Given that this is increasingly the go-to for a college degree, college needs to rethink its cirricula and place in the world. Or at least get rid of the essay.
Lest it become a place where student and teacher ais go to play pay-to-win social deduction video games.
For real, the "Claudish" has become so painful to read that it just takes me out of whatever task I was working on.
When prompted to use simple English without jargon, it's still filled with load bearing honest caveats in every footgun seam it talks about — what I should have led with. <Insert whatever other Claude cliche you prefer>
And I'm not the only one to notice this. Next time it's up for renewal, my team is abandoning it for GH Copilot in order to use literally any other frontier model.
From my own tests, the best model for writing complex, nuanced prose is Opus 4.6. All the next versions are impossible to coax into good writing. Gemini is OK, GPT ok but requires significant prompt tuning.
Makes sense when you consider what type of data Google had available in abundance. Natural written language (e.g., Docs, Gmail, Books) and natural spoken language (e.g., YouTube).
One could argue that Google Colab would supply the training data for better coding performance. I would argue that Colab is mostly used for non-complex (e.g., small number of variables) and self-contained (i.e., runnable in one page) code that can’t train a model for multi-folder and multi-page projects that rely on global connections, which real-life coding would often require.
when i use gemini i ask it to stop asking me questions, to stop showing me media and just use text, and be concise in output. with these directions it’s pretty useful
My settings are similar. I also added to be very concise without losing important information. It's output is so slim now that I can ask yes or no questions. Asking for a code snippet gives me just a snippet without an accompanying paragraph of explanation that I would just ignore anyway. Of course I can still ask follow up questions, but it gets right to the point. No filler is a dream.
Having coworkers who use it and thus unfortunately needing to read its output, Claude's "English" is very obviously unnatural-sounding, and extremely distinctive in a bad and irritating way. It's almost like another dialect.
...and of course this article itself has a bit of AI-ish tone to it.
I have the same workflow for about 3 months now (constant). same workflow since opus 4.5 and now with fable (variable). start with a plan about a problem (somewhat similar), write down the plan, use the plan to execute the work. Lately the plans are so verbose and confusing, Im starting to think of skipping the plan stage entirely or tell it to be super concise.
> How to use Gemini for a college essay
Given that this is increasingly the go-to for a college degree, college needs to rethink its cirricula and place in the world. Or at least get rid of the essay.
Lest it become a place where student and teacher ais go to play pay-to-win social deduction video games.
Author, that doesn’t mean you need to get Gemini to write your article.
In my experience, Gemini excels at explaining new concepts clearly and intuitively. Much more so than other models.
Anything is better than the current crop of Claudes, its prose has become painful.
For real, the "Claudish" has become so painful to read that it just takes me out of whatever task I was working on.
When prompted to use simple English without jargon, it's still filled with load bearing honest caveats in every footgun seam it talks about — what I should have led with. <Insert whatever other Claude cliche you prefer>
And I'm not the only one to notice this. Next time it's up for renewal, my team is abandoning it for GH Copilot in order to use literally any other frontier model.
Say a word.
You make some good points, but the best one is the one you might not be aware you've made.
From my own tests, the best model for writing complex, nuanced prose is Opus 4.6. All the next versions are impossible to coax into good writing. Gemini is OK, GPT ok but requires significant prompt tuning.
Gemini is bad at coding, but good at writing. More human like
Makes sense when you consider what type of data Google had available in abundance. Natural written language (e.g., Docs, Gmail, Books) and natural spoken language (e.g., YouTube).
One could argue that Google Colab would supply the training data for better coding performance. I would argue that Colab is mostly used for non-complex (e.g., small number of variables) and self-contained (i.e., runnable in one page) code that can’t train a model for multi-folder and multi-page projects that rely on global connections, which real-life coding would often require.
According to public material, Google does not train Gemini on Gmail or Docs: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gmail/pr... https://proton.me/business/blog/google-docs-ai-scraping
Yet
True. Whenever I ask LLMs to translate English to other languages, Gemini is always the most natural one.
when i use gemini i ask it to stop asking me questions, to stop showing me media and just use text, and be concise in output. with these directions it’s pretty useful
My settings are similar. I also added to be very concise without losing important information. It's output is so slim now that I can ask yes or no questions. Asking for a code snippet gives me just a snippet without an accompanying paragraph of explanation that I would just ignore anyway. Of course I can still ask follow up questions, but it gets right to the point. No filler is a dream.
Having coworkers who use it and thus unfortunately needing to read its output, Claude's "English" is very obviously unnatural-sounding, and extremely distinctive in a bad and irritating way. It's almost like another dialect.
...and of course this article itself has a bit of AI-ish tone to it.
its starting to feel that way with newer models. right after opus 4.6, I have started to notice the same
I have the same workflow for about 3 months now (constant). same workflow since opus 4.5 and now with fable (variable). start with a plan about a problem (somewhat similar), write down the plan, use the plan to execute the work. Lately the plans are so verbose and confusing, Im starting to think of skipping the plan stage entirely or tell it to be super concise.
ok. so what