LLMs are writing as well as humans for people who think writing words is the goal. Printing presses also write words better than humans. LLMs are solving the problem one layer higher than printing presses, but still several layers down from the top.
Note that LLMs aren't useless, since they have other strengths which can make them equal or better than humans in certain applications. For instance, they can tirelessly review code for silly mistakes, making them useful in cybersecurity.
Finally, someone else understands that writing is not the goal, the entire point of all of this is our communications between one another and this market for narrative stories is a nice departure and it does convey important knowledge and moral lessons that larger society needs. But it is an indirection, an indirection to the mission of communicating solutions to how to live as a human and that is why we care, why the interest persists despite lifetimes of narrative dreck. We are adrift without instructions, and no religions are not the instructions.
I think the first goal of writing is to talk to yourself. Without an external, unchanging scratchpad, most people cannot keep their thoughts truly straight. It can feel otherwise, but trying to write something about any tricky topic even a few pages in length can take a long time to be self-consistent. Clarifying it takes even longer, especially when you intend to share it. Writing as thinking is definitely a thing. I believe it’s the trickiest part of understanding how such interesting things pop out of a language model trained to predict the next token and rewarded with pleasing sequences. Since it is not thinking, it proves that certain sentences (most?) can be generated thoughtlessly.
I like the term I've seen someone use for LLMs: a "thought partner." Truly it's the duck programming duck I've always wanted.
I say that LLM's are a pacifier. LLM output is to conscious output as a silicone nipple is to a breast.
Sure, at some level, there are some people who at least some times, cannot pecieve a difference. That does not prove that there is no difference or that the difference doesn't matter.
Don't just focus on the model, half the turns in a session belong to the human, it's an instrument that depends on how well the user wields it. It does not need to produce the novel insights, just to support the user to have them.
No.
I think narrative stories are a "brain hack", in the same way heavily processed food, drugs, clickbait, soap operas and TikTok are brain hacks, combined with some exclusivity status signaling games. They're just old enough to have gained a cultural cachet that more modern forms of entertainment don't yet have. Same for art, music, comedy and culture generally.
There is nothing wrong with those "brain hacks", if they make us happy and don't have negative consequences, why not use them, but we should recognize that it's what they are.
I think that an alien intelligence could communicate with us about Ohm's law and Rieman's last theorem, maybe even debate resource and power allocation strategies (democracy, monarchy, capitalism, socialism) with us, they could probably understand the pull of sports, even if they couldn't participate in it themselves, but art and humor would be completely lost on them and considered a weird human excentricity.
This sounds like a fully general argument against being alive and having experiences; you could equally well call love a "brain hack". I also care a lot about solving practical problems, but the reason it's important to solve them is because it leads to human flourishing, which includes participating in all these activities you're deriding. Otherwise why are we doing anything at all?
I understand where you are coming from, that brain hack is how we remember cause and effect. It's very much like the use of Jazz Hands to signal to the dullards "now is the moment you're supposed to remember and say 'oh, I liked that'" A narrative story used as a vehicle to convey moral lessons and life guidance is the Jazz Hands of our fragmented and incomplete human instruction manuals.
The "story form" is a brain hack, i.e. a way of disseminating "problem X may cause Y and be resolved by Z". Whether that's useful depends entirely on what's being communicated and how.
Art, music, humour, poetry are more basic and the commonality is more or less "I bring you surprising phenomena". If phenomena are surprising to you then your mental model of the world needs improving.
What's Riemann's last theorem?
Culture and art can teach something to its audience, unlike most of the garbage you likened it to. It's clear you don't hold it in much regard, since you compare it to outright scams (clickbait) and even imply that consuming fiction is basically done for virtue signalling.
But like it or not, humans are not computers. They are animals with messy, complex thinking and reasoning that is impossible to fully describe, and incredibly complex societal systems created from their chaotic interactions. These messy people don't learn from datasheets and reference manuals, even if you'd like it to be otherwise.
Of course, there's a place for non-fiction, I like some of it a lot. But art has subtlety to it - instead of smacking people in the face with data and lists of objective measurements, it can pry into them by using the human ability to imagine themselves in other shoes, experience emotions that aren't results of real life events, and much more. There is a reason why parents teach their children values by reading them fables or educational stories, not the legal code of their jurisdiction. And this is also why fiction actually changes the minds of people reading it, arguably doing it more effectively than nonfiction. Slop (clickbait, average tiktok content, whatever else you're imagining) doesn't make you feel new things or think of something you haven't thought of before, art does.
