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Proof of care in the age of AI

jacobfilipp.com

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Re: Proof of care in the age of AI

#81

Post by BeetleB »

elil17 wrote: post #58
werber wrote: 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 think that perhaps you would have gotten more out of finishing it - given that you would have found out that it is more of a short story than an "article."

Yes, but not a particularly good story.

Re: Proof of care in the age of AI

#82

Post by DanielHB »

LLM corporate slop is the new version big data reports that nobody reads.

I am sad this infected code documentation and PR descriptions. This kind of stuff used to exist in order keep managers/executives busy not to keep engineers busy...

Re: Proof of care in the age of AI

#83

Post by RevEng »

pphysch wrote: post #34
chb wrote: post #30

Am I the only one who thinks the ending is a non-sequitur? How is the hackneyed, "the kids are allright" [sic] related to the preceding content?

Yeah and if this were taken seriously, you would have Mechanical Turk style services where poors are paid pennies to hand-write submitted/generated slop, defeating the purpose.

They covered that situation with the pen plotter. There are signals of commitment that you can't fake. The article isn't saying anything about accuracy or authorship, only that you actually cared about what you were communicating enough to put in some self sacrifice, and that this is a useful signal to help decide if something is worth listening to.

Re: Proof of care in the age of AI

#85

Post by BeetleB »

mschuster91 wrote: post #48
werber wrote: 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…

Do you not have to second guess/verify stuff humans write...?

Of all the reasons to dislike AI writing, this is an odd one.

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

I truly believe that in a few years, the obsession with determining whether an AI wrote some text will be classified as a mental disorder. And I say that with all seriousness.

Re: Proof of care in the age of AI

#87

Post by thewebguyd »

Kerrick wrote: post #44
jimmiles wrote: post #27

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.

> It was common before the proliferation of computers

We always had to write our first couple drafts in pencil/handwritten in school. Eventually we moved to typing the final draft by the time I hit high school but exams were always handwritten still and now I feel quite "old" at 38 knowing that there are adults on this very forum that probably did not have to handwrite much beyond elementary school.

Re: Proof of care in the age of AI

#88

Post by bens74 »

My wife's mother tongue is a relatively niche language (I don't want to name it here) that hasn't been a priority for our big tech overlords. It's writing system isn't supported out-of-the-box by any platform, there's no machine translation or OCR, and no LLMs are able to produce it convincingly yet. People sometimes communicate by taking pictures of handwritten notes, or with voice messages.

I've long been frustrated by the lack of support, but within the last few months had a change of perspective. I realized that this is actually a blessing! This language is the only remaining text on the Internet that I read and am sure is not LLM generated. And when spoken, I believe much less infected by LLM-isms that English.

I've done some work building an OCR corpus, but actually stopped now and don't plan to complete it. Working OCR would unlock text that the AI labs would slurp up, train on, and improve their infinite slop generators. We don't need that.

Re: Proof of care in the age of AI

#89

Post by RevEng »

dfgvfvbcv wrote: post #42
jvanderbot wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

Because I can't read all content to judge its value.

I used to use other signals to help judge: literacy, reputation of the writer or publisher, the media they used to communicate. Now even governments are distributing notice of official policy through poorly written tweets, yet the Internet is flooded with whole websites of AI slop that looks on the surface to be professionally made. We lost the signals that used to help us filter out the signal from the noise.

The alternative is not to read all content carefully because we don't have anywhere near the bandwidth to do so. This article is about other ways we can provide those signals. Even if the content is crap, the fact that someone has to sacrifice to produce it limits the amount they can produce, requiring them to prioritize what they produce, and signaling that this was important enough to them that it was worth the sacrifice.

Re: Proof of care in the age of AI

#90

Post by RevEng »

doug_durham wrote: post #67

Handwriting is inherently ableist. A portion of the population is blessed with the inherent ability of fast, legible handwriting. A portion of the population is not. Typing is an equalizer that allows more people to participate in the conversation.

If this were the only option, sure. It's not - the article points out several other possibilities. Just because one option isn't accessible to all doesn't mean we have to accuse the author of being ableist. We don't take away writing from some people because others can't do it - we provide alternatives.
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