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The End of an Era

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Re: The End of an Era

#271

Post by [deleted] »

bsenftner wrote: post #98
inigyou wrote: post #4

LLMs are writing as well as humans for people who think writing words is the goal. Printing presses also write words better than humans. LLMs are solving the problem one layer higher than printing presses, but still several layers down from the top. Note that LLMs aren't useless, since they have other strengths which can make them equal or better than humans in certain applications. For instance, they can tirelessly…

Finally, someone else understands that writing is not the goal, the entire point of all of this is our communications between one another and this market for narrative stories is a nice departure and it does convey important knowledge and moral lessons that larger society needs. But it is an indirection, an indirection to the mission of communicating solutions to how to live as a human and that is why we care, why th…

[deleted]

Re: The End of an Era

#272

Post by actionfromafar »

inigyou wrote: post #145
bayindirh wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of us understood that, and tried to tell it over and over. My keyboard is worn, my mind is numb, my soul is weary from typing/telling that the output is not the aim, but the content it carries, the substance it holds. Yet a very vocal group advocates integrating LLMs into every aspect of their lives, and the other group watch in dismay. On the other hand, I used a sentence form used by LLMs in a comment during a…

It must be a distinction between engineer-type brains and leader-type brains. If you're focused on social status climbing, the fact that you produced a report, and the length of that report, is far more important than whether the contents of the report have any relation to reality beyond the surface level. This is true if you're trying to get VC funding as well. It's even in institutional academia, as seen by the Sok…

I thought for a second you were going the opposite way with the brain thing. Good leaders are very much concerned with accurate and timely communication.

It can be a very engineer thing to point at a vanilla Doxygen dump and call that thing "documentation".

Re: The End of an Era

#273

Post by Aurornis »

inigyou wrote: post #145
bayindirh wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of us understood that, and tried to tell it over and over. My keyboard is worn, my mind is numb, my soul is weary from typing/telling that the output is not the aim, but the content it carries, the substance it holds. Yet a very vocal group advocates integrating LLMs into every aspect of their lives, and the other group watch in dismay. On the other hand, I used a sentence form used by LLMs in a comment during a…

It must be a distinction between engineer-type brains and leader-type brains. If you're focused on social status climbing, the fact that you produced a report, and the length of that report, is far more important than whether the contents of the report have any relation to reality beyond the surface level. This is true if you're trying to get VC funding as well. It's even in institutional academia, as seen by the Sok…

> is far more important than whether the contents of the report have any relation to reality beyond the surface level.

This only works in broken companies where leadership is already overrun with other status climbers.

If someone tries this trick at a functional company and is discovered, their reputation takes a huge hit that can take years to overcome, if ever.

At high performing companies reputation is everything. It can be a real problem to even get people to work on difficult or risky problems because they’re afraid of having a failure attached to their reputation.

Throwing unreviewed LLM slop around would be a reputation death sentence if your peers are good at what they do, because by now we all know that it’s easy to generate long reports with LLMs. The secret is out and anyone who follows technology knows it.

There are some companies where you can LLM report-slop your way to prestige. Those are not companies you want to stay at.

Re: The End of an Era

#274

Post by phinnaeus »

mike_hearn wrote: post #262

Offtopic for the actual post, but if you don't know the author and like sci-fi mysteries his Silo story is great. I haven't read the books because I'm enjoying theorizing but the Apple TV series is being broadcast now on a weekly basis. It's one of these very dense mysteries that asks you to figure out the clues. It's about a city of about 10k people living underground in a giant cylindrical self-sufficient "silo" be…

Nitpick, Silo is the name of the adaptation, the books are WOOL, SHIFT, and DUST

Re: The End of an Era

#275

Post by ReptileMan »

b112 wrote: post #247
ReptileMan wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Right. LLMs are text production machines. I use them as text consumption machines. They read and watch a lot of the books and movies i have no time to. And from the TLDR I decide whether the full thing is worth watching.

That is what humans are for!! Ask people! There is no way a summary of these things fron an LLM has the correct context. (not really frustrated at you, as much as where society is going)

That is not how it works because of how bloated everything is. There is rarely a movie, book or series lately that are not 2 times longer than needed. So you are forced to go for aggressive recaps.

