I can confirm that a lot of student’s writing have become “averaged” and it seems to have gotten worse this semester. I am not talking about students who clearly used an AI tool, but just by proximity or osmosis writing feels “cardboardy”. Devoid of passions or human mistakes.
This is how I was taught to write up to highschool. Very “professional”, persuasive essays, arguing in favor of something or against it “objectively”. (Assignment seemed to dictate what side I could be on LOL.) Limit humor and “emotional speech.” Cardboard.
I was taken aback in my first political science course at the local community college, where I was instructed to convey my honest arguments about a book assignment on polarization in U.S politics. “Whether you think it’s fantastic or you think it sucks, just make a good case for your opinion.” Wait, what?! I get to write like a person?!
I was even more shocked when I got a high mark for reading the first few chapters, skimming the rest, and truthfully summarizing by saying it was plain that the author just kept repeating their main point for like 5 more chapters so they could publish a book, and it stopped being worth the time as that poor horse was already dead by the 3rd chapter.
It was when it hit me, that writing really was about communication, not just information.
I worry about that these days: That this realization won’t come to most, and they’ll use these Ai tools or be influenced by them to simply “convey information” that nobody wants to read, get their 85%, and breeze through the rest of their MBA, not caring about what any of this is actually for, or for what a beautiful miracle writing truly is to humanity.
That isn’t what I mean by cardboard. Persuasive, research, argumentative essays have been taught to be written the way tou described. They are meant to be that way. But even then, the essays I have read and graded still have this cardboard feel. I have read plenty of research essays where you can feel the emotion, you can surmise the position and most of all passion of the author. This passion and the delicate picking of words and phrases are not there. It is “averaged”.
I think we’re saying a similar thing, but I understand your point better.
I have read plenty of research essays where you can feel the emotion, you can surmise the position and most of all passion of the author.
Exactly! That’s what I mean. There’s so many subjects I expected to be incredibly dry, but the writing reminded me it was written by a person who obviously cares about other people reading the text. One can communicate any subject without giving up their soul.
(I am always surprised, but I find this in programming books often, haha.)
But that’s what I meant by cardboard as well, I think we might be in agreement:
We expect to see a lot more writing that comes across like “This is what writing should look like, right?”
Writing that understands words, and “averages” the most likely way to convey information or fill a requirement,
but doesn’t know how to wield language as an art to share ideas with another person.
I do agree with your “averaging machine” argument. It makes a lot of sense given how LLMs are trained as essentially massive statistical models.
Your conjecture that bad writing is due to roleplaying on the early internet is a bit more… speculative. Lacking any numbers comparing writing trends over time I don’t think one can draw such a conclusion.
I do agree with your “averaging machine” argument. It makes a lot of sense given how LLMs are trained as essentially massive statistical models.
For image generation models I think a good analogy is to say it’s not drawing, but rather sculpting - it starts with a big block of white noise and then takes away all the parts that don’t look like the prompt. Iterate a few times until the result is mostly stable (that is it can’t make the input look much more like the prompt than it already does). It’s why you can get radically different images from the same prompt - the starting block of white noise is different, so which parts of that noise look most prompt-like and so get emphasized are going to be different.
I am a young person who doesn’t read recreationally, and I avoid writing wherever I can. Thank you for sharing your insight as well as sparking an interesting discussion in this thread.
Yup, it’s something I myself recently started to realise and have been forcing myself to read things that actually interest me.
While in elementary and middle school every 2 months we had a specific book we had to read and then would discuss it in class and would be graded based on our input.
Reading books and writing essays has been cemented in my mind as a boring chore that is forced upon me. It took years before it even occured to me that reading might be a fun activity, and a couple more before I actively started trying to read again. It’s difficult to break away from the mould I’ve been set to during my childhood, but I’m slowly chipping away at it.
Children SHOULD read, but how can we get them to WANT to read?
deleted by creator
I can confirm that a lot of student’s writing have become “averaged” and it seems to have gotten worse this semester. I am not talking about students who clearly used an AI tool, but just by proximity or osmosis writing feels “cardboardy”. Devoid of passions or human mistakes.
This is how I was taught to write up to highschool. Very “professional”, persuasive essays, arguing in favor of something or against it “objectively”. (Assignment seemed to dictate what side I could be on LOL.) Limit humor and “emotional speech.” Cardboard.
I was taken aback in my first political science course at the local community college, where I was instructed to convey my honest arguments about a book assignment on polarization in U.S politics. “Whether you think it’s fantastic or you think it sucks, just make a good case for your opinion.” Wait, what?! I get to write like a person?!
I was even more shocked when I got a high mark for reading the first few chapters, skimming the rest, and truthfully summarizing by saying it was plain that the author just kept repeating their main point for like 5 more chapters so they could publish a book, and it stopped being worth the time as that poor horse was already dead by the 3rd chapter.
It was when it hit me, that writing really was about communication, not just information.
I worry about that these days: That this realization won’t come to most, and they’ll use these Ai tools or be influenced by them to simply “convey information” that nobody wants to read, get their 85%, and breeze through the rest of their MBA, not caring about what any of this is actually for, or for what a beautiful miracle writing truly is to humanity.
That isn’t what I mean by cardboard. Persuasive, research, argumentative essays have been taught to be written the way tou described. They are meant to be that way. But even then, the essays I have read and graded still have this cardboard feel. I have read plenty of research essays where you can feel the emotion, you can surmise the position and most of all passion of the author. This passion and the delicate picking of words and phrases are not there. It is “averaged”.
I think we’re saying a similar thing, but I understand your point better.
Exactly! That’s what I mean. There’s so many subjects I expected to be incredibly dry, but the writing reminded me it was written by a person who obviously cares about other people reading the text. One can communicate any subject without giving up their soul.
(I am always surprised, but I find this in programming books often, haha.)
But that’s what I meant by cardboard as well, I think we might be in agreement:
We expect to see a lot more writing that comes across like “This is what writing should look like, right?”
Writing that understands words, and “averages” the most likely way to convey information or fill a requirement, but doesn’t know how to wield language as an art to share ideas with another person.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
tbf school-goers nowadays are mostly taught to not make mistakes.
I do agree with your “averaging machine” argument. It makes a lot of sense given how LLMs are trained as essentially massive statistical models.
Your conjecture that bad writing is due to roleplaying on the early internet is a bit more… speculative. Lacking any numbers comparing writing trends over time I don’t think one can draw such a conclusion.
For image generation models I think a good analogy is to say it’s not drawing, but rather sculpting - it starts with a big block of white noise and then takes away all the parts that don’t look like the prompt. Iterate a few times until the result is mostly stable (that is it can’t make the input look much more like the prompt than it already does). It’s why you can get radically different images from the same prompt - the starting block of white noise is different, so which parts of that noise look most prompt-like and so get emphasized are going to be different.
deleted by creator
I am a young person who doesn’t read recreationally, and I avoid writing wherever I can. Thank you for sharing your insight as well as sparking an interesting discussion in this thread.
deleted by creator
Yup, it’s something I myself recently started to realise and have been forcing myself to read things that actually interest me.
While in elementary and middle school every 2 months we had a specific book we had to read and then would discuss it in class and would be graded based on our input.
Reading books and writing essays has been cemented in my mind as a boring chore that is forced upon me. It took years before it even occured to me that reading might be a fun activity, and a couple more before I actively started trying to read again. It’s difficult to break away from the mould I’ve been set to during my childhood, but I’m slowly chipping away at it.
Children SHOULD read, but how can we get them to WANT to read?