The aiens are also a bit of a copout. You're just assuming that there's bound to be this perfect species (that are effectively computers) that operate only on mathematics and discrete logic, who are obviously superior to us and can show us our wrong ways. What if computers aren't always superior? Or what if organic life requires some of that messiness you don't like to be viable? What if the aliens had their own weird things we could never relate to?
> No.
What's the purpose of this? You didn't disagree, you just went on a tangent. Is this another "brain hack?" If so, there is something wrong with them. They often make words appear to be something that they are not.
Like a magician would use a thing called "indirection."
We already suspect that many non-human animals have a "sense of beauty" and a sense of humor. At least one other species spontaneously dances on the "beat" to music (parrots).
I think alien intelligence would be able to appreciate art and humor, even without necessarily feeling it viscerally, as we do. We know that our particular brands of them rely on highly-developed and specific aspects of our psychology, but at a basic level, they seem to fundamentally be about congruence, incongruence, expectation, and interpretation/perspective. Any embodied intelligence that can observe physical reality is capable of grokking those concepts.
Shit engineers say
Fact. Someone has missed the point of existing. Or failed to come up with one for themself.
I'd like to live in a world where people only make art to serve a higher purpose. But we don't live in that world and never did. Before we had slop we had pulp — formulaic, low effort writing full of cliches of romance, lust, crime and adventure broke college students could churn out en masse to make a living.
I'd also recommend having a look at the books published by this article's author. I will admit that I have never read nor heard of any of them. But come on, just look at the books published covers and the way the author introduced them and tell me that they are not industrial products engineered for mass commercial appeal.
We do live in that world, but that world is also filled and conditioned by the predator and prey structure we all operate within. The higher purpose that Art serves today is aliased, hidden, and conveyed in layers of metaphor. This is somewhat of a game, as the predators playing the art game try to consume their prey, anyone that is not an art philosopher in the pursuit of stories to explain our situations and not fame or wealth. The obvious paths were long ago traveled and farmed to barren land, and all that is left is the extremes as nobody wants to admit that this, this with all of us, is it and nothing more.
I agree, any book that is liked by more than one other person is a crime against artistry and a moral failing.
Many of us understood that, and tried to tell it over and over. My keyboard is worn, my mind is numb, my soul is weary from typing/telling that the output is not the aim, but the content it carries, the substance it holds.
Yet a very vocal group advocates integrating LLMs into every aspect of their lives, and the other group watch in dismay.
On the other hand, I used a sentence form used by LLMs in a comment during a morning-brain moment, and an angry mob tried to crucify me with torches and pitchforks.
Many people love to generate text with LLMs, but most of same crowd apparently hates to read LLM output. An interesting phenomenon.
It must be a distinction between engineer-type brains and leader-type brains. If you're focused on social status climbing, the fact that you produced a report, and the length of that report, is far more important than whether the contents of the report have any relation to reality beyond the surface level. This is true if you're trying to get VC funding as well. It's even in institutional academia, as seen by the Sokal affair.
> is far more important than whether the contents of the report have any relation to reality beyond the surface level.
This only works in broken companies where leadership is already overrun with other status climbers.
If someone tries this trick at a functional company and is discovered, their reputation takes a huge hit that can take years to overcome, if ever.
At high performing companies reputation is everything. It can be a real problem to even get people to work on difficult or risky problems because they’re afraid of having a failure attached to their reputation.
Throwing unreviewed LLM slop around would be a reputation death sentence if your peers are good at what they do, because by now we all know that it’s easy to generate long reports with LLMs. The secret is out and anyone who follows technology knows it.
There are some companies where you can LLM report-slop your way to prestige. Those are not companies you want to stay at.
> This only works in broken companies
The promotion of LLMs is, I believe, basically a referendum on how many companies are broken in that way. So far, the adoption statistics are looking like it’s most of them.
I thought for a second you were going the opposite way with the brain thing. Good leaders are very much concerned with accurate and timely communication.
