cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/178862
spoiler
Just as the community adopted the term "hallucination" to describe additive errors, we must now codify its far more insidious counterpart: semantic ablation.
Semantic ablation is the algorithmic erosion of high-entropy information. Technically, it is not a "bug" but a structural byproduct of greedy decoding and RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback).
During "refinement," the model gravitates toward the center of the Gaussian distribution, discarding "tail" data – the rare, precise, and complex tokens – to maximize statistical probability. Developers have exacerbated this through aggressive "safety" and "helpfulness" tuning, which deliberately penalizes unconventional linguistic friction. It is a silent, unauthorized amputation of intent, where the pursuit of low-perplexity output results in the total destruction of unique signal.
When an author uses AI for "polishing" a draft, they are not seeing improvement; they are witnessing semantic ablation. The AI identifies high-entropy clusters – the precise points where unique insights and "blood" reside – and systematically replaces them with the most probable, generic token sequences. What began as a jagged, precise Romanesque structure of stone is eroded into a polished, Baroque plastic shell: it looks "clean" to the casual eye, but its structural integrity – its "ciccia" – has been ablated to favor a hollow, frictionless aesthetic.
We can measure semantic ablation through entropy decay. By running a text through successive AI "refinement" loops, the vocabulary diversity (type-token ratio) collapses. The process performs a systematic lobotomy across three distinct stages:
Stage 1: Metaphoric cleansing. The AI identifies unconventional metaphors or visceral imagery as "noise" because they deviate from the training set's mean. It replaces them with dead, safe clichés, stripping the text of its emotional and sensory "friction."
Stage 2: Lexical flattening. Domain-specific jargon and high-precision technical terms are sacrificed for "accessibility." The model performs a statistical substitution, replacing a 1-of-10,000 token with a 1-of-100 synonym, effectively diluting the semantic density and specific gravity of the argument.
Stage 3: Structural collapse. The logical flow – originally built on complex, non-linear reasoning – is forced into a predictable, low-perplexity template. Subtext and nuance are ablated to ensure the output satisfies a "standardized" readability score, leaving behind a syntactically perfect but intellectually void shell.
The result is a "JPEG of thought" – visually coherent but stripped of its original data density through semantic ablation.
If "hallucination" describes the AI seeing what isn't there, semantic ablation describes the AI destroying what is. We are witnessing a civilizational "race to the middle," where the complexity of human thought is sacrificed on the altar of algorithmic smoothness. By accepting these ablated outputs, we are not just simplifying communication; we are building a world on a hollowed-out syntax that has suffered semantic ablation. If we don't start naming the rot, we will soon forget what substance even looks like.
It's short and this writer seems to be the one who coined the term, but I'm reposting it out of the aggregator instance because it's a really good term for something I didn't have a word for before. Something about AI writing even when the tell-tale signs are removed really stands out to me. When Walter Benjamin was studying the same kind of phenomenon with art in the 1930s, he described it as the cultic significance of a work that's lost when we industrially reproduce it. The individual oil painting is a museum exhibit or family heirloom, the Thomas Kinkade print is a single-serving plastic food container that hides empty wall space. Every LLM could write a thousand novels a second for a thousand years and none of them would be worth reading because there's no imagination behind them.
I like how it's technically represented here in simplifying processes.
Yeah, you can tell when something is ai cause its soulless. People who aren't creatives love this shit cause they never really engaged with art to begin with, it was always a commodity to hang on the wall or put on the bookshelf. Creatives cringe at ai "art" cause its not creative at all.