Writing Links
Orb's Pondering
Defense Against the Slop Machine
17/02/2025
Someone asked the question "How can I learn to Identify AI-generated writing?" It's a valid question, but it made me start feeling really angry and pretentious. What do you mean you can't smell the LLM stink from a mile away? I'm still feeling angry and pretentious, so today's pondering shall take the form of more of a rant... look, I never said this website was Good Vibes Only.
Think about what makes good writing good. Keen rhetoric? Exquisite control of language? Thought-provoking imagery? Unique insight, adeptly presented? A live electrical connection to a real part of the human condition? Prose where every paragraph is a beautifully constructed machine?
Now take all of that and throw it in a granite crusher.
What remains is either LLM-generated dogwater, or dogwater generated by a human with no respect for the artform. Sure, either output may be *comprehensible*--a way to get from A to B, beam some information or a little story into your brain--but neither have any value beyond the purely informative. Nothing will surprise you, nothing will challenge you, nothing will give you any of the human connection that is the entire point of reading anything aside from an instruction manual.
Unlike unskilled human writers, though, LLMs do excel at one thing: marketing drivel. Soulless, santitised, overblown boilerplate pumped full of exciting adjectives designed to sell you on... insert prompt here. Marketing drivel aimed at nobody in particular--that is, the lowest common denominator. The Marvel Cinematic Universe of writing prompt fulfillment, paragraph after flabby pre-digested paragraph. Quantity over quality, keep the content comin'!!! 🤑🤑🤑 But what do we expect? The biggest LLMs are so big because they are commercially geared. Selling things is what they are for--a nice advertiser-friendly service to another service in the dismal human centipede arrangement that's taking over the tech sector.
Good writing is hard. So hard that it's the sole domain of a tiny demographic of freaks who've been devoting their lives to it for decades. The average human writer is not a freak, and can therefore be forgiven for writing garbage. After all, it's a systematic problem--over 50% of adults in the USA are below sixth-grade literacy level (before I get too smug, Australia isn't much better)--but there's always capacity for people to learn better. The nature of a commercially-geared LLM is that it cannot learn how to output anything *but* garbage--by their nature, they avoid outputting anything genuinely thought-provoking. And the unfortunate reality is that most humans simply do not care. AI-generated writing is brushed off more for this very reason--people do not care. For the majority of people, writing is about nothing more than beaming hopefully-comprehensible information into one's brain through the least-resistive paths available. They do not appreciate the skill and thought and art that goes in to good writing--they cannot, because appreciating writing as an artform is a skill they never bothered to develop.
LLMs are only going to get better. They'll get more consistent with their details, they'll get less redundant with their wording. As is the case with visual art, the current imperfections will be come less and less noticeable until they're not reliable tells at all. The only long-term defense is, therefore, to cultivate a robust understanding of writing as art, and to develop a really, really discerning taste for it. The only truly reliable tell of AI slop is the lack of understanding these machines--or, more accurately, their creators--have for art's purpose beyond the commercial.
I'm not trying to say that I'm a great writer--I'm barely competent on a good day. Sure, I might know how to use a semicolon, but I've had years of my life where I've gone without reading a single book; readers of this website will know by now that I can't spell to save my life. But that's just the thing--it isn't so hard to get to this level. You needn't become a freak. But if you care about telling LLM slop from human writing, you need to know what the good stuff actually is. Without that comprehension, it's a losing game.
The Stunted Tree
23/11/2023
Something pulled me outside today—an outing for which I was shamefully overdue. These months, I’ve spent so long indoors that even focusing my eyes along the changing depths of a shrub feels like an almost-unbearably sweet treat. I watch iridescent wasps feed on the nectar of bright yellow banksias. Honeyeaters bully each other in the sanctuary of backyard shrubs. Life boils around me—the birds, the insects, the grass, the weeds. It’s overwhelming. And to think I didn’t even have to go further than my own backyard. Such great reward for so little effort. Why do I leave weeks and weeks between what should be daily maintenance?