It can be a very engineer thing to point at a vanilla Doxygen dump and call that thing "documentation".
It is documentation. This week, I looked at the Laravel API docs[0], just as much as I looked at the framework guide[1]. It all depends on the question you have and the answer you need.
It's like the car manual (Do they still ship with one?) where every detail is laid out. It's not important for daily driving, but when you to fix an electrical problem, that's the reference you need.
[0]: https://api.laravel.com/docs/13.x/index.html
[2]: https://laravel.com/docs/13.x
It is documentation, but unless someone writes it, there's nothing "meaty" there explaining why certain choices were made, which APIs which will be deprecated, the overall design, where new things should go depending on what they do etc etc.
To be frank, I neither live/work in an environment or live for "climbing" anything, so fluffware is not something I produce or understand.
On the other hand, I have friends who play that game, and I don't talk with most of them, because their life views and mental states continually drift to a state which makes no sense whatsoever for me, so we grow apart.
Eventually, enough engineers will breed with enough engineers, that we'll be a different species, incapable of communicating with weirdo humanity.
You are describing the bifurcation of society that is the moral lesson of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. The Morlocks are the scientific and engineering "gender" (so to speak) of the human race while the Eloki are the child-like humans kept around because they are the food the Morlocks consume to survive in that future.
Yes, I've read the book, the two movies (one modern one from the 60s?), and the sequel, very well done!, by Stephen Baxter.
It's a good concept, but for some reason I thought of a military movie I watched recently, where someone was going on about how they were third generation military. And how their friends and family were military. Sort of the same kind of siloing there.
Stephen Baxter, I loved his "The Light of Other Days". I need to read more of him.
> but the content it carries, the substance it holds.
It's even more than that, I think. It's the intent to reach out and transfer to others something that you experience internally. It's a sense of purpose motivating that content and substance to be packaged up and communicated in the first place.
Sometimes LLMs will slip up and say things like, "I see this working with people all the time." And it REALLY breaks the illusion that the text they extrude means anything. Because obviously there is no "I" and no, the LLM does not have this autobiographical memory the text is simulating.
My wife uses ChatGPT a lot for advice on child development and parenting in general. Every so often, it says things like "in my experience, what I've noticed works best is..."
> Many people love to generate text with LLMs, but most of same crowd apparently hates to read LLM output. An interesting phenomenon.
Are you sure it's the same people? I feel the opposite: it's the same people who happily read tons of LLM output themselves and send some of it to others.
my coworker presented a 93 page pdf for a project plan entirely created by $230 of Claude's deep learning. i hope i wasnt too mean while asking him variations of "what now? what do i do with this?" the answer is obvious: read it. but so much of it covers problems which are already solved and my coworker clearly hasnt considered at all
point is: maybe llm output is best not shared. maybe, like a dream, the only audience who can appreciate the content of the writing is the first party
Having made the mistake of writing a couple of them, I’m pretty sure the only uses of non-fiction documents longer than ~30 pages is
* As a reference; people can look look up just the algorithm they want
* As a token that says “I’ve thought about this problem”
(The former is somewhat a subset of the latter. All of the stuff they didn’t read when they used the work as reference was there to provide them confidence that the algorithm they plucked out of the thing had some thought behind it).
totally. ive made some 10 pagers documenting topics ive THOROUGHLY considered and had my work peers review. same as you, the purpose is to point at it 5 years from now and say "the answers in there"
but when my coworker pays to create documents on topics he hasnt considered, for ideas of projects which dont exist, it feels like an exercise in text generation and i become mildy put off for the onus of reading it. i know it was written without purpose and while there are possibly novel tech and ideas in there, it feels like being handed less than a rough draft because it lacks any aim and intention
now, i expect he would get much more from it. hes the first party audience who reads the doc and sees a valuable project somewhere inside of it
Sometimes the medium is the message though. Especially in literature, prose matters. It's not just about what is said but also how.
This applies even in "low" art. AI generated imagery from mainstream models tends to be so ugly it detracts from effectively communicating what the prompter intended.
I don't we disagree a little bit, I think. Content and substance also contains "how" alongside "what". At least that was my intention.
I stopped sharing my photos publicly to stop supplying training data for image generation models. I don't want to feed that machine.
