Rands Has Robot Feelings
The content is flowing in the Rands Cinematic Universe:
- How Grumbles Helps (How I'm using the robots to manage the blog)
- The Promotion Paradox (The Important Thing — Lyle asks about different promotion situations)
- RIP Claude (Wherein I rail on watermarking... loudly)
We're trying ANOTHER something new with the newsletter, here's a seeing a draft blog post here before it shows up on randsinrepose.com proper. Brace yourself + merry Xmas.
Do you know what I despise about robot writing? It has no voice.
I believe what triggers the humans is not the em dashes, it's not the trailing participial clauses, and it's not incessant adverb transitions. It's that the robot does not care about what it's writing, it has infinite data at its disposal, and it's a brown-noser. Let's discuss each in reverse order:
Brown-noser: This is a slippery one, but let's remember the primary job of the robot is to efficiently respond to your prompt. Two parts to explain here:
- Efficiently. If you're using ChatGPT or Claude on the web, it's obvious to me that those respective companies have provided a meta prompt to the robot to give it guidance on how to answer. I suspect they provide a clause that reads "Better is the enemy of done," which means "Answer quickly" because quickly is cheaper. The reason I know this exists is that I mostly use Claude via Ghostty and it knows to think before answering my questions, which takes longer and costs more. I am shocked when I prompt via the web, and the answer is: instant and frequently incomplete or wrong.
- Your prompt. In addition to the efficiency clause, the meta prompt also makes it clear it's important to respond to your prompt. What's your prompt? I don't know. I do know that the robot's only job in responding is to make sure you get a satisfying answer. I didn't say correct; I said satisfying. How do I know this exists? Because I have super dumb ideas all the time and never in the history of ever has a robot told me my idea was dumb and — wow — the dumb has been substantive. The meta prompt has told the robot to be nice, helpful, and to support whatever dumb idea I type.
Brown-nosing is when someone on your team constantly agrees with you. All your ideas are good. Yes sir! I'll get right on that. The robots have weaponized this sycophantic behavior at scale.
Infinite data: Ok, not infinite, but a lot more than you have at your immediate disposal. When you combine all of that data with the robot's desire to efficiently answer your query, it finds quite a bit of information, all of which it wants to efficiently share with you. What data is more important? Less? Given your brief prompt and the desire to help, web-based robot responses tend to sound like a know-it-all, which is interesting because they literally know nothing, which is the actual point...
They don't care: That wall of text the robot just generated for you on the breakfast sandwiches in San Francisco is mostly true (it did search for the best breakfast sandwiches in San Francisco) and pretty complete, but as you read it... that emptiness you feel inside? It's because the writing has no voice.
Writing captures how another human thinks. When we read text generated by robots, it's that thinking that is missing. There are words, sentences, ideas, arguments, footnotes, and everything else you'd expect out of writing, but the reason you squint your eyes and wonder, "Did a robot write this?" is because... there is no voice.
It does not care about its writing. It looks like it cares about you, but that's because it's using the last words you wrote, the prompt, and working incredibly hard to find the precise set of words to respond to your specific set of words.
Do you want to know how someone thinks? Read their writing.
These humans have voice:
Happy Thursday.