Syntax That's Sus From Writing That Sucks

I loathe LLM-generated writing, especially when someone launders it as their own work, thoughts, or insights. LinkedIn is a prime example of posts laden with lazy tokenized text. The glut of fabricated text crowds out human voices, which compounds the insult of how text and image generation are derivative of copyrighted material collected without consent or compensation.

I lament how the emdash has become a superficial signal of synthetic thought. I haven't changed my writing style because of that. I embraced the emdash long ago and enjoy the rhythm and visual distinction it provides. I don’t and won’t use LLMs in my writing process. I enjoy the process of thinking — and struggling — my way through a sequence of sentences.

I also see it as respect for the audience.

Readers don’t want to waste their time on something thoughtlessly generated. And so they search for tics of tokenization.

They point to syntactic tells of artificial expression, from that glorious emdash to an abundance of bullet points. Others point to stylistic decorations, from the poker-like tell assumed in a word like "delve" to overused formulations like, “It’s not X. It’s Y,” and throw-away phrases that serve as word count filler between mundane or generic assertions.

They even turn to services that purport to identify LLM-generated text, albeit with questionable accuracy disguised by decimal points and methodologies that vary between grep with a few regexes and guessing with probabilities.

Relying on some particular punctuation is insufficient. It misses the weaknesses in structure, sense, and style that make LLM writing so unappealing. Unfortunately, we don't always have obvious shortcuts to identify and therefore avoid the cruft that comes from prompts.

That's the trap of these time-wasting tokens when their nature isn't immediately apparent. There's a great betrayal in the asymmetry of thought spent reading something when there was zero thought spent writing it.

Write, Revise, Refine, and Read

Bad writing and poor conference presentations predate people spending money to trickle their thoughts through a random number generator. Humans on LinkedIn have generated vapid business-speak since its inception. But I can accept many of those human efforts as people experimenting with their own first drafts. I’ve gone through, and continue to go through, that perpetual process of draft, revision, draft.

Writing is a craft that requires exercise. There’s nothing wrong with scattered thoughts and early drafts. Learning and improvement takes patience and practice. Taking deliberate decisions to iterate through drafts is far more beneficial than re-running prompts. There's no self-improvement or gainful exercise in relegating writing to a machine.

Reading is also a craft. Applying critical thinking to a spec, design, or idea is crucial to cybersecurity. Threat modeling is a loosely structured application of critical thinking. That’s another reason why reading text spewed from an LLM is so annoying – its boring patterns and extraneous phrases offer nothing valuable in terms of intellectual exercise. Cybersecurity doesn't use noise to train spam filters and ML-based detections. Reading skills hardly benefit from the emptiness of LLM-based writing.

Write Often, Read Often

Cybersecurity relies on writing, from explaining vuln research to describing secure designs to sharing knowledge to the occasional blog post about taking security seriously. There's a whole discipline of security awareness predicated on applying communication skills to change user behavior.

Cybersecurity likes patterns and lists. It talks about programming patterns and regex patterns. It draws on TTPs as patterns to vaguely define threat actors. It likes creating lists of things not to do. But if you take away all the exhortations of what not to do, that leaves a void of recommendations about what to do.

If we limit an analysis of writing to a list of “don’ts”, we risk framing writing as an absence of annoying characters rather than building examples of how to be convincing, entertaining, concise, or whatever a particular topic or situation calls for.

Those are the patterns to look for – the patterns that engage an audience. I'd rather seek out writing that makes me think, that makes a topic entertaining, or that captures my attention. It might be a single sentence, a blog post, or a novel. That context and experience informs my own ideas of the kind of writing I want to find more of or to create myself.

That’s why it’s so important to read and write on a regular basis. There’s no single, uniform reader to appeal to. Nor a single writing style to adopt. But there are outcomes to strive for.

To use cybersecurity as an example again, an outcome might be precision and insight into events when documenting a postmortem, being persuasive with trade-offs in a design decision, or educating someone on how to secure their systems.

Write about the steps you took to find a flaw. Write about the steps that failed to find a flaw. Write something you would enjoy reading, that comes from your thoughts and through your voice.