Most people love to drive, but hate to be stuck in traffic. Or for the countryside to be all freeways and the city to be all parking lots.
It's not the exact same asymmetry, but there are parallels.
No one likes generating content. Many like generating income or status. It is a new era. The era of curation. I would predict shorter and weirder stories and meme style communication patterns outside normal syntax. Poetry e.g. is replicable but not redoable. I am ambitious we are to see the best writing ever soon.
> No one likes generating content.
Oh no. I see the contrary.
One of my friends recently stated (paraphrased):
And they continued how they replace almost everything they do with LLMs.I have seen people who never think but spend all their days querying LLMs for everything. Docs, help, howtos, system administration, coding...
What I see is an incentive for less work, less effort. Not income or status. They don't spend their "saved" time, if there's any, for personal activities or self-improvement either. They just do things with less effort, and just live as they lived before.
It's brain numbing.
> I would predict shorter and weirder stories and meme style communication patterns outside normal syntax.
I don't share the same sentiment, yet I don't have idea what to expect. It has to get darker to get brighter again.
We're just starting.
It is very weird. 6 months ago I generated some documentation for a service that was largely undocumented. When it was done my only thought was "who is this for?" Is any one going to actually read this or are they just going to ask the LLM? If someone didnt write it, why would I read it? It just becomes something to pipe into the context for the next person. It seems though a lot of people don't have this experience, its like they think they are the only ones with access to this technology.
Additionally I am so, so ,so sick of reading claudes overly wordy technical writing ish bullshit. Its exhausting trying to find the fuck ups or hidden assumptions in the pages of text it produces for everything.
Every time I try and search for ways to make it stop I just find people trying to save tokens which I don't give a shit about. I just want it to communicate things to me without having to constantly read 4 paragraphs, dump the context or fork it or start a new session so it "remembers" or re-weights that is was told to be concise and terse in like 7 different places. Maybe I am using it wrong.
In the rare occasion I use LLMs, I always add at least one of the following:
Then I skim the result, and jump to the references it has given. I don't have time for other way.You have reinvented the search engine.
That’s not meant to be glib; Google and friends are pretty trash now.
That’s the point. I only use LLMs if and only if Kagi can’t unearth the thing I’m looking for for a week or so.
This means it finds me a single video which is not in a language which I know, or similar.
An LLM-vector-based search engine has the potential to be fantastic. No autocomplete - just make it search for similar vectors.
To be fair, LLMs didn't really change this that much: Throughout my career, I've been generating docs that nobody is going to read, only because some process somewhere says "In order to get engineering approval to commence work, an Engineering Risks Document (ERD) must be produced." Everyone knows that nobody reads these, but someone with a rubber stamp checks to see that the doc exists and it looks sufficiently long, and then he stamps the stamp. LLMs just make producing this shit faster.
For my medical notes assistant I had to set a global "write in a telegraphic, minimal style" because it was fluffing up every aspect of the notes. Nobody wants to read that BS and it's impossible to find information in a series of walls of text.
It can also go the other way. It outputs a paragraph so full of telegraphic technobabble that it’s just unreadable, inventing new jargon every other sentence, using terminology invented in its thinking stream and never explained. And when it combines the two issues and it outputs 4 pages of technobabble, it gets just exhausting to read. Paradoxically, given that 2 years ago everyone was using LLMs to summarize web pages, their ability to condense text (including their own thought stream) is still lackluster. I dream of some post-processing diffusion optimizer just condensing all of their slop away. Until then, I just tell it to _avoid_ telegraphic and newspaper-title speech and to output one or two paragraphs of prose only.
I wonder if reading cooking recipe sites in training contributed to this.
9 pages about how it felt to be a kid eating the dish, for 7 ingredients and a one line recipe.
And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.
Im curious what you mean by this
Wow. My comment is auto-collapsed. I'm not aware of this phenomenon on HN. Is it a moderation thing? It hasn't been downvoted. I don't think I've been shadow-banned or had this comment flagged or anything.
Anyway, to answer your question, I was pointing out that the request for "important knowledge and moral lessons that larger society needs" and "communicating solutions to how to live as a human" as well as lamenting that "We are adrift without instructions" is actually a request for religion. Religion is how to make sense of how to live. So the comment is asking for religion and rejecting religion at the same time.
