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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

#251

Post by mikepurvis »

TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #3
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 think there's a difference between using an LLM as an editor and asking the LLM to write something for you. The output in the former I find to still have a far clearer tonal fingerprint than the latter. And whose to say your idiosyncratic expressions wouldn't find an audience as it changes over time? Just you saying that makes me curious to read something you wrote.

Not the GP, but I'm a millennial who leans on cultural references and has a bit of verbal flourish that I think comes from a diet of ironic, quirky, dialogue-heavy media in the early 2000s, stuff like Firefly, Veronica Mars, and Pushing Daisies, not to mention 90s Tarantino, John Cusack films, and so on.

I've never given it too much thought, it's just... the way I communicate, and most people in my life don't give much thought to it either. But I recently switched jobs, and a few people there remarked on it, and I've also recently been corresponding with someone overseas who is an intermediate-level English speaker and says I sometimes hurt their brain.

Not making a value judgment either way on whether it's "sophisticated" or whatever, but it is I think part of my personality, and if I used LLM editing/translation I would want it to be only in the short term, and certainly not as something

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#252

Post by [deleted] »

IMTDb wrote: post #71
Lapel2742 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's how the algorithms promote engagement. They are destroying our democratic societies and should be heavily regulated. The same will become true for AI.

> should be heavily regulated. By who, exactly? It’s easy to call for regulation when you assume the regulator will conveniently share your worldview. Try the opposite: imagine the person in charge is someone whose opinions make your skin crawl. If you still think regulation beats the status quo, then the call for regulation is warranted, but be ready to face the consequences. But if picturing that guy running the sh…

[deleted]

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#253

Post by macintux »

chasing0entropy wrote: post #221
Aurornis wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m surprised at how much regulation has become viewed as a silver bullet in HN comments. Like you said, the implicit assumption in every call for regulation is that the regulation will hurt companies they dislike but leave the sites they enjoy untouched. Whenever I ask what regulations would help, the only responses are extremes like “banning algorithms” or something. Most commenters haven’t stopped to realize that…

HN let's you choose what order (active, new, top[actual algorithm]) That's not true of Facebook, new does not show you true posts in order of recency. Reddit still does, bit also injects ads that look like recent posts and actually aren't which is misleading.

And HN doesn't choose to show you targeted, inflammatory content based on your history. That's a huge difference from Facebook.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#254

Post by DontForgetMe »

chasing0entropy wrote: post #225
mentalgear wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not that complicated: - Ban algorithmic optimization that feeds on and proliferates polarisation. - To heal society: Implement discussion (commenting) features that allow (atomic) structured discussions to build bridges across cohorts and help find consensus (vs 1000s of comments screaming the same none-sense). - Force the SM Companies to make their analytics truly transparent and open to the public and r…

> it's really not that complicated... Then lists at least four priorities which would require one multi page bill or more than likely several bills make their way through house, senate, and presidents desk while under fire from every lobbyist in Washington?

I believe the world may contain legal and regulatory authorities that are not part of the United States. Dozens of them, so I've heard.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#255

Post by mikepurvis »

rcxdude wrote: post #182
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.

I think it can be useful as a tone-check sometimes, like show me how a frustrated or adversarial reader is going to interpret this thing I'm about to send/post.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#256

Post by donbox »

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…

Just started using Minifeed (free account). I am still nostalgic about Google Reader.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#257

Post by zwnow »

oidar wrote: post #108
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

And what's more is the suspicion of it being written by AI causes you to view any writing in a less charitable fashion. And because it's been approached from that angle, it's hard to move the mental frame to being open of the writing. Even untinged writings are infected by smell of LLMs.

Thats whats happening to me with music and discovering new artists. I love music so much but I simply can not trust new music anymore. The lyrics could be written by AI, the melodies couldve been recommended by AI or even the full blown song could've been made by AI. No thanks, back to the familiar stuff...

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#258

Post by randycupertino »

khannn wrote: post #248
mtlynch wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that explain what you observed? The only way I can understand that as an explanation is if your entire company can see each other's chats, and so she clicked yours and read the response you got. Is that what you're saying?

They're saying that the shared account is enough for OpenAI to provide the same result. Very interesting, I'd like to know more like was it a generic IUD or a specific one in the query. Also, the Doc is a cardiologist, they don't specialize in Gyno stuff and their training/schooling is enough for them to evaluate sources. Just for reference before AI it was typical for employers of doctors to pay for a service/app ca…

There were several specific brands cited in the response and she read through them one by one in the same order with the supporting details, word for word. I think it just gave us the same response and she read it off the page.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#259

Post by ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 »

There has been an explosion in verbose status update emails at my job recently which have all clearly been written by ChatGPT. It’s the fucking emojis though that drive me wild. It’s so hard to read the actual content when there’s an emoji for every single sentence.

And now when I see these emoji fests I instantly lose interest and trust in the content of the email. I have to spend time sifting through the fluff to find what’s actually important.

LLMs are creating an assymetric imbalance in effort to write vs effort to read. What is taking my coworkers probably a couple minutes to draft requires me 2-3x as long to decipher. That imbalance used to be the opposite.

I’ve raised the issue before at work and one response I got was to “use AI to summarize the email.” Are we really spending all this money and energy on the worlds worst compression algorithm?

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