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We're losing our voice to LLMs

tonyalicea.dev

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Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#181

Post by ashtakeaway »

ricardo81 wrote: post #6

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…

That's the same algorithm Youtube has and is more blatant. Phone mics and your coworker's proximity does a great job at picking up things you've said even after disabling mic access plus airplane mode just by process of elimination.

I'll only use an LLM for projects and building tools, like a junior dev in their 20s.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#182

Post by rcxdude »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #2

It is not a zero sum game. I have always had a very idiosyncratic way of expressing myself, one that many people do not understand. Just as having a smartphone has changed my relationship to appointments - turning me into a prompt and reliable "cyborg" - LLMs have made it possible for me to communicate with a broader cross section of people. I write what I have to say, I ask LLMs for editing and suggestions for impro…

I would be interested to see an example of a before and after on this. I do think LLMs as editors and rewriters can be useful sometimes, but I usually only ever see them used as a means to puff out an idea into longer prose which is really mostly counterproductive.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#183

Post by BoredomIsFun »

freejazz wrote: post #36
CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #13

In a lot of ways, I'm thankful that LLMs are letting us hear the thoughts of people who usually wouldn't share them. There are skilled writers. Very skilled, unique writers. And I'm both exceedingly impressed by them as well as keenly aware that they are a rare breed. But there's so many people with interesting ideas locked in their heads that aren't skilled writers. I have a deep suspicion that many great ideas have…

> In that way, perhaps we now have a monotexture of writing, but also perhaps more interesting ideas being shared. They aren't your ideas if its coming out of an LLM

counterargument: they still are your ideas even if they went through LLM.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#184

Post by femiagbabiaka »

alt227 wrote: post #98
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that some folks dislike it, but Bluesky and atproto in particular have provided the perfect tools to achieve this. There are some people, largely those who migrated from Twitter, who mostly treat Bluesky like a all-liberal version of Twitter, which results in a predictably toxic experience, like bizarro-world Twitter. But the future of a less toxic social media is in there, if we want it. I've created my own f…

I personally dont feel like an ultra filtered social media which only shows me things I agree with is a good thing. Exposing yourself to things you dont agre with is what helps us all question our own beliefs and prejudeces, and grow as people. To me, only seeing things you know you are already interested in is no better than another company curating it for me.

> I personally dont feel like an ultra filtered social media which only shows me things I agree with is a good thing. Exposing yourself to things you dont agre with is what helps us all question our own beliefs and prejudeces, and grow as people.

You are the one who gets to control what is filtered or not, so that's up to you. It's about choice. By the way, a social media experience which is not "ultra filtered" doesn't exist. Twitter is filtered heavily, with a bias towards extreme right wing viewpoints, the ones it's owner is in agreement with. And that sort of filtering disguised as lack of bias is a mind virus. For example, I deleted my account a month or so ago after discovering that the CEO of a popular cloud database company that I admired was following an account who posted almost exclusively things along the lines of "blacks are all subhuman and should be killed." How did a seemingly normal person fall into that? One "unfiltered" tweet at a time, I suppose.

> To me, only seeing things you know you are already interested in is no better than another company curating it for me.

I curate my own feeds. They don't have things I only agree with in them, they have topics I actually want to see in them. I don't want to see political ragebait, left or right flavoured. I don't want to see midwit discourse about vibecoding. I have that option on Bluesky, and that's the only platform aside from my RSS reader where I have that option.

Of course, you also have the option to stare endlessly at a raw feed containing everything. Hypothetically, you could exactly replicate a feed that aggregates the kind of RW viewpoints popular on Twitter and look at it 24/7. But that would be your choice.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#185

Post by amrocha »

boxerab wrote: post #91
glitchc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do LinkedIn as well. I got rid of it earlier this year. The "I am so humbled/blessed to be promoted/reassigned/fired.." posts reached a level of parody that I just couldn't stomach any longer. I felt more free immediately. N.B. Still employed btw.

This. Linkedin is garbage, yet I still use it because there are no competitors. This is what happens in a monoculture.

Do you really want a “competitor” to linkedin? Do you really want to have to make and manage accounts on multiple sites because you need a job and you don’t know which a company uses?

Isn’t it better to have a single place you check when you need a job because everyone else is also there?

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#186

Post by mewpmewp2 »

AstroBen wrote: post #67

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

I would love to see true really good AI art. Right now the issue is that AI is not there where it by itself could produce actually good art. If we had to define art it would be kind of opposite of what LLMs produce right now. LLMs try to produce the statistical norm, while art is more so about producing something out of the norm. LLMs/AI right now if it wants to try to produce out of norm things, it will only produce something random without connections.

Art is something out of the norm, and it should make some sense at some clever level.

But if there was AI that truly could do that, I would love to see it, and would love to see even more of it.

It can be clearly seen, if you try to ask AI to make original jokes. These usually aren't too good, if they are good it's because they were randomly lucky somehow. It is able to come up with related analogies for the jokes, but this is just simple pattern matching of what is similar to the other thing, not insightful and clever observation.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#187

Post by cj »

anbotero wrote: post #120
chemotaxis wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Right, but that’s slightly different.

I think the nuance here is that with algorithmic based outrage, the outrage is often very narrow and targeted to play on your individual belief system. It will seek out your fringe beliefs and use that against you in the name of engagement.

Compare that to a typical flame war on HN (before the mods step in) or IRC.

On HN/IRC it’s pretty easy to identify when there are people riling up the crowd. And they aren’t doing it to seek out your engagement.

On Facebook, etc, they give you the impression that the individuals riling up the crowd are actually the majority of people, rather than a loud minority.

Theres a big difference between consuming controversial content from people you believe are a loud minority vs. controversial content from (what you believe is from) a majority of people.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#188

Post by jfindper »

Aurornis wrote: post #174
anbotero wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 I’m not exactly old yet, but I agree. I don’t know how so many people became convinced that online interactions were pleasant and free of ragebait and propaganda prior to Facebook. A lot of the old internet spaces were toxic cesspools. Most of my favorite forums eventually…

>pleasant and free of ragebait and propaganda

Most people are putting forth an argument of pervasiveness and scale, not existence.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#189

Post by amrocha »

nathan_compton wrote: post #58
glitchc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do LinkedIn as well. I got rid of it earlier this year. The "I am so humbled/blessed to be promoted/reassigned/fired.." posts reached a level of parody that I just couldn't stomach any longer. I felt more free immediately. N.B. Still employed btw.

I have a special, deep, loathing for linkedin. I honestly can't believe how horrible it is and I don't understand why people engage with it.

You have a special loathing for a site where you can message professional contacts when you need to?

Nobody is forcing you to use the social networking features. Just use it as a way to keep in touch with coworkers.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#190

Post by BoredomIsFun »

the_snooze wrote: post #43
LaGrange wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate when people hijack progressive language - like in your case the language of accessibility - for cheap marketing and hype. Writing is one of the most accessible forms of expression. We were living in a world where even publishing was as easy as imaginable - sure, not actually selling/profiting, but here’s a secret, even most bestselling authors have either at least one other job, or intense support from their c…

It basically boils down to "I want the external validation of being seen as a good writer, without any of the internal growth and struggle needed to get there."

> "struggle needed to get there."

"Struggle" argument is from gatekeepers and for masochists. Thank you very much.

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