At the same time, I was pointing out that one religion in particular has directly addressed the point that "writing is not the goal." The "word"—or "logos" in the greek—is the reason, the logic, the rational principle of the cosmos behind the words. It points to that need for a solution for how to live, as well as showing there is a real answer.
In the beginning were the Words, and the Words made the world. I am the Words—the Words are everything. Where the Words end, the world ends. You cannot go forward in the absence of space. Repeat.
They are quoting John 1:14. At the beginning of his book, John describes Jesus as being the personified word of God. That was likely an early example of the influence of Neo Platonism on Christianity.
Yes but curious GP's thoughts on comparing LLM writing to the reference and how it relates to the topic
> Printing presses also write words better than humans.
False equivalence, printing presses do not write.
Right. LLMs are text production machines.
You can also view them as data expansion tools. They expand an input to an arbitrary long text. That text contains roughly the same amount of information as was contained in the input to begin with.
This is not very useful unless your work is content production. More useful is when the output length is shorter than the input. Then it is a (lossy) data compression tool. These are, as we all know, very useful for images and sound but now we have them for text too.
This assumes one-shot generation. I don't use it that way, and I don't think many people who find it useful do.
I use it as a colleague I'm drafting with. I'll ask how a sentence lands, tell it to make a paragraph more friendly or more dramatic, have it argue against a point I'm making. The piece comes together over many turns, and the information arriving in each turn is mine — it's not expanding one prompt, it's helping me converge on something.
The information-content framing also proves too much: a copy editor adds no information either. Neither does a translator, or a ghostwriter. What they add is form, and form is most of what makes writing good or bad.
Many people make the mistake to think LLMs are stochastic parrots, but they are more like pianos, you play the keys and they make music, if you don't bring no new spices to the soup no wonder it comes out bland.
Exactly. LLMs regress to the mean. If you want don't want average, you need to feed the context to push it away from the mean.
I agree that the output is more likely to be valuable when it’s shorter than the input. And when they use tools to do research and try things, it can be a lot of input that comes from all sorts of places.
I really hate the whole thing about companies promoting using LLMs to change one-liner emails into this long multi-paragraph thing that ends up saying almost nothing ... just wasting everyone's time in reading them (with an extra sprinkling of hallucinations).
LLMs have created more billable hours for me as an attorney because the LLMs convince the client that they need to know more about irrelevant issues, how specific statutes may apply, and other such things. They may ask about specific procedural issues that they would otherwise have no idea about that I then need to explain in greater detail. It reliably bloats things that would be a .1 into .5 or more.
>They may ask about specific procedural issues that they would otherwise have no idea about that I then need to explain in greater detail.
My favorite part about LLMs is that their insufficiency as legal aids (Aides? Aids.) seems to be slowly cluing-in the general public as to how Byzantine and "inside baseball" our legal system has become. (This is a bad thing.)
I believe you are supposed to use an LLM on the receiving side to compress them again.
This is supposed to help our economic growth during the coming decade.
In webcomic form: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
/s I hope
What part of it do you think was sarcastic? Economic growth is measured by the resources humanity wastes.
>Right. LLMs are text production machines.
I use them as text consumption machines. They read and watch a lot of the books and movies i have no time to. And from the TLDR I decide whether the full thing is worth watching.
That is what humans are for!! Ask people!
There is no way a summary of these things fron an LLM has the correct context.
(not really frustrated at you, as much as where society is going)
That is not how it works because of how bloated everything is. There is rarely a movie, book or series lately that are not 2 times longer than needed. So you are forced to go for aggressive recaps.
Most of the non pulp books published - contain at least two times as many pages as needed for the story or narrative.
The information density in the modern world is absurdly low.
Yes, I agree on modern trends for that. There are some modern authors not too bad in that respect, but it may be why I find older sci-fi books more appealing.
I really want to know what people specifically mean when they allude to some "higher" level of cognition that humans have above LLM's when it comes to useful outputs. I don't mean the nature of consciousness or internal experience (which is unfalsifiable), I mean the essence of cognitive labor as a tool: writing is about relating concepts, drawing comparisons, aggregating elements of reality into a fictive but believable narrative.
All these processes can be reduced to mathematics and computation. The human brain is just a tool, like any other organ. Do we deny this reality because it shields us from existential horror?
