this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
718 points (98.9% liked)

Science Memes

12598 readers
4657 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 43 points 14 hours ago (4 children)

All this really does is show areas where the writing requirements are already bullshit and should be fixed.

Like, consumer financial complaints. People feel they have to use LLMs because when they write in using plain language they feel they're ignored, and they're probably right. It suggests that these financial companies are under regulated and overly powerful. If they weren't, they wouldn't be able to ignore complaints when they're not written in lawyerly language.

Press releases: we already know they're bullshit. No surprise that now they're using LLMs to generate them. These shouldn't exist at all. If you have something to say, don't say it in a stilted press-release way. Don't invent quotes from the CEO. If something is genuinely good and exciting news, make a blog post about it by someone who actually understands it and can communicate their excitement.

Job postings. Another bullshit piece of writing. An honest job posting would probably be something like: "Our sysadmin needs help because he's overworked, he says some of the key skills he'd need in a helper are X, Y and Z. But, even if you don't have those skills, you might be useful in other ways. It's a stressful job, and it doesn't pay that well, but it's steady work. Please don't apply if you're fresh out of school and don't have any hands-on experience." Instead, job postings have evolved into some weird cargo-culted style of writing involving stupid phrases like "the ideal candidate will..." and lies about something being a "fast paced environment" rather than simply "disorganized and stressful". You already basically need a "secret decoder ring" to understand a job posting, so yeah, why not just feed a realistic job posting to an LLM and make it come up with some bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Exactly. LLM's assisting people in writing soul-sucking corporate drivel is a good thing, I hope this changes the public perception on the umbrella of 'formal office writing'. (including: internal emails, job applications etc.) So much time-wasting bullshit to form nothing productive.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

LLM's assisting people in writing soul-sucking corporate drivel is a good thing

I don't think so, not if the alternative is simply getting rid of that soul-sucking corporate drivel.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 hours ago

Reminds me of the one about

  1. See? The AI expands the bullet point into a full email.
  2. See? The AI summarizes the email into a single bullet point.
load more comments (2 replies)