Most of the non pulp books published - contain at least two times as many pages as needed for the story or narrative.

The information density in the modern world is absurdly low.

Re: The End of an Era

#276

Post by dgfl »

projektfu wrote: post #217
tempest_ wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very weird. 6 months ago I generated some documentation for a service that was largely undocumented. When it was done my only thought was "who is this for?" Is any one going to actually read this or are they just going to ask the LLM? If someone didnt write it, why would I read it? It just becomes something to pipe into the context for the next person. It seems though a lot of people don't have this experience,…

For my medical notes assistant I had to set a global "write in a telegraphic, minimal style" because it was fluffing up every aspect of the notes. Nobody wants to read that BS and it's impossible to find information in a series of walls of text.

It can also go the other way. It outputs a paragraph so full of telegraphic technobabble that it’s just unreadable, inventing new jargon every other sentence, using terminology invented in its thinking stream and never explained. And when it combines the two issues and it outputs 4 pages of technobabble, it gets just exhausting to read. Paradoxically, given that 2 years ago everyone was using LLMs to summarize web pages, their ability to condense text (including their own thought stream) is still lackluster. I dream of some post-processing diffusion optimizer just condensing all of their slop away. Until then, I just tell it to _avoid_ telegraphic and newspaper-title speech and to output one or two paragraphs of prose only.

Re: The End of an Era

#277

Post by un-diletante »

cyanregiment wrote: post #264
un-diletante wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conveyance requires a source and a destination. To have an experience conveyed to you means to gain a degree of understanding of another's experience which you yourself did not have. Yet you yourself have not actually experienced it, you have merely gained knowledge into some aspects of it's nature by comparing it to your own experiences. If a reader perceives that they have been conveyed an experience that nobody ha…

Even within your own brain, conveyance != experience. When you report on your own experiences - like the warmth of the sun - that report is not itself the experience. The scary part about an LLM (p-zombie) is that it can report on an experience exactly the same as if it had one, and for all intents and purposes it'd be sufficient for the task at hand. After all, I don't need to have your experiences to know what you…

I agree with conveyance != experience, and looking at it again I agree with your original statement with regards to the "!=". But I do believe that conveying experience requires having it.

By conveying, I don't mean conveying the idea of a possible experience, but conveying knowledge about a real experience that a real experiencer had. What is conveyed is not the entire experience which is impossible, what is conveyed is knowledge that is sensible to someone who has similar experiences they can associate it to.

If the report does not correspond to an underlying experience, then it's just a lie. Like if I say to someone "Thank you" after they do me a favor, they perceive that I am having the experience of gratitude. But if I am not really grateful, then my words haven't conveyed information about an actual experience, about an actual instance of an experience.

So I'd say the report + the report's correspondence to reality + the receiver's ability to understand the report based on their own experiences = conveyance.

I do not consider a false report that leads the receiver to imagine the existence of a non-existent experience to be "conveyance of an experience".

Re: The End of an Era

#279

Post by shmeeed »

ghaff wrote: post #33
boriskourt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But then I have to remind myself that I don’t sound like AI, it sounds like me. I’ve been em-dashing and comma-splicing up a motherfucking storm these past two decades. It was fun then, and it’s fun now." From the source.

The em-dash thing really annoys me. Using them has been house style the last couple of places I worked and I'm not just going to stop using them because some idiot might think they were generated by AI.

I try to do the same, but I'm afraid the chilling effect is already slowly taking hold at the back of my mind.

Re: The End of an Era

#280

Post by suddenlybananas »

rsstack wrote: post #244
kriro wrote: post #211

""" Another prediction is that MOST readers will care about machine-vs-meat as much as they currently care about publishing imprints, which is to say almost none. """ This does not align with what I see in the fiction book space at all. At least in the communities that I frequent (fantasy, sci-fi, horror) there is no AI publication that I am aware of that is good. And readers react allergically to any notion of AI in…

You're definitely in a certain environment of readers. There are populations living on this Earth reading AI-generated books that are available on Amazon, an AI-generated TV shows. I am not recommending you try to engage and consume that content, just saying that it exists and there are people that either don't notice or don't mind.

If those readers were always your target, you were always writing slop.
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