Humans don't seem to have much problem sharing the world with other species, whether they are dogs or LLMs. This is unrelated.
“ All these processes can be reduced to mathematics and computation” may or may not be a true statement.
We don’t know yet, and maybe it’s unknowable.
Believing everything can be explained that way is itself just another ideology followed blindly
LLMs don't have the connection to reality that humans have. LLMs only have text. That's the difference.
> I don't mean the nature of consciousness or internal experience (which is unfalsifiable)
The way I've been thinking about it is not that internal experience is unfalsifiable, along with the modern science connotation that everything that is unfalsifiable is automatically irrelevant (which would be quite absurd, as everything that is dear and meaningful to humans are all simply cognitive phenomena in the end!). It's that it is externally, naively and a-priori unfalsifiable. That is, you can't externally measure or prove it, without having an a-priori theory of what it is and how it happens in the first place. But it is internally falsifiable, in the sense that if we have it, then we know we have it. Note that it's not that "If I have it, then I say I have it", or that "I one has it, he says he has it"; those are all communication to the external world, and for example machines can clearly say they have it without having it, or you can have it before even learning the words that represent it. But if you have it, you can know you do. This actually creates some potential for expanding this knowledge, maybe, in the future, to allow for external verification. We can internally investigate properties associated with consciousness, and from those properties (along with scientific knowledge), maybe one day we will know more about the objective basis which affords consciousness/sentience manifesting or emerging. So I see it like an experimental field where the component of self-assessment or self-experimentation or self-measurement is essential (again along with more conventional scientific notions).
I have been thinking the same way about all properties of life/consciousness, in particular if we think of ethics as a property of (even if you consider the ethics or ideals only pertaining to how it would be ideal to lead your own life) the mind, or of sentience in general. I think of ethics as an inherent property of existence: it stems from the fact that internal experiences/internal life/sentience/etc. are the only thing that could have value, that in fact sentience is experimentally (again taking the point of view of experimental sentience) the only thing that truly matters or has value. If we are minds, we know that only the content of minds can matter; it cannot matter, for example, that a lone rock in some place no one can know about has this or that fate, because there is no mind to interact or perceive and be affected in any way by it. So all of ethics can probably be founded or based upon this kind of observation, and the act of experimental self-observation of consciousness. And I think it's quite important that we collectively recognize those values and what matters to make our lives better (better yet, as good as it can be!) :)
Going further, all of those are currently under the umbrella of metaphysics, which is again a kind of prejudiced-against (often taken as irrelevant, when it contains some of, and in fact many of, the most important things in life) field of science/knowledge. I think metaphysics should just be seen for what it is as a more indirect kind of science. In a way all of science is varying degrees of indirect, we use all sorts of instruments and need to make all kinds of assumptions (that conceivably, but unlikely, could indeed be false) to be able to do any kind of science or assume any kind of validity to results. We need to assume (although indeed many of those assumptions we don't even need to consider, i.e. they're implicit) there aren't any "gremlins" of whatever kind interfering with our measurements. We do our best to cross-verify whatever experiments we have to increase our confidence. Likewise, metaphysics to me is simply about inferring facts and properties with more indirect methods. One of them is what I referred to above, i.e. observations from within your own mind, and proposing properties of cognition from first hand experience. A second (very close to actual physics) is conjecturing what other universes are out there of if there is some larger mechanism our own universe (or all universes) are part of. Another is judging other properties of existence, for example, are our minds completely separate or are we all ultimately part of the "same thing", somehow? How did I come about living as the person I am currently living, am I perhaps a random sample, with some particular distribution, of all living beings? How do those facts influences how we should live together? (I think they all strongly support the notion of valuing everyone, and discredit any absolute notion of primacy of yourself in ethics, i.e. egotism).
>The human brain is just a tool, like any other organ.
sorry the brain is a tool to who exactly in this ostensibly reductive worldview?
He talks about this in TFA:
Yo, this blog post could’ve been a freakin’ prompt. I have years and years of blogging for an AI to learn from, and over 20 novels, and tons of short stories. One prompt, and all this spills out. And if your goal is a blog post, you’re gonna love this era. If your goal is the joy of thinking in words, nothing has changed. So this is the real part, right here: Doing a thing for the love of the thing is no different than it ever was. The problem is, there aren’t many people for whom this applies.
