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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)

#221

Post by whstl »

lelanthran wrote: post #207
bcherny wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work at Anthropic) I agree. I use an LLM to write my code, but I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think. It reminds me of the transition over the last year from AI-assisted coding to AI doing all the coding. At first the code output wasn't good enough, and humans read and iterated on the code all day, so the details of the source code mattered. Now, the code is largely high quality and it meets a la…

> wonder if long form writing will go the way of code. You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document. What use is that? I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know. Who or what is the audience for that sort of long form writing? If it's a human, why would they read it? They'd just give it to an LLM and get the salient points back. If the aud…

A lot of corporate documentation exists solely to measure if people are working or not.

That's why there's so many meetings in white collar companies. Because people can't understand what is going on at those documents so they just need to "align".

LLMs are amazing at generating this useless documentation that goes absolutely nowhere.

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

#222

Post by zahlman »

masswerk wrote: post #34
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 think, there's a systematic flaw in RLHF: constructs reinforced as effective or sophisticated style will always suffer overuse and significant overexposure. Which will be also very obvious when used out of the intended context, it's copied from. There will be always a "smell", something that causes us to turn our backs to these texts, and possible the supposed authors, as well. There's also the problem that certain…

> There is no way this passes the Turing test of a competent reader.

Every day I get more depressed thinking of what's happened to the supply of competent readers.

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

#224

Post by zahlman »

manlymuppet wrote: post #65
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 agree. LLM writing is atrocious, but people also want LLM writing to be atrocious in many cases, because they don’t like LLMs. The worst of this is with image/video AI models, where the results today, although still very imperfect, some people will still pretend like it’s awful and the worst thing they’ve ever seen. They refuse to admit the technology is at all impressive or making progress because they don’t like…

I mean, these things can be tested. Maybe some people really are gifted at discerning AI work, and of course there's no accounting for taste. But the former is subject to objective evaluation, and the latter should at least be somewhat expressible.

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

#225

Post by agumonkey »

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…

That's an important point. It's the core of your life, thinking, balancing, exploring, improving. I don't believe adjusting something large you didn't do will ever benefit people.

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

#226

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

electric_toucan wrote: post #209
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but how about you and the team who will eventually read and do code review. Why are you reviewing AI code in detail? Do you also review the assembly output of GCC line by line?

Compilers like GCC are deterministic and the source code already fully defines the behavior. LLMs are non-deterministic and will accept ambiguity, filling in details where you haven’t. These sorts of comparisons aren’t really fair. In the case of writing, it’s like hiring someone to write a book for you vs. hiring someone to translate a book you wrote into another language. In the first case, you didn’t really define…

Sure, but I don't know what GCC's behavior is, and I don't vet behavior differences between compiler upgrades. As long as the output works, why does it matter that the black box is deterministic?

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

#227

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

jeremyjh wrote: post #200
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, of course. At some point the LLMs will also run the organization.

In the meantime, they aren't capable of doing it, and neither are humans who never understand the code.

So, you believe that Sam Altman understands the code?

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

#228

Post by zahlman »

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.

> But I'd rather read LLM writing than read typical long form perfect English journalist crap.

The problem is precisely that LLM writing is that exact thing (at least by default), but even more so. Longer-form, more "perfect" in some technical sense, and yet crappier.

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

#229

Post by mtabini »

hi_im_greg_h wrote: post #113
jgrahamc wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My worry is that if people can't express clearly, in writing, what it is they want to say then an LLM won't help them much. I've seen LLMs get the wrong end of the stick over and over and produce a huge chunk of text that's certainly readable and says something. It's just not clear that the something is the thing the person originally really wanted to say. If you can write clearly enough to express your idea to an LL…

This. If you cant communicate your ideas properly to a human who has infinitely more awareness of the scenario/business/world/etc. How are you going to prompt effectively and not allow the LLM to infer a bunch of nonsense?

You are not. I am in agreement with you :-)

My thought is that perhaps there is some utility to using AI to help in routine scenarios, such as for example when a language barrier prevents someone from explaining themselves well, or when they are struggling to find the right words to express themselves.

Primarily, I was trying to stay away from an absolutist view of the problem to see if there are circumstances in which AI can be useful even considering all its shortcomings. There seems to be a lot of “all or nothing” perspective on its use right now, and I was simply wondering whether it might be a better idea to take a more pragmatic approach.

We do this with a lot of tech in real life: You don't need to be an MD to decide to take an aspirin, or an F1 driver to take the car to the grocery store (well, maybe in some cities, but that's beside the point). The problem is not with using technology, but with abandoning your judgment to it.

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

#230

Post by zahlman »

riskable wrote: post #130
jampekka wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs write better than most journalists. I used to think this, but now that I've been trying to use them to help with writing, it turns out they are not necessarily that great on the deeper level. The grammar and the surface style are impeccable, but they often struggle with continuity and carrying on a point or an argument.

I've come to trust their grammar corrections implicitly. So much that I've setup a "Fix Grammar" command with Obsidian Copilot that I'll just let it run on a whole chapter (YOLO mode): Proofread the following text for grammar, punctuation, and typos while strictly preserving the author's voice, pacing, and intentional stylistic choices (such as sentence fragments or character dialogue quirks). Rules: - Correct object…

> About a year ago, all three big AI vendors could end up with strange "corrections" that would throw you off, but not anymore.

Without a history of diffs created by this method, I don't believe you.

> I am decent with English grammar so most of what needs fixing is typos I didn't spot or misplaced commas and periods inside/outside of quotes (I always screw that up without thinking—even though I know the rules! LOL).

The rules there vary by style guide and are not objective.

LLMs seem like massive overkill for something the red and green squiggles can already accomplish.

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