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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   20801 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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A good LLM may give an answer that's more technically accurate and thorough, but I'd have to read all the glazing and em-dashes. The human slop is more entertaining and pleasurable to read.

You can make an LLM avoid glazing and figurative language. It will still sound like an LLM and maybe a domain expert would give a better, more concise answer. But I think LLMs are more than adequate for answering questions with facts, where the primary goal is understanding the answer, especially niche ones which you’ll have trouble finding an human expert.

Sure, I agree that llms are adequate if that's the bar, but this is quite a low bar.

If only there was a worldwide network where domain experts could share concise answers to a variety of questions. And if only there was some sort of engine that let people search this network to find the answers they are looking for. I would argue such a system could serve many queries better than an LLM can.

But alas there's no way soemthing like that could exist.

You can make an LLM avoid ... figurative language.

Literally impossible. Never seen a prompt that succeeds at this and would love to see one if you have one.

I'm not going to pretend that AI can write better than a human, it can't. But sir, this is absolutely insane lmao

If only there was a worldwide network where domain experts could share concise answers to a variety of questions. And if only there was some sort of engine that let people search this network to find the answers they are looking for.

I don't understand how you're the SEO-defence force. Google was bad in the late 201X years and rapidly becoming fucking unusable 2020-2022. I was looking into paid search services by the time ChatGPT dropped because the SEO slop farmers were mogging google hard. But now, much like how people are rallying behind Uber drivers who might lose their jobs to Waymo (I thought we were mad at Uber drivers from taking the "good taxi jobs" even through we all hated cabbies before Uber) you have reflexively started taking positions against the thing you don't like, even if that position is saying "no no SEO slop google was actually totally fine"

Huh my experience is totally the opposite. I checked my chatlogs with this longtime google employee I know, and I started raging at him monthly about SEO slop right at the beginning of 2023

Literally impossible. Never seen a prompt that succeeds at this and would love to see one if you have one.

If you're thinking about things in terms of prompts then you're behind. It's a matter of having a harness set up that has a second, third or fourth pass that polices for figurative language specifically. You can essentially set up a whole editing department with whatever pipeline of content polishing you want if you have the drive to set it up.

Tried it and it doesn't work. The writing models will spend more effort bypassing your policing layers than actually doing the task. It'll come up with some twisted way to be "nu-uh I didn't use "figurative language" there" in a way that the layer will buy it. This is the creature we have created with RLVR.

Once added a requirement that all entries in bulleted lists need to be verified against a certain criteria. Instead of verifying the criteria, it replaced all the bulleted lists with numbered lists.

What is a writing model? How are you construction you agents?

If only there was a worldwide network where domain experts could share concise answers to a variety of questions. And if only there was some sort of engine that let people search this network to find the answers they are looking for.

We had that, Stack Overflow. We still do but it all but died. Notice that it started declining before AI.

There are multiple theories, but mine is simply that there are lots of beginners who tire out the domain experts, and the (novelty) incentive to answer decreases while old answers constantly become outdated, lowering median answer quality, further decreasing incentive. LLMs solve the beginner problem, and we can maybe address the motivation problem by e.g. paying experts and training LLMs to cite them (I suspect this is possible and would improve training).

Moreover, LLMs are the ultimate search engine, better than Stack Overflow and Google could’ve been, because if the question is exact, the LLM may regurgitate the expert’s exact answer, but it can also handle (near-arbitrary) peculiarities and combine domains, which there aren’t enough experts for.

You can make an LLM avoid ... figurative language.

Literally impossible. Never seen a prompt that succeeds at this and would love to see one if you have one.

I have ChatGPT set to “efficient” with a custom prompt to cite sources. I’ve never seen it glaze or use figurative language yet. It still has LLMisms and occasional (filler) casual exclamations, but it has been concise enough, and answered specific questions I couldn’t get from manually searching online.

Why do these things seem so rigid on their style?

Many years ago I had a job doing SEO filler content for Commercial Ice makers. AI is welcome to take that job

Are you saying you didn't like doing the job, or was the content actually bad?

It was fine as something that paid but trying to write articles differentiating a 9kg per hour ice maker and a 11kg per hour ice maker is difficult

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