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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   23122 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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Right now, if you run text through an LLM, it will make it sound less like you and more like every other LLM.

People say this but i think it's completely untrue. You can make the result sound vastly different if you're willing to put some effort into properly using it.

It again sounds to me like criticism of photography "they all look the same", yeah, if you haven't invented or considered a composition grammar or metering and exposure.

What's maybe true is that it'll always sound slightly different than handwritten ways in ways that may or may not be important. But rejecting it altogether as a tool is a stronger claim than that.

I know, survivorship bias, but I’ve never seen a convincing example of LLM-written text that didn’t read at least slightly but noticeably LLM-written, and definitely certain human writing styles I’ve never seen replicated by an LLM. The Unslop Contest tried to produce good AI fiction, and every result has similar LLM prose except the schizophrenic one.

I can think of one but to be fair it's not longform compared to those.

That’s an old post, I think GPT-3. Older LLMs did sound more original, although they hallucinated more. Interestingly, increasing an LLM’s temperature hyperparameter (which I’m almost certain produced the schizophrenic Unslop entry) also makes it sound different and unique, but output nonsense.

Probably because they’re more random, but also (at least GPT-3 does) rely less on fine tuning and more on its training from the Internet.

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