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Proof of care in the age of AI

jacobfilipp.com

41–50 of 119 posts

Re: Proof of care in the age of AI

#41
I didn't finish the article, it was slightly difficult to read due to handwriting, and I'm not sure if I would have gotten any more value if I had continued. The mere of act of having written, or prompted to get something written is not intrinsically valuable to me. I have a degree in English literature, and I do not feel confident in my ability to discern AI writing from human anymore. I wasn't sure when I stopped reading if the images had been generated or not, and I don't know if it matters either way.

If you cannot demonstrate why I should continue reading by the quality of your writing alone, I'm not going to finish what you have written. I put down maybe half of the books I start without finishing, plenty of them written well before 2022 just because I am not enjoying them, or find the writing bad, or boring, or overly pedantic, or a million other reasons that are specific to me and my own bad taste.

I hope we can get to a point where people will stop clutching their pearls over AI writing, I have no interest in entertaining the theater of proof. Writing is either useful or not useful, good or bad for the reader, and making the reading experience worse to prove your worthiness as a writer provides me no value. If you need to be reassured that something was not written by a large language model, and that's enough for you to consider something worth reading your standards are lower than I will ever be comfortable dropping mine too.

Re: Proof of care in the age of AI

#42

Don't handwrite your next post and definitely don't start writing in your own back to front cryptic code. The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something. Sometimes they do, but not always. It's like lamented handwritten script when the printing press was invented....

LLM slop is considered low value because it contains a low information/minute as well as a low effort/minute signal. You want to know that the reader put more effort in than you do, and that it is worth your time. The effort signal just points to a possible high information/minute return. When someone takes the laborious effort to provide a short paragraph on an insanely complex topic, precisely written without exces…

What differentiates a splendid idea slopped into an article by AI from complete meaningless drivel being chiseled into perfection by a skilled human writer is not the form, but the content.

We arrived in the era of Effective Content: judge a book by its content, not its cover.

E=MC^2 expressed as AI slop article still is light-years ahead of any of, say, Deepak Chopra's work no matter how polished, well-thought or painstakingly handwritten it was.

If I had the algorithm for AGI and I would let Fable write some slop about it you'll still sell your own mother to read it. It's not the form, it's the content.

Re: Proof of care in the age of AI

#43

If I had handwritten this, there would be at least one (likely lots more) errors in writing crossed out mingled in with the text. That there isn't makes me wonder why such a lengthy sample contains seemingly zero handwriting errors. Is that plausible? EDIT: After seeing the comments, I am realizing how little I ever rewrote my own writings, an admitted weakness of mine. It was the blindspot behind which I made my rep…

You can write a draft first and then transcribe it once it's done without any mistakes. That's how I had to write essays when I was at school.

Re: Proof of care in the age of AI

#44

If I had handwritten this, there would be at least one (likely lots more) errors in writing crossed out mingled in with the text. That there isn't makes me wonder why such a lengthy sample contains seemingly zero handwriting errors. Is that plausible? EDIT: After seeing the comments, I am realizing how little I ever rewrote my own writings, an admitted weakness of mine. It was the blindspot behind which I made my rep…

You can handwrite more than just your first draft. It was common before the proliferation of computers to handwrite early drafts in pencil, and then handwrite the final manuscript with ink.

Re: Proof of care in the age of AI

#45
I have to admit I skipped to the end, but the conclusion of the article seems to be: "If you really care about something, make a song and dance about it. Around a bonfire. While wearing feathers and a mask. Drugs are optional, but recommended."?

...which reminded me of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qyk5U2p-msk ("I must be a narcissist / God knows that I can’t resist / To make a song and dance about it").

Re: Proof of care in the age of AI

#46

TLDR proof of care from the article: a low bandwidth process (e.g., from handwriting to tattooing it on your body) that you voluntarily put your words through to convey their level of personal importance. Some of his examples were tongue in cheek. But even handwriting feels a little too laborious when what we lost that needs replacement is manual typing.

Not to mention accessibility, which as usual benefits everyone with features such as text search, so I guess we‘ll keep looking for an answer. Typewriters?

I have heard of some high school classes reverting to typewriters. So your suggestion holds some weight.

Re: Proof of care in the age of AI

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know they worked hard on it. That is still a valuable sign An infant scrawling the alphabet in its own excrement would have that "signal"...

And also has the hallmarks of "art." I suggest, however, if one were to actually implement this, that the 'excrement' should likely be a food-safe lookalike; maybe chocolate with granola and fruit hunks. Less likely to have trouble with child welfare authorities.

Just a short jump from there to the concept of steganography over the back channel of aggregate child welfare enforcement actions. Typical HN

Re: Proof of care in the age of AI

#48
post #41

I didn't finish the article, it was slightly difficult to read due to handwriting, and I'm not sure if I would have gotten any more value if I had continued. The mere of act of having written, or prompted to get something written is not intrinsically valuable to me. I have a degree in English literature, and I do not feel confident in my ability to discern AI writing from human anymore. I wasn't sure when I stopped r…

> I hope we can get to a point where people will stop clutching their pearls over AI writing, I have no interest in entertaining the theater of proof.

The problem, at least for me, is that I don't trust AI. Subtle mistakes, outright hallucinations, or mistakes/omissions that an actual expert of the domain would immediately notice, whatever.

And as soon as I encounter anything that even looks like one of the typical AI tells or, in long content, a lack of cohesion or repetition... I can't help myself from immediately second-guessing every little thing in the content. And where there's smoke, usually there is fire... and I find myself annoyed for having wasted time to read something I had to crosscheck with other sources and found my suspicions confirmed. At least sometimes I learn something from digging into original sources, but frankly, I don't have the time for that.

Using AI for anything (including to "polish" grammar and spelling) is mentally taxing for everyone else.

Re: Proof of care in the age of AI

#50

Don't handwrite your next post and definitely don't start writing in your own back to front cryptic code. The reality is people don't always care if a human poured their heart and soul into something. Sometimes they do, but not always. It's like lamented handwritten script when the printing press was invented....

When the printing press was invented by Gutenberg, it wasn't used to produce finished documents. Printed books had large margins and omitted initial letters to leave space for the manual steps of rubrication and illumination. Plus, the printing itself was a product of huge amounts of manual typesetting effort.

The results speak for themselves. Those early printed works are beautiful to a degree few other books have managed since.

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