I'm becoming AI-blind: why I now skim past AI-generated work docs

My son is currently learning Romanian and I was trying to help him with verbs. I don’t know Romanian but recalled when learning a foreign language for the first time it really helped me to break down how a verb form or tense worked in English, then learn the equivalent in the new language. So I wanted to make some charts and pages that he could use as learning resources.

I used Claude to help. I don’t know how to quite describe it, but because the text was polished and well constructed my brain was giving me the the signal “if you aren’t getting this it’s because you’re not focusing” so I’d read it again and then again and it still was not landing. It sorta felt like when you read something technical or heavy when very tired - you are reading but not processing.

Only after wrestling with this for a few days did I realize that it wasn’t me. As I started going through, sentence by sentence, forcing it to re-write things to be more clear the concepts became easy to understand.

I wish there was a name for this situation. It’s almost like a pseudo-language where it has the correct form and presentation but is missing critical components.

The more complex the topic, the more I sense this.

I've been stuck in loop all week where a coworker asked me to review some methodology documents that are clearly generated by Claude (which is fine in this case) but every time I sit down my brain can't get through 2 sentences without feeling like I'm reading nothing. It actually feels like the content, which isn't empty, has no meaning. So I go on to another assignment and come back later and the same thing happens. And now I have anxiety about opening it so it has compounded in difficulty haha. Glad other people are experiencing this.

I also find it impossible to parse half the comments that Claude tries to sneak into our pull requests. I’ve never had an issue understanding code comments written by humans like this before. The structure of the information is like a waterfall that leaves me unable to swim to the surface and grab the air of comprehension.

So, “Please write a one-liner comment manually to replace these 5 lines of AI generated comment” is a common refrain in my PR reviews to colleagues.

That last image is bizarre. The quiche, cream and even the salad look like they've been given the trypophobia treatment.

Which might even make sense, because there were always (still are?) those horrible ads in the chumbox area of news sites that used trypophobia and other creepy body-horror stuff to get you to click. [1] So maybe the hope is that you don't really look closely at the quiche, but some reptilian party of the brain gets oddly activated and drives you towards the restaurant?

1. https://medium.com/the-awl/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-c...

In high school, a teacher gave me a copy of "How To Read Better And Faster" which teaches you speed reading. This came in very handy in college.

I find that when I try to speed read modern human writing, there are often errors (like missing or misused words) or awkward expressions that I do have to slow down and think harder a lot to really parse it.

With AI writing, it's sort of self redundant and the information density of each sentence seems to have more even information density. This makes it very easy to do a very high level speed read and get the full gist.

There are also what I'm assuming are bots on hugging face (or maybe non-native english speakers who are using ai for translation) that interact with me where I have no idea what they are saying until I read it very slowly.

Claude has become noticeably, painfully worse at writing in the last six months. At this point it’s practically useless for anything except code.

"There's an ongoing discussion of whether humans are good at recognizing AI-generated text. While most research claims that humans don't really do a good job there, I disagree. "

I wonder if humans that spend all day working in tech are good at recognizing AI-generated text, but people who spend all day doing jobs that don't involve computers aren't as good.

And I wonder if those of us in tech are the only ones who really care?

I find this struggle with coding too. When Claude spits out a plan I have to really focus to not skim over the details. It's also difficult to parse the plan because I have to work backwards to determine if the high level context matches my understanding of what Claude will do.

I've been given AI generated documents or presentations and you can always tell when they've just one-shotted the output. Claude has a way of adding so much jargon and unnecessary text to a document that it makes it very hard to read or even understand what the original intent of the writing even was.

I'm not sure why this issue is so prevalent, it's not hard to point Claude at the Wikipedia article on signs of AI writing or ask Claude to write content anyone of the average American reading level could understand.

To me it just gives off a sense of laziness, that you cared so little of your content that you did not take the time to read it yourself and edit it to effectively communicate the message you wanted to communicate. To that point, it's just not worth my time reading, otherwise my eyes glaze over trying to read between the lines of machine written language for other machines.