Mm. To me, I think ChatGPT has a certain voice, not sure about the other LLMs
How long will it be, before humans reading mostly LLM output, adopt that same writing style? Certainly, for people growing up today, they will be affected.
I remember an HN comment six months or so ago by someone who said they were intentionally modeling their writing on ChatGPT's style. The person said that they were not confident about writing and that they were trying to get better by imitating AI.
One of the many surprising things to me about ChatGPT when it was first released was how well, in its default style, it imitated the bland but well-organized writing style of high school composition textbooks: a clearly stated thesis at the beginning, a topic sentence for each paragraph, a concluding paragraph that often begins "In conclusion."
I mentioned that last point—the concluding "In conclusion"—as an indicator of AI writing to a university class I taught last semester, and a student from Sweden said that he had been taught in school to use that phrase when writing in English.
If I see HN comments that have final paragraphs beginning with "In conclusion" I will still suspect that an LLM has been used. Occasionally I might be wrong, though.
I was taught in high school that using "In conclusion" to open your conclusion was cliche and really almost like an unnecessary slap in the face to the reader. Your composition should end with a conclusion, yes. There was a standard formula for that, yes. But it's not necessary to literally label it as such.
Many of the disliked essay writing cliches are good speech tropes. The difference between reading and listening is that in reading you can skim and skip and rewind, so you don't need structured signposts to guide you through the content. In listening you do. You can't see the last paragraph coming when listening to a speech.
An entertaining informative style of speech can detract from clearly communicating substance. (Of course, the audience rarely wants substance.)
I've intentionally changed some parts of I've comments I've written just because upon reading them back, it felt very close to ChatGPT's style at certain sentences.
I understand. A few months ago, I posted a comment here that attracted several down votes. The content, I thought, was completely innocuous, and I couldn’t figure out at first why some people didn’t like it. Only later did I realize that I might have polished it a little too much and it came out reading like ChatGPT.
How long will it be, before humans reading mostly LLM output, adopt that same writing style?
From what I’ve seen (tutoring high school kids), the picture is much bleaker. They use ChatGPT to write for them but they have no writing style of their own. They can barely put a sentence together just to write the prompt!
As humans, we like to copy things we consider good. I know I tried to use writing styles I thought were funny with varying results. I think I will say never ( or as close to never as possible ).
Given how inhumanly capable it is of seeing both sides of a topic, I guess we'll find out when we see "sublety" and "nuance" go the way way of "literally" and radically change meanings to their near opposite.
> How long will it be, before humans reading mostly LLM output, adopt that same writing style? Certainly, for people growing up today, they will be affected.
Just imagine 180M users of chatGPT having an estimated 1B sessions per month. The model is putting 1-2Trillion tokens into people's brains. People don't assimilate just the writing style and ideas, but also take actions into the real world influenced by the model. Sometimes they create useful discoveries or inventions that end up on the internet and in the next scrape. Full cycle.
How long will it be, before humans reading mostly LLM output, adopt that same writing style? Certainly, for people growing up today, they will be affected.