "duck speak"

[mspong@mastodon.social]

@cstross I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves...

[perigrin@ack.nerdfight.online]

@Jmj @cstross Perl’s TIMTOWDI has ruined me.