Same reason I still code by hand. If I wanted to direct someone else to write code, I would have gone into management.
Yep. I love it when someone doesn't read the whole article, posts a takedown and it gets voted to the top of the discussion.
> LLMs are writing as well as humans for people who think writing words is the goal.
Only if what you mean by this is "for people who think padding a word count is the goal".
LLMs absolutely do not write well, by human standards.
LLMs don't do anything well by human standards. Not even the one thing (programming) they are supposed to be good at. It's disheartening how many people are prepared to accept the slop an LLM puts out just because it's fast.
I've seen way too much humanslop to be able to reject LLM slop outright.
There are areas where the average of LLM slop already beats the average of humanslop by a sizeable margin.
Possibly, although I have to say that I get PRs now where it's clear it's a miss by the LLM and was generated by a human who did not take the time to understand the subject matter.
In the past, a human producing humanslop would get a serious talking to, but nowadays it's apparently a valid excuse "well, an LLM generated it". This approach is placing a huge burden on the reviewers, much more so than in the past.
The interesting thing for me is that I have a very easy time of identifying AIslop. Have I been conditioned to simply ignore or accept humanslop? Is that the direction this is all going? That at some point we will simply accept both as a product of the human existence?
We shouldn't. Slop is slop. But there are a couple of differences:
AI slop can be more annoying to read. I mean, some human slop is as annoying as AI slop, but not all of it.
AIs can produce slop far faster than humans, so that the majority of slop at the moment is AI slop.
The difference with 'humanslop' is that it's avoidable by training or hiring a better human. With AI it's all the same, even SOTA models are still very distinctly and obviously AI in what they produce. And even very dedicated humans have a limit and aren't capable of creating low value content nonstop, meanwhile you can set up an LLM, point it at the internet and let it start filling gaps by firehosing it in low quality slosh 24/7, completely unattended.
[dead]
Huh that is an interesting metaphor. A next higher layer printing press?
I don't buy it, although I agree with GP's larger point about other strengths.
Printing presses are about exact duplication of writing. The internet is a higher layer printing press. LLMs substitute for (some of) the human effort of producing the text that a printing press or the internet can then replicate.
Allow me to offer a minor reframing: printing presses aren't about duplicating writing. The printing press exists to mass produce text regardless of how or where the content of the text was produced.
LLMs likewise are text production machines. They don't produce writing, they produce text. Text without writing is what we call slop in the modern parlance.
LLMs are literally throwing random dice into a printing press and making a thousand copies that you then try to huck on the street as if it were a real newspaper.
You are shadowbanned and have been writing mostly into the void for the last three months.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48067472
I'm confused, how can I see it, for example?
Looks to me that the ban was reversed at some point. The GP's comments are quite reachable.
Enable showdead and scroll through their history
They have a lot of dead comments, and their recent comments are all non-dead.
Either people are vouching for those again and again, or the ban was lifted at some point. I don't really know how this works here, but the first option seems unlikely to me.
Strangely, I'm still seeing the comment. How does that work?
A user with enough reputation and who has enabled the option to view censored comments can vouch for a censored comment, restoring it.
I wonder how that algorithm works. At the risk of discussing a bit of a taboo topic (are there rules against this? there might be...), I've never vouched for a comment and had it come alive. I have many times been the final nail in a comment where my flag caused it to die, but I have never seen the opposite with vouch.
Interesting. Every time I've ever vouched a comment, it came alive. (Though the last one I vouched ended up dead again after enough people flagged it, oops. I hope that doesn't mean I lost my power. In my defense, it was flagged to death based on being AI [apparently], which I didn't pick up the signal on, nothing super terrible / controversial.)
You are probably shadowbanned from flagging and vouching, which is separate from a commenting and posting shadowban. A shadowbanned comment only requires one vouch to come alive. A comment that is dead because of excessive flags or moderator action may require more.
> Printing presses are about exact duplication of writing.
maybe LLMs are seen to write as well as humans because most humans have poor reading comprehension skills? to wit: OP is using an analogy to make their point, where the components don't need to be an exact fit to make the point (ever heard the phrase "the map is not the territory"?)
