Lots of fun!

According to a study at Cardiff University, it is possible to track the progression of the late Sir Terry Pratchett's Alzheimer's disease from the writing in his novels:

"Subtle changes in Sir Terry Pratchett’s use of language in his books anticipated his dementia diagnosis by almost ten years, research has shown.

The study, from academics at Cardiff University, Loughborough University and the University of Oxford, used computer software to analyse the range of nouns and adjectives used in 33 of his best-selling Discworld novels."

https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/view/3020807-sir-terry-pratchetts-novels-may-have-held-clues-to-his-dementia-a-decade-before-diagnosis,-research-suggests

I was amazed at the avalanche of ideas in 'The Colour of Magic' and 'The Light Fantastic', then they settled down a bit, with somewhat more philosophical plots, especially 'Small Gods' and 'Jingo'.

Maybe in the future there will be an AI that checks to see if there is enough of the 'high entropy' stuff in its writing in future, and we'll complain that it is meaningless drivel.

It feels soulless, and I suppose this is why. Even AI-generated meeting notes just feel wrong and I think partly because there is no personality, no editorial flare that a real person would have added just by being them.

AI is very good at corporate speak though. Makes sense really.

If noone could be bothered to write the words, why should I be bothered to read them?

A few days ago Liam was describing watching a Red Hat employee having a chatbot summarise a received email and then write a reply. The original sender could have cut out the entire email by having his own chatbot summarise it and write the reply without even sending it.

Serious issue: Doctors are using AI to summarise their discussions with patients, does this 'semantic ablation' affect the quality of care or have they found some way to prevent it?

That "feels wrong" is what unsettles me. Presented with AI output from those who are deciding to use it, when asked "what do you think?" I find it covers all the bases but it's just not right though I cannot put my finger on why. I find myself stuck between accepting it as correct but finding it unsuitable, somehow "wrong", but unable to explain why. It's a very odd feeling.

And I find that with all AI output of any decent length. It's like that uncanny ability of TV detectives to tell who the murderer is just by looking at them. I presume my brain is wired in a way which is adverse to AI and it stands out like a sore thumb, my subconscious rejecting what my consciousness sees as passable, and more so than colleagues who see the same AI output as perfectly fine.

So maybe the article explains why I feel how I do. I'll certainly be testing that theory next time I am presented with AI output.

"We can measure semantic ablation through entropy decay."

So, we can measure the AI-ness of a text by it's entropy (actually, a form of perplexity)!

A new language processing field is born.

The fact that it will mark Marketing and CEO business speak too is a feature, not a bug. These text genre's are the human business equivalent of AI speak: All form, no content.

>>It is a silent, unauthorized amputation of intent, where the pursuit of low-perplexity output results in the total destruction of unique signal<<

Wow! Big words for "You just gutted my sentence"

The new LLM: mickaroo

Well+written and possibly purposefully constructed to evade AI summaries and demo the very point.

everyday this gets more and more unbearable, knowing this is the state of the art of human research endeavours.

The amount of money spent, environmental damage done, authors rights deprivation we are perpetrating just to try to hammer out problems that are very intrinsic with this technology from hell and bury them under the rug is astonishing. It really brings me down day after day.

What do you mean by, "we", Kimosabe?

This is well put.

I might use this analogy occasionally.

Starts catchy and gets better the more you think about it

That analogy comes from this 2023 article:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

...but do you have any references to cite? How does one measure ablation etc.?

" have any references to cite "

Just search "semantic ablation"

Two picked at random:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07421-0 , https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13300

How does measure semantic ablation? I assume by measuring the quantity of information in the system before and after the process has been applied; the loss of information is the ablation. Entropy typically being the measure of information.

Does rather sidestep the issue of the relation of "meaning" (semantics) to "information" in this sense. To my mind the "meaning" must include the context of the reader. A theory of Life, the Universe and Everything recorded in Minoan Linear A script † could be demonstrated to contain information but currently very little meaning. The Voynich manuscript might be equally futile.

† I guess " == || " does appears somewhere. ;)

The trouble is that as more and more text is written by AI, people will read it more and more and subconsciously start to mimic it.

Because this is what humans do. We see a lot of examples of something and it eventually rubs off on us.

So I see this being a big problem with... not only AI getting more and more filled with low-risk text with low entropy, but humans having the same issue where stuff humans write will end up being as soulless as if it had been written by AI in the first place.

Yes, a race to the bottom sadly.

Sounds a lot like Tabloid Journalism to me.

Sounds a lot like Tabloid Journalism to me.

Except the ablation there is removal by liquification of cerebral cortical tissue.

1. I think of Romanesque as rather simple - semi-circular arches and barrel vaulting, say like the White Tower in the Tower of London and Baroque as complex decoration, swirls and C-scrolls. Not exactly Tower Bridge (that's Gothic Revival) but that sort of complexity only less repetitive. A smoothed out version would be Moderne. Perhaps an AI hallucinated the simile.

2. It seems ideal for writing ISO 9001 quality manuals.

I suspect the comparison would be rather telling, reinforcing the point the author was making.

As the native English speaker in a university department, I was handed the not-in-the-job-description task of proof-reading the papers and theses of those for whom English was a second (or third …) language. Apart from bringing home the fact that, [1]thanks to the predominance of Anglo-Saxon culture, … [t]his is the first time that we have a true Lingua Franca for all: bad English , I would point out "surprising" words, and ask my victims/clients whether their intention was to surprise their audience. Mostly it wasn't, in which case I'd suggest something more anodyne; but sometimes it was. And occasionally, when I thought that the audience needed to be made to sit up and pay attention, I'd suggest a surprising word in place of something more predictable.

I expect that the PhD. candidates in my former group are all writing about/with LLMs now.

[1] https://www.brusselstimes.com/509639/embrace-bad-english-as-the-european-lingua-franca-says-timmermans