It’s not as if I don’t see the value in it. At all times, I’m achingly aware of just how finite my life is. So why do I deny myself these moments which are so openly available to me? Why do I choose to deprive myself of these things which would heal me? I lower myself to sit on the grass, and dig for trigger points to relieve my aching hands and wrists (my birthing this website was not, it turns out, without physical toll). The veil feels thin in this moment, and I hear the rustling of the banksia leaves answer my question with another question:
Does a tree have free will?
The notion is self-apparently absurd. Of course not—it’s at the mercy of the sun and rain and animal foragers. Many of this banksia’s seedpods before me are ripped apart by cockatoos, so much effort lain to waste. I could plant an oak tree in this tiny yard of mine, knowing its sappling would be destroyed by the next round of landlord-mandated lawnmowing.
Is that the fault of the tree?
Equally, it is absurd to accuse a tree for its own failure to thrive. The seed did not choose to fall upon barren ground. The sapping did not choose to grow in a place with too much wind. The tree did not choose to have the ground around it razed and made into a parking lot.
And yet these are not passive machines. Brainless, granted, but not souless, and nowhere near as inanimate as people naturally assume. As soon as you start learning about the vast interconnectivity of a forest, the true complexity of their lives starts to dawn on you. They’re complicated beyond human fathom, ever striving.
I know, I know. The tall and vital wild eucalupt is no more a manifestation of divinity than the redgum stricken with dieback, or the birch choked by urban concrete, or the bonsai shaped and stunted by human care. None of these organisms are less sacred than the others. Each was placed deliberately, with its own purpose, to experience being in its own way. Concepts of failure and success are human. The universe (or God, whatever you want to call it) does not make mistakes. My suffering and deprivation is no more self inflicted than a tree’s.
Fine. There’s relief in fatalism, sure, but… it doesn’t exactly give you much of a reason to try and help yourself. Does it?
So if its misery is pre-ordained, why should the tree bother?
Huh? That’s so obvious. It grows because the makeup of its being dictates so. Its DNA tells it to put forth leaves and strive for the sun. Instructs it to take in what nutrients it can, build what it can, according to the instructions its own biology gives it. It would not be a tree if it did not do these things. These actions are not what a tree does, they what makes a tree. There’s no choice…
...Huh. Well there you go. So too do I catch these last rays of afternoon sun, feed myself dinner, conduct what exercise and physical therapy I can in my withered state despite my only desire being to rot. I contemplate. I sit to write this, and send it out to the world on my little website. I do so despite the barren soil in which I was planted. These are my leaves. Put forth in spite of everything because of what I am.
Phew, this banksia’s really telling it like it is. I’m so attuned right now, alive and real, really communing for the first time in so long. Oh god, I have so many more questions… listen...
The sounds of vehicles, dogs barking, human industry, the misophonic nightmare of my cohabitant’s shiny new television set. Pain and fatigue in my body. So much noise which scrapes away at my sanity. Why make me so fragile and self aware? Why was this suffering given to me? You know I cannot take it. The absurdity of the human world. The stale concrete boxes in which we dwell, and electronic screens we fill them with…. my universe. How can you make me live like this? The textile cladding my legs was woven by machines and sewn by the hands of humans I will never meet in sweatshops I’m privileged to never have to acknowledge, let alone see. Its surface is so simple and sterile compared to the infinite complexity of the dead leaf on the grass beside me. Human things are ugly in their sterility, boring in their simplicity, and abhorrent by the means of their existence—it’s insane. I spiral into thoughts of all the cruelty on this planet. How do you justify that? How is that anything but sadistic? Huh? How can that be perfect and divine? Come on. Answer me.
The banksia’s got no more answers today. I’ve lost my focus—can’t concentrate through the sound of the TV leaking through the walls. I exhale. Try to gather what I’ve been given—it’s so much already, enough for one day. I place my palms flat on the earth for a while, thanking it. My tears feel cathartic, at least, and when I go inside again I’m still a little lighter.