> Huh that is an interesting metaphor. A next higher layer printing press?
A printing press that does the thinking for you.
A thinking press?
> A thinking press?
Soon you won't be doing anything. At best you'll just be a bag of meat attached to automated processes you don't understand in order to take legal liability for it.
Literally a scapegoat, except of a different species.
WALL-E captured this sentiment.
What was the scapegoating in WALL-E?
That would be an interesting legal case. I would expect it to lead to negligence on the part of the employer for lack of training, etc rather than attach to the employee pressing the button.
You get paid for having liability attach to you. Soon it may be the only thing you could be paid for.
Are employees usually liable for process-related issues? Like individual employees weren't liable for dispensing too-hot coffee but McDonalds was liable. Or how cops aren't liable in their individual capacity if it was a failure of training, etc.
It may not even legal liability, just blame.
For instance: give John the job of monitoring the HR AI so it isn't racist. To do that he needs to do impossible task of checking 10,000 automated resume evaluation decisions per day. No one can do that, so eventually he just approves them all.
Then if the system is determined to be super racist, you proceed to blame it on John, and fire him for being negligent and not doing his job. You put out a press release, and hire Steve into John's role. Your decisive actions show you're taking the problem seriously and the company isn't to blame.
Your job description won't say scapegoat - that would be too obvious. It'll be more like how Amazon drivers are forced to piss in jugs while driving.
a great point, and I think a very rare one
I’d be interested to know what you think the “several layers” above a system that solves open mathematical problems in an afternoon, and writes entire operating systems from scratch, are.
Figuring out what problems to solve or what features to include in the OS.
Go ask an LLM to "do something with 1M tokens".
I think that is a bad argument.
You could ask a human to "do something with 1M dollars" and get garbage too.
The point is that the deciding is the "higher layer." It's not that LLMs cannot, but LLMs as designed do not. They are not designed for free-ranging days off, they are designed to help us do things, and that makes them somewhere between us and published works.
It's no different than an editor standing between the author and a book, or a publisher, or a printing press. It's part of the process of idea realization, so it's just on that spectrum somewhere between book sale and author idea. (even though in another flipflop, that editor might be an author and now elevated to the premier deciding role). It's about how the tool fits, not what the tool is ultimately capable of.
So the analogy holds, just fine.
This terrible argument comes up in relation to AI over and over again. I don’t care if you built a brain surgery robot that outperforms the average person at brain surgery, I care if you built a brain surgery robot that outperforms the average brain surgeon. Outperforming “a human” at a specialist task is still essentially worthless.
> You could ask a human to "do something with 1M dollars" and get garbage too
At least the human's brain requires about 20 Watts to operate.
Cheap garbage is better than garbage requiring whole power plants nad billions of capital investment.
And the human is human.
The idea that we'd have to justify the existence of humans relative to LLMs based on objective metrics sounds like it's leading in a bad direction. If the LLM gets their power budget down to nineteen watts, what does that mean for humans?
Capitalism is a paperclip maixmizer. If we didn't want to be culled when surplus to requirements we would've chosen a different system.
The ones getting culled aren't the ones that chose the system.
I think that the point he’s getting at is the human experience.
> and writes entire operating systems from scratch
ehhhh, we're not really there. Not saying it's impossible to reach in the future but large tasks like this are still out of scope for LLM's beyond demoing toy applications. Impressive nonetheless, but I can't tell an LLM to reproduce microsoft word and have it give me a useful enough tool that doesn't contain an immense amount of bugs and require a human in the loop to replace it.
I would go as far as to say the LLM part has peaked.
To 1-shot MS Word will be possible only within some workspace designed for creating that kind of software. It will probably be saas style where you pay to export binaries or maybe some will take 30% if they become destinations for finding such software.
But I would bet other platforms are used for game dev, or for filmmaking.
Such that we still won’t have some super “model” that just does everything. The harnessing becomes architecture becomes software becomes user experience and expertise.
Non sequitur. Neither most mathematicians nor Terry A. Davis are particularly well known for their literature abilities.
> writes entire operating systems from scratch
Yeah, yeah. Remind me how many people are using those operating systems? The ability of LLMs to produce dogshit software that nobody will ever use is truly unparalleled, but not especially world-changing.