Synonyms and antonyms: manton.org

@manton I have yet to be convinced that using AI for editing can do anything more for me than I can accomplish with my local instance of LanguageTool and Harper.

@manton LLMs are great thesauri and a terrible writers. But they’re terrible writers BECAUSE they’re great thesauri. Whereas I will struggle over 1 word for ages, they don’t. Words mean nothing to them because there isn’t even a them to mean something to. The cheapest, closest token is good enough. Worth remember than researchers invented the concepts of temperature and top-k simply to make the LLMs more palatable to humans.

@codybrom This falls into my General Theory Of Why LLM Writing Is Face-Eatingly Bad. LLMs are purposely set to favour the most common next word in their pools and every degree beyond the most common makes them sound more nonsensical, so they will always err toward tired, bland words.

@matthewhurst They’re not 100% deterministic, but fiddling with options can get you to a small number of very semantically equal outputs. (See: speakerdeck.com/codybrom/…).

@codybrom Not sure I see the connection with what you linked to? My point was about creative prose. Writers choose words to cast a new light on the subject: LLMs choose the most used words for that subject, so they deaden whatever they describe.