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I know you didn't write this

ammil.industries

11–20 of 145 posts

Re: I know you didn't write this

#11
post #2

> Suspicions aroused, I clicked on the “Document History” button in the top right and saw a clean history of empty document – and then wham – fully-formed plan, as if it had just spilled out of someone’s brain, straight onto the screen, ready to share. This isn't always a great indicator. I can't stand Google Docs as an interface to write with, so use VIM and the copy/paste the completed document into it.

Yep. I do this because I explicitly do not want a third party to see my thought process. If I wanted the reader to see my edits and second thoughts, I would have included them in the final document.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#12
Why can't the plan be judged on its merits? Rigorous verification of the idea is a good thing that should happen anyways. The main potential problem I see is transmission of privileged information to a third party.

I assume they are working at a business to make money, not a school or a writing competition.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#13
There is knowing, and then there is knowing.

For example suppose that someone likes to work in Markdown using VSCode. To get the kind of Word document that everyone else expects, you just copy and paste into Word. AI isn't involved, but it will look exactly like AI to you.

And there are more complicated hybrids. For example my wife has a workflow where everything that she does, communications, and so on, wind up in Markdown in Obsidian. She adds information about who was at the meeting that includes basuc research into them done by an agent (company directory, title, LinkedIn, and so on - all good to know for someone working in sales). Her AI assistant then extracts out bullet points, cross references, and so on. She uses that to create summaries that she references whenever she goes back to that project. And if someone wants to know what has happened or is currently planned for that project, AI extracts that from the same repository.

There's lots of AI in this workflow. But the content and thought is mostly from her. (With facts from searches that an agent did.) The fact that she's automated a lot of her organizational scutwork to an AI doesn't make the output "AI slop".

Re: I know you didn't write this

#14
> If you know in your heart of hearts that you didn’t put the work in, you’re undermining the social contract between you and your reader.

There's been a lot of social contract undermining lately. Does anyone please know about something that can be done to try and revert back? Social contract of "F you. I got mine" isn't very appealing to me, but that seems to be the current approach.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#15
post #12

Why can't the plan be judged on its merits? Rigorous verification of the idea is a good thing that should happen anyways. The main potential problem I see is transmission of privileged information to a third party. I assume they are working at a business to make money, not a school or a writing competition.

The unstated elephant in the room is that you can't possibly know how much thought the originator has given to this.

You can't know if it has been reviewed and checked for minimal sanity, or just chucked over the fence.

So you have to fully vet it.

And, if you have to fully vet it, then what value has the originator added? Might as well eliminate their position.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#16
post #2

> Suspicions aroused, I clicked on the “Document History” button in the top right and saw a clean history of empty document – and then wham – fully-formed plan, as if it had just spilled out of someone’s brain, straight onto the screen, ready to share. This isn't always a great indicator. I can't stand Google Docs as an interface to write with, so use VIM and the copy/paste the completed document into it.

Me too.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#17
post #2

> Suspicions aroused, I clicked on the “Document History” button in the top right and saw a clean history of empty document – and then wham – fully-formed plan, as if it had just spilled out of someone’s brain, straight onto the screen, ready to share. This isn't always a great indicator. I can't stand Google Docs as an interface to write with, so use VIM and the copy/paste the completed document into it.

It's bizarre to me that this didn't occur even slightly to the post author.

Or the tell that the guy who usually writes fairly succinctly suddenly dumps five thousand words with all of the details that most people wouldn't bother to write down.

It would be interesting to see the history where the whole document is dumped in the file at once, but then edits and corrections are applied top to bottom to that document. Using AI isn't so much the problem as trusting it blindly.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#18
If I discover you fed me AI output, directly from AI, it really makes me wonder what you are doing here. What did you add to this equation when I could have done it myself?

At least a "Generated by AI, reviewed and edited by xyz" tag would be some indicator of effort and accountability.

It may not be wrong to use AI to generate things whole cloth, but it definitely sidesteps something important and calls into question the "prompter's" contributions to the whole thing.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#19
post #4

I don’t really find it better when someone ads a disclaimer. What am I supposed to do then? There’s still an expected default behavior of reading it, and if I don’t I need to confront them and say “I don’t care what you got an LLM to say, why not give me your view”. It’s inappropriate under any circumstances imo

When I receive something that either I suspect an LLM wrote 90% of, or the author is up front about it, I always ask "Did you check all of this yourself to verify before I pick it up?" and maybe half of the times I get a no, and then they return a day later with a new document and some fixes. Other half the time people say yes, I start digging into it, start finding bunch of weird stuff and send it back to the person.

I don't really care if it's a person or the LLM getting it wrong, if you're sending me stuff that you checked or haven't checked but it's wrong/ambiguous anyways, I'm sending it back to you to fix.

Re: I know you didn't write this

#20
When it comes to LLMs, the only thing I hate more than the "I don't know, the AI wrote it" people is the "I wrote this" crowd. No you didn't, you asked someone else to write it. If you couldn't claim copyright for it in an IP court, you did not write it. Period.
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