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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   28459 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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This looks like your words. Please tell me it was all your words and not GPT-enhanced. I don't want to be taken in. The writing is good, but bloated, which is why I am still narrowing my eyes a little.

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/PgukJm97zk

99% my words? I usually keep a "100% human" original draft around these days, not because I have to, but because it's the best evidence I've got that I put in actual effort. Unfortunately, this is the one time I didn't bother, because I started writing at 12 am and didn't finish till 3. Version control is neither a passion nor a strength of mine. All edits happened inside a single Google Docs file. I'd share the full chat, but as I've complained before, Anthropic doesn't allow this without leaking my actual Christian name.

Best I've got to back me up on this are screenshots of me arguing with Claude, and then ignoring its advice. Here's a handy album:

https://ibb.co/bgC8L5m8 https://ibb.co/SD70zq4D https://ibb.co/Rp2xQNvb

It's 5 am, as the screenshots will demonstrate. Pardon my laziness, I'm going above and beyond because it's you asking, specifically. And to add hilarity, the chief complaint was that my essay could do with a trim, though I'm not sure if that's in the screenshot and I'm not going back to look.

What did I use it for? Typo pass, I think it strongly insisted I put in title headers (and in all fairness, actual Real Humans have asked me to do that in the past). It wrote a nice image prompt for the Substack version. Yay.

2000 words to say "I am fat and my friend wants to not be fat and this made me have feelings."

She's not even fat! Slightly chubby, maybe, but no red blooded man is going to call her a torta, let alone not fuck her.

Sometimes, I am genuinely grateful for being a man, even if I acknowledge that I'm unusually emotionally attuned for one. The shit women say and do to each other? With a smile on their face? I'm glad our gender's approach to intrasexual warfare is mostly seeing who's taller and and more muscular. I can work with that, nobody is trying to stop me from going to the gym because I'm perfect at any size.

And to add hilarity, the chief complaint was that my essay could do with a trim

Ironically in this conversation, but seriously: trimming essays may be a great use case for AI. "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." is one of those quotes that's so popular it's been re-phrased a dozen times and re-attributed to a half dozen later authors, but it's obsolete if we can solve the problem with mostly tokens instead of time. Getting an AI to add words to your prompt is always risky, but hallucinations and stylistic cliches and verbosity aren't issues when you're only getting the AI to subtract words.

I've found that this is less than reliable in practice. If you have GPT 5.4 Thinking at hand, it's the ur-example. I can throw just about any essay I've ever written, and munch popcorn with the confident expectation that it'll tell me to trim down something. And if I indulge it and let it do it for me? Regretfully, the results will exhibit both aggressive trimming and unacceptable levels of stylistic drift. It's a very intelligent and capable model, but this is a failure mode that I can't beat out of it. I've tried.

I mean, I wasn't asking for proof of work. I'd take your word for it.

fwiw, I do not have a problem with using AI to proofread and act as a beta-reader. Just with letting it generate the words.

Thanks, but don't worry about it. I got excited thinking that you might be willing to look past your previously expressed distaste for the use of AI generated prose, minimal as it was even back then. If nothing else, I've got handy documentation the next time someone else asks.

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