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.
That is scary. I have looked into using AI to help with writing a few times, and every time it has felt like it made me an actively worse writer. I could imagine also being pulled into a feedback loop of feeling like my work isn't good enough, so I get AI to "help" and actively get worse at writing as a result, and need to rely more on AI, ultimately ending up in a situation where I am no longer capable of actually creating things anymore.
It really does feel like anti-practice, that it reinforces bad habits and actively unimproves skills instead of honing them. I've never seen an artist who started using AI more frequently (whether written or drawn artwork) who improved, they would stagnate at best, and often times would just use it as a "get rich quick" kind of thing, they always seem to try to monetise it, their output would be 10x what it was, but with 1/10th the quality and self-expression that made their art compelling the first place.