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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)

#331

Post by asdff »

wj wrote: post #293

I don’t want to read content written by AI. A feature I would like on LinkedIn would be a 100% verified human content flag for users. LinkedIn can then do the scans and flip that to false for any users it catches posting AI assisted content. Let me filter that out of the feed. If we don’t do something to maintain some standard of discourse, we lose intellectually and as a piece of our humanity. LinkedIn is the only s…

They don't want you to do that because you will realize how quiet and dead these spaces are becoming.

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

#332

Post by asdff »

siskiyou wrote: post #27

I worked at LinkedIn (briefly, before retirement) and the product had been useful to me for years before that, so I used it a fair bit but not much anymore since it doesn't serve any of my current needs. There were always awful million-view posts written by humans, useless influencers promoted by the algorithm. That was always garbage, but to an LLM those posts look like success, because engagement, so the LLM tries…

Part of it also with seeing the feed is that it is basically useless for me. The only interesting thing is when it automatically tells me someone I know got a new job someplace. All the rest is pure and I mean pure slop. No one I actually know ever posts anything to linked in. It would be like making a facebook status update these days. Like who does that, other than the influencer types of course?

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

#333

Post by asdff »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #16
dominotw wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

majority of population dont read anything at all. Most they a read is perhaps labels and signs at a supermarket.

I think there's probably a large chunk who "read" Facebook and skim the linked articles poorly.

People are still on facebook?

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

#334

Post by strix_varius »

IanCal wrote: post #321
lelanthran wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> What use is that? I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know. People are terrible at writing. Near universally bad. Even good writers have drafts and editors. There is a constant refrain here that somehow short messages are more valuable than longer ones. But that assumes it's understandable. Lots of short content is, frankly, awful because the writer cannot put themselves in the position of the reader…

To turn bad short writing into good long writing you must necessarily change the content of the writing, not just the shape.

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

#335

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

gopher_space wrote: post #304
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I manually test the output of the LLM. Manual testing is actually the main role for humans doing software engineering these days. I wouldn't use it for flight control software yet, at least not without careful review, but most software isn't exactly critical. At the same time, I wouldn't trust flight control software that was only reviewed by humans, since AI is so much better at debugging. We'll probably need…

Can’t imagine a client allowing me to pass the buck like this.

How so? As long as it works to spec, I haven't had anyone care. They literally hire people so they don't need to care about the details. Put money in, get working software out.

And, AI is rapidly getting better than people at both code review and authorship, so a human deeply involved is turning into nothing but a slowdown. The main purpose people have is testing that the specs were, in fact, implemented properly.

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

#336

Post by fc417fc802 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #313
fc417fc802 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amusingly I absolutely abhor translations done by people who think the way you do. I want a translation that's as literal as possible and which provides the necessary commentary for me to understand any alien concepts, idioms, customs, etc. I absolutely never want "translated" cultural references. At that point the "translator" is nothing more than a shitty fan fiction author as far as I'm concerned. Of course the ab…

But you aren't disagreeing with your parent comment. You seem to have a strong opinion that you are; that opinion is incorrect. Words refer to a broad semantic region, a phenomenon technically known as "polysemy". The range of a word in one language is always different from the range of analogous words in another language. This is a classification problem. And a translator must think about how to solve it. Imagine a…

Of course nothing involving natural language and human culture is exact. A "literal" translation is obviously a slightly fuzzy concept that speaks to intent. However I think I provided enough context that this should be clear. I gave the example that I don't want "translated" cultural references or idioms but rather the (approximately) literal wording and some commentary from the translator providing the necessary context.

Obviously there are degrees to this and obviously preferences will vary. I acknowledged that.

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

#337

Post by matheusmoreira »

qlte wrote: post #275
CuriouslyC wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself. You have no way of knowing what the input to the writing was. You're making the erroneous assumption that the person posting the article was a mouthbreathing spammer who used the prompt "write me an article on subject XYZ, make no mistakes!" and you could have supplied the same prompt.

> You're making the erroneous assumption that the person posting the article was a mouthbreathing spammer Yes, that's the risk of using an LLM to "clean up" your writing. It's human nature to think you're unique and everyone else should somehow instinctively realize your output is unlike all the LLM spam garbage and worth their time but that doesn't work in practice. It's unreasonable to expect other people to suppre…

Your rhetoric can and has been used to justify all kinds of prejudice, including racism.

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

#338

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

cozzyd wrote: post #295
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do that with LLMs for the parts you really care about too. The LLMs aren't regenerating the codebase from scratch every time, so the results stick around.

Only if it's not too byzantize to understand what part you should look at

The AI can tell you where to look. It's really good at this. It's actually a lot better at analyzing code than it is at writing it.

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

#339

Post by matheusmoreira »

perarneng wrote: post #288

The people who are going to be successful in the coming economy is the ones who can channel all the knowledge and experience of an llm without shame. If you are smart: "... in the style of a my writing"

I've been doing that. It helps that I have a substantial human writing corpus to draw from. Results are still mixed. Models simply can't resist adding some LLMisms. Pangram still detects some of it but not others, and also misdetects some of my actual writing as AI generated.

Honestly, I'd rather the shame and hate just went away instead. It's seriously exhausting and I'm starting to feel tempted to just give up and either start using AI more heavily or stop writing altogether.

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

#340

Post by matheusmoreira »

softwaredoug wrote: post #152

It’s never been easier to differentiate yourself as a writer. You just write with some personality. People don’t want writing that doesn’t look average, but looks novel. I despair much less for human writers than a did maybe a year ago.

> You just write with some personality.

I used to do that, then someone on HN basically said I had mental problems because of the way I wrote the article. Best part is Claude told me to tone it down a bit, and I completely ignored its advice. Wouldn't have happened if I had listened to the AI.

I've also been called a schizophrenic on a GNU mailing list because of my idea and the working code I submitted. Caused me to literally quit the list on the spot. Best part is the maintainer eventually implemented his own version of it.

Since then, others have encouraged me to keep it up, but I just don't feel comfortable anymore with this "just be yourself" nonsense.

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