added by Keely Adler · updated 4mo ago
What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing
ChatGPT is a collective voice, not a specific one, and so even as the algorithm improves, we will likely continue to find its writing emotionally inadequate
from What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing by Laura Hartenberger
Keely Adler added 4mo ago
It’s difficult to determine a text’s quality without considering the context in which it was written.
from What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing by Laura Hartenberger
Keely Adler added 4mo ago
But the technology’s capacity for imitation will likely continue to improve: New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka observed that ChatGPT was not very effective at mimicking his own writing voice, but the AI startup, Writer, created a bot trained on his own writing to produce text in his voice that, while not perfect, was still “unnervingly effective.
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Keely Adler added 4mo ago
In other words, good writing isn’t about sophisticated sentences or complex ideas; it’s about unifying all elements into a coherent whole. You can write a poignant, lyrical, oblique sonnet about the rain, but if your purpose is to inform newspaper readers about the weather forecast, that’s not good writing.
from What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing by Laura Hartenberger
Keely Adler added 4mo ago
Broadly, good writing seems to require a balance of conformity and nonconformity, and at times, deliberate rule-breaking. A certain amount of Strunk and White-style convention is necessary to convey ideas coherently — after all, language is a shared system of meaning, and straying too far from its rules risks losing connection with readers or becom
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Keely Adler added 4mo ago
rule-breaking is human
We tend to admire writing whose predominant feature is experimentalism, but readability seems to matter to us, too — how great can a piece of writing be if few have the capacity or inclination to finish it?
from What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing by Laura Hartenberger
Keely Adler added 4mo ago
The Value Of Human Error
from What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing by Laura Hartenberger
Keely Adler added 4mo ago
But because it has no intention, it can’t be purposeful in how it adheres to or strays from the rules. Its arguments are built not from critical thought, but from predictive phrase sequences — it doesn’t “know” what its passages are really about, only that their words tend to occur together, so it lacks the meta-cognitive awareness needed to select
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Keely Adler added 4mo ago
Indeed, the fact that AI, which is trained to detect and replicate underlying patterns in our writing, can produce such coherent prose is a testament to just how much we rely on convention, both at the sentence and structural level.
from What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing by Laura Hartenberger
Keely Adler added 4mo ago