9 ms·
This is such a well written story, and congratulations Ben, it sounds like it's been a lot of hard but ultimately successful work! I know you'll deservedly get
by JohnHammersley 7mo ago
This is such a well written story, and congratulations Ben, it sounds like it's been a lot of hard but ultimately successful work!
I know you'll deservedly get a lot of credit for all your work in remastering the game, but you should also get credit for how you've woven this narrative together, it's a lovely read. Thank you for taking the time to write it up, and good luck with the Steam release, and whatever project you take on next! :)
- benstopics 7mo agoThank you sir and I'm glad you enjoyed the story! I hope it's successful but we will see.
- sho_hn 7mo agoI really enjoyed this article as well! I'm still curious, however: > That's not a marketing angle—it's a headline that writes itself. Any ChatGPT assistance there?
- grey-area 7mo agoI wonder why LLMs do this so persistently (the ‘it’s not this it’s that’)? Is there really so much of this style of writing out there?
- alwa 7mo agoI wonder this too. Is there so much of this style, or does it indicate some aspect of the LLMs’ sensemaking?
- te7447 7mo agoWhatever it is that caused "It's not X, It's Y", it's more recent than LLMs as a whole. As far as I remember, neither GPT3.5, GPT4, nor Claude Instant did it. I think Gemini was the first to really do it, and then out of nowhere, everybody was doing it.
- msephton 7mo agoProfessionally typeset books. Designers have been typing it—and the other dashes—manually using modifiers+hyphen on Mac since 1984. You can type them—plus the bullet character—today on iOS by doing a long press on the hyphen key.
- grey-area 7mo agoI’m not talking about the em-dash, which is not a great indicator IMO but the horrible overuse of binary oppositions with a kind of false surprise, e.g.: The problem was not em-dashes — but binary opposition! That sort of thing. It is a much clearer marker of llm use than the em-dash. The sad thing is when searching for info on this the most convincing reply in search was generated by an LLM, which went on at length about why LLMs do this as some sort of consequence of their internal structure. I have absolutely no idea if that’s true — it really sounds a bit trite and exactly the kind of thing LLMs would confidently assert with no basis. I would want to hear from someone working in LLMs, but their blogs are probably all generated by an LLM nowadays. So this conundrum is a good example of a question where LLMs actively work against clear resolution. This is in my view the most insidious damage word generators are inflicting on our culture — we can no longer assume most writing is honest or well-meaning because amoral LLMs fundamentally are not wired to make that distinction of true and untrue or right and wrong (unlike most humans) and many people will use and trust what they generate without question, polluting the online space and training data until everything is just a morass of half-known facts sprinkled with generated falsehoods that are repeated so often they seem true. How do we check sources when the sources themselves were generated by LLMs?
- msephton 7mo agoApologies! You have a point.
- Macuyiko 7mo agoMy personal feel (completely subjective) is that during RLHF humans are incredibly sensitive to this pattern, especially when talking about personal or emotional issues. Any reply in the form of "it's not you, it's them" is such a dopamine hit that the LLMs started applying it for everything else.
- doctoboggan 7mo agoI think it comes from the RLHF. If you haven't interacted with LLMs enough to get turned off by it, I think that kind of speech is seen as powerful and confident.
- dxdm 7mo agoRLHF = Right Left Hand Foot. It's a technique in Bavarian interpretative folk dance where you jump around, artfully hitting the soles of your feet with your hands in order to court women who are busy carrying unbelievable numbers of beer Steins into the mountains. That's what came to mind when I saw the abbreviation. Then I looked it up: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback.
- rzzzt 7mo ago"Rood Luck, Have Fun!" A rood is a unit of area that is equal to about one fifth of a football field.
- selimthegrim 7mo agoUm, isn't it also a synonym for the cross?
- rzzzt 7mo agoIndeed. But the area conversion tool appeared first when I went looking for it.
- elzbardico 7mo agoIt is a staple of marketing and journalism writing. And the guys doing the HF on it most probably came from this exact background: marketing and journalism.
- elzbardico 7mo agoMarketing copy has been using this rethorical artifact for decades, as well as journalism with some success, it is like an analogy, but pruned down in meanin by the opposition. It is impactful, and probably got high marks with the humans doing RHLF, that I suppose, came mostly from journalism and marketing schools.
- benstopics 7mo agoClaude actually! Yeah the content editing was heavily LLM assisted as I'm a terrible writer and I wanted the read to be enjoyable. So I compiled all the research and worked with Claude to build the article. I then attempted to go through with a fine tooth comb and write it in my own words. That is one particular sentence I missed with a highly recognizable LLM pattern which I will fix. I simply also don't have time to really market the game, I care more about the quality of the software. I know if the software is great then it will be successful. But I wanted to share the story in a compelling way. Apologies if it was distracting!
- sho_hn 7mo agoTotally fine, thanks for the answer.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 7mo agoTo me, it read like your typical reporter writing a story for nontechnical readers, which is exactly what it is. I thought it was fine. You could look at it like Claude was the reporter writing the story, with your collaboration.
- Aloha 7mo agoI'm only annoyed that I cant buy it right now!
- teiferer 7mo ago> This is such a well written story, [...] you should also get credit for how you've woven this narrative together, it's a lovely read. Don't forget to give credit to the LLM too which wrote the story for him.
- benstopics 7mo agoSure, it's 2026 I used Claude to write a lot of it. But tell me this. Do you know which paragraphs I wrote?
- Eisenstein 7mo agoPlease don't feel the need to be defensive about this. People are reacting in a predictable way to a shift in how effort is perceived. Where one formerly could use a certain way of writing as a heuristic for effort put into content they are spending time ingesting, now that heuristic is meaningless and a new one must replace it. At this point some people have decided 'has markers of AI writing' is the heuristic to match 'no/low effort' on, and are trying to use shame in order to start a system of self-policing against it. Unfortunately that isn't going to work, because 1. the heuristic is flawed 2. most people are going to end up using AI tools for writing, since writing well is difficult
- magic_hamster 7mo agoI don't agree that it's flawed. There's so much to gain by writing your own words. It's something to practice and after a while, it's even fun to be able to express something the way you intended. Even today I do my own writeups and articles manually. I want the text to come from me, to show how I'd put it, even if I have a typo here and there. I feel like it's worth it to keep your own personality instead of having AI do it for you - or even edit for you. Even if you think your writing suck, it's still your voice and it's just more interesting for me to read an actual human being.
- benstopics 7mo agoI agree honestly. I just wanted to get the story out and share it and I'm swamped IRL. But I'm going to go back and clean it up when I get the chance. I do appreciate the constructive feedback from everyone and I will do better.