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Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

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Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#211

Post by arctic-true »

brabel wrote: post #185
arctic-true wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect some amount of long form writing will go the way of code - long form writing for the purpose of consumption by other AIs. Writing as a means of exchanging qualitative information, with no regard for how the reader will feel about it (beyond understanding what the words mean). Not everything can be distilled into data, but this doesn’t mean it is beyond the reach of LLMs. On the other hand, long form writing…

What makes you think it will take a long time? AI seems capable of imitating any writing style if prompted to do so already, and I think it will get better on this quickly since the AI writing style is a main focus of AI labs right now. I can see no reason at all to believe this is a matter of years still, more like a few months.

You can have a great “writing style” and still put together really crappy long-form work. The problem is that AI writing, particularly creative writing, is too repetitive, too predictable, too trope-laden.

All of the things you say are very true in the near term for short form writing - a page or two of Claudeslop will probably be much easier to swallow in a year or two than it is now. But I don’t see a path to fully AI-generated novels or long-form investigative journalism becoming mainstream in the next couple of years.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#212

Post by antonvs »

anon84873628 wrote: post #103
CrimsonRain wrote: post #68

LLMs write better than most journalists. It also writes better than majority people in the world when it comes to English as majority are really bad in writing. And of course, LLMs write as you prompt. Personally, I'm happy to read broken English from non English people or good English from English people. But I'd rather read LLM writing than read typical long form perfect English journalist crap.

I would almost never transmit LLM output without a decent amount of editing. But I also don't understand people who paint it as this horrible offensive unreadable slop. Calling it better than most journalists is extreme (and probably the reason for down votes), but it must certainly be better than the average person. We're hearing this criticism from the highly educated professional class people who bother to have th…

> But I also don't understand people who paint it as this horrible offensive unreadable slop.

When a piece of writing is full of LLM tells, I find it as offensive as any formulaic writing, except that the LLM style has quickly become pervasive, much more so than any other type of formulaic writing.

I’m not reacting out of some general dislike of LLMs - I use them daily. I’m reacting because I don’t like terrible writing.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#213

Post by zahlman »

bbor wrote: post #100
jeremyjh wrote: post #62

These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you: Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your tho…

They are powerful tools but they do not have any human understanding - that isn't their optimization target. Ofc the rest is all right on, but I'd quibble with this specific idea. LLMs are absolutely targeted at modeling human understanding, which is the same faculty that contains what we call perception (!= sensibility) and intuition (!= rationality). It would be nice to train them to be completely alien from the gr…

> absolutely targeted at modeling

Not everyone accepts a simulationist view in which modeling something accurately enough inherently results in creating the actual thing.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#214

Post by 27183 »

jeremyjh wrote: post #191
27183 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhh... what? You'll instantaneously feel very differently when the service you're responsible for is down at 3:15am and your logs are full of stack traces that end somewhere in that code that "doesn't need to be understood". At that point, you will need to understand it well enough to fix it stat.

Test code for a new bug is a good example. You can prove the test covers the bug without understanding the test code (you need to understand the bug, of course). There are some domains/tests where you can't do that - you need to be sure its failing for the right reason, but often you can do that without understanding every line of the test code. You can extend this to lots of related test infrastructure. If you can w…

> You can prove the test covers the bug without understanding the test code (you need to understand the bug, of course).

I'm not following.. When we write regression tests those tests encode invariants we expect to be maintained under source code transformations over time. If I don't understand the test code I've written, how can I know which invariants I've imposed? That's why, broadly speaking, we write test code to be as simple as possible above all else--it's absolutely imperative that these invariants are not only intentional and easy to reason about, but also that when an invariant is violated we can easily discover why. Often, on a team, the person encountering a test failure after making a code change is not the person who originally established the invariant, so it's very important they be able to easily understand it.

I see no possible world in which failing to understand the test code is... possible? Like, if you have indecipherable test code things are really bad in your codebase. Fixing that is P0, because it'll compound rapidly.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#215

Post by lelanthran »

altmanaltman wrote: post #121
Dumblydorr wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All writing is thinking when done by a human, you’re literally distilling your thoughts into words. You can’t write without thought. And not all thinking is writing is a clear truism, there’s no point to even stating that. Writing helps us think about the world, it’s a pivotal intellectual technology.

I have been thinking over this comment for a while now. I think yes, you are correct that thought is involved in writing but I don't think it is possible to claim "all writing is thinking when done by a human". Like what type of thinking are you claiming here? Because one can copy a text and write it down and that involves thinking in the sense that anything we do involves thinking fundamentally. But that thinking is…

> Why does me writing "apt apt apt apt apt apt apt" help me think about the world?

Poor example. You wrote it to make a point, after all.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#216

Post by zahlman »

dynm wrote: post #14

I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing." My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus,…

> If LLMs get better at writing

They definitionally cannot, for the definitions implied in the argument. The point is that good writing is a thing humans are capable of doing because they are human.

> It's a sort of a claim that certain thoughts can be attributed to a human being when in fact they can't.

Yes. And this is a requirement of "good writing" as understood here.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#217

Post by simonra »

jeremyjh wrote: post #62

These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you: Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your tho…

I always found writing to be an unnecessarily arduous tool for communication, so I never do it until I've overthought what I want to express and approximately how. At that point I flesh out the skeleton of the message, and pile on words and structure and references and other rhetorical tricks until the packaging feels sufficient. Rarely, if ever, have I experienced writing things down altering my perception of the strength or weaknesses of the chosen arguments, or revealing new ones. That is to say, I really don't vibe with the concept of writing being thinking, rather it's a waste of humanity's resources to push it as The Tool.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#218

Post by eikenberry »

zero_shift wrote: post #133
jeremyjh wrote: post #62

These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you: Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your tho…

I have found this extremely relevant as a (primarily) non-verbal thinker. I don't, generally, think in words, more in - I guess I would call it something like meta-shapes? A sense of a shape but not things I can exactly visualise. (You might be surprised to read this and then hear I have an English degree. Surely I thought about Shakespeare in words?! Nope. Shapes, movement, structures) For me, having to write is cri…

+1... this is me as well. Using LLMs in a conversational mode does not fit my thinking. I use AI help in my editor through targeted code generation, explanations, etc. and I'm writing my own harness to hopefully get a better feel for the shape of LLMs that way. How are you adapting?

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#219

Post by zahlman »

stronglikedan wrote: post #97
dynm wrote: post #14

I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing." My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus,…

I don't think anyone needs to disclose the tools they used to write something. Nobody ever disclosed Word's grammar suggestions or spelling corrections, or the fact that they used some autocomplete tool to produce code, so we should they now need to start disclosing this tool. Besides, in it's current state, it discloses itself to anyone paying attention. I do think people own the output they produce regardless of th…

> Nobody ever disclosed Word's grammar suggestions or spelling corrections

And plenty of people have made mistakes that clearly indicate mindlessly accepting such a "correction" when it was wrong (as opposed to just making a typo, or genuinely lacking skill in English, which both generally look different); and it's historically been common to poke fun at that.

> or the fact that they used some autocomplete tool to produce code

Right, because there are really only two options: either it's effectively guaranteed to be what the user would have written by hand anyway, or it's unambiguously wrong and does the wrong thing.

Not at all comparable to LLM prose.

> and if they want to put crappy writing out there with their name on it, that's on them.

The problem is that people who don't care (and quite possibly have no real sense for crappy writing) are vastly more enabled by the technology than people who do.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#220

Post by pixelmonkey »

jeremyjh wrote: post #62

These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you: Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your tho…

Related, one of my favorite quotes by the computer scientist Leslie Lamport is this one:

"If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking."

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