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Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is boring and dangerous
(www.theregister.com)
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This is a good name for one of the main reasons I've never really felt a desire to have an LLM rephrase/correct/review something I've already written. It's the reason I've never used Grammarly, and turned off those infuriating "phrasing" suggestions in Microsoft Word that serve only to turn a perfectly legible sentence into the verbal equivalent of Corporate Memphis.
I'm not a writer, but lately I often deliberately edit myself less than usual, to stay as far as possible from the semantic "valley floor" along which LLM text tends to flow. It probably makes me sound a bit unhinged at times, but hey at least it's slightly interesting to read.
I do wish the article made it clear if this is an existing term (or even phenomenon) among academics, something the author is coining as of this article, or somewhere in between.
GPT-4o mini, "Rephrase the below text in a neutral tone":
"avoid the typical style associated with LLM-generated text" -- slop!
Wow that gpt rewrite is awful. Not just bland as hell but it also changed the meaning. The first sentence is very different.