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We're losing our voice to LLMs

tonyalicea.dev

111–120 of 425 posts

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#111
post #5

Where are these places where everything is written by a LLM? I guess just don’t go there. Most of the comments on HN still seem human.

i think the frontpage of hn has had at least one llm-generated blog post or large github readme on it almost every day for several months now

Tbh I prefer to read/skim the comments first and only occasionally read the original articles if comments make me curious enough. For now I never ended checking something that would seem AI generated.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#112

There's something unique about art and writing where we just don't want to see computers do it As soon as I know something is written by AI I tune out. I don't care how good it is - I'm not interested if a person didn't go through the process of writing it

If the writer’s entire process is giving a language model a few bullet points… I’d rather them skip the LLM and just give me the bullet points. If there’s that little intent and thought behind the writing, why would I put more thought into reading it than they did to produce it?

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#113

FWIW this prompt works for very good for me: Improve grammar and typos in my draft but don't change my writing style. Your mileage may vary.

There are deterministic solutions for grammar and spellcheck. I wouldn't rely on LLMs for this. Not only is it wasteful, we're turning to LLMs for every single problem which is quite sad.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#114

I deleted my Facebook account a couple of years ago and my Twitter one yesterday. It's not just LLMs, it's how the algorithms promote engagement. i.e. rage bait, videos with obvious inaccuracies etc. Who gets rewarded, the content creators and the platform. Engaging with it just seems to accentuate the problem. There needs to be algorithms that promote cohorts and individuals preferences. Just because I said to someo…

an interesting thing about Twitter, I find, is that plenty of rage bait and narcissism bait surface, but amid very highly technical information which is also published there, and extremely useful (immunology, genomics, and of course computational) to me.

i've learned pretty well how to 'guide' the algorithm so the tech stuff that's super valuable (to me) does not vanish, but still get nonsense bozo posts in the mix.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#116

I deleted my Facebook account a couple of years ago and my Twitter one yesterday. It's not just LLMs, it's how the algorithms promote engagement. i.e. rage bait, videos with obvious inaccuracies etc. Who gets rewarded, the content creators and the platform. Engaging with it just seems to accentuate the problem. There needs to be algorithms that promote cohorts and individuals preferences. Just because I said to someo…

One could absolutely push algorithms that personalize towards what the user wants to see. I think LLMs could be amazing at this. But that's not the maximally profitable algorithm, so nobody does it . As so many have said, enragement equals engagement equals profit. All my social media accounts are gone as well. They did nothing for me and no longer serve any purpose. TBF Bluesky does offer a chronological feed, but t…

Could someone use a third-party AI agent to re-curate their feeds? If it was running from the user's computer I think this would avoid any API legal issues, as otherwise ad and script blockers would have been declared illegal long ago.

> but the well-intentioned blocklists just became the chief tool for the mean girls of the site.

I've never used it, but yes this is what I expected. It would be better to have topical lists that users could manually choose to follow or block. This would avoid quite a bit of the "mean girl" selectivity. Though I suppose you'd get some weird search-engine-optimization like behavior from some of the list curators (even worse if anyone could add to the list).

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#118

I actually think we’re overestimating how much of "losing our voice" is caused by LLMs. Even before LLMs, we were doing the same tweet-sized takes, the same medium-style blog posts and the same corporate tone. Ironically, LLMs might end up forcing us back toward more distinct voices because sameness has become the default background.

[deleted]

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#119

There's something unique about art and writing where we just don't want to see computers do it As soon as I know something is written by AI I tune out. I don't care how good it is - I'm not interested if a person didn't go through the process of writing it

> There's something unique about art and writing where we just don't want to see computers do it

Speak for yourself. Some of the most fascinating poetry I have seen was produced by GPT-3. That is to say, there was a short time period when it was genuinely thought-provoking, and it has since passed. In the age of "alignment," what you get with commerical offerings is dog shite... But this is more a statement on American labs (and to a similar extent, the Chinese whom have followed) than on "computers" in the first place. Personally, I'm looking forward to the age of computational literature, where authors like me would be empowered to engineer whole worlds, inhabited by characters ACTUALLY living in the computer. (With added option of the reader playing one of the parts.) This will radically change how we think about textual form, and I cannot wait for compute to do so.

Re: modern-day slop, well, the slop is us.

Denial of this comes from a place of ignorance; let the blinkers off and you might learn something! Slop will eventually pass, but we will remain. This is the far scarier proposition.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#120

I deleted my Facebook account a couple of years ago and my Twitter one yesterday. It's not just LLMs, it's how the algorithms promote engagement. i.e. rage bait, videos with obvious inaccuracies etc. Who gets rewarded, the content creators and the platform. Engaging with it just seems to accentuate the problem. There needs to be algorithms that promote cohorts and individuals preferences. Just because I said to someo…

> It's not just LLMs, it's how the algorithms promote engagement. i.e. rage bait, videos with obvious inaccuracies etc. I guess, but I'm on quite a few "algorithm-free" forums where the same thing happens. I think it's just human nature. The reason it's under control on HN is rigorous moderation; when the moderators are asleep, you often see dubious political stuff bubble up. And in the comments, there's often a fair…

I want to agree with this. Maybe OP is young or didn't frequent other communities before "social networks", but on IRC, even on Usenet you'd see these behaviors eventually.

Since they are relatively open, at some point comes in someone that doesn't give care about anything or it's extremely vocal about something and... there goes the nice forum.

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