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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)

#431

Post by lelanthran »

altmanaltman wrote: post #428
lelanthran wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, but not to understand or think about the world. In this case, writing was to express something, not to understand something. The overall point is that claiming that "human writing = human thinking" is too broad a general statement to make seriously.

> The overall point is that claiming that "human writing = human thinking" is too broad a general statement to make seriously.

Do you have any non-contrived example of writing that was done with zero thought?

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

#432

Post by OroPla »

habinero wrote: post #292
OroPla wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of the following: (1) Translation from one language into another (2) Transcription from one medium (audio) into another (text) (3) Deception to obfuscate your thoughts (4) Posting things like "First!", "This.", "Just google it.", etc. (5) Textbook answers with no original thought.

> Translation from one language into another Bad example, because translation is deeply creative. You can't blindly mill one language into another, because words and phrases and concepts and cultural references in one language frequently don't map 1:1. You have to find a way to convey meaning as closely as you can and not necessarily the words.

That's called localizing and I can't stand it.

I prefer when things are kept 1:1 as is and maybe there's an explanation for things that don't quite make sense as a footnote.

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

#434

Post by sensanaty »

bcherny wrote: post #166
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 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…

> It reminds me of the transition over the last year from AI-assisted coding to AI doing all the coding.

Really huffing your own farts there, huh?

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

#436

Post by Mr_Minderbinder »

riskable wrote: post #137
Sharlin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why people think posting undisclosed LLM writing is any better than posting some other person’s writing uncited. Even if the original author is okay with it, it’s still misleading and dishonest. Or maybe all these people would be fine having someone else write their content for them if it were free and easy? A social media is a reputation economy, but reputation doesn’t work if gaining karma requires no effo…

It's because they view the LLM's output as "their thoughts." They told the LLM (via the prompt) what to do—often with loads of run-on sentences and long trains-of-thought. From their perspective, the LLM is just acting as a translation tool, saving them the trouble of having to think (about grammar, ideal wording, or even the order in which their thoughts should be presented). They treat it as "just another tool" to…

> We need better terms for these things so we can differentiate use cases.

Machine assisted versus machine delegated authorship?

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

#437

Post by SecretDreams »

snk wrote: post #382
SecretDreams wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've engaged with people at work where they led with an LLM via slack before I connected with them on a call. It's quite jarring and disappointing to see the gap in cohesion and knowledge going from one form of communication to the other. If you're using an LLM to tidy something up, that's one thing. If the LLM is your voice and is supplanting your knowledge, I might as well cut you out and talk to the LLM directly.…

So connecting with them on a call and cutting out the LLM was an error?

> So connecting with them on a call and cutting out the LLM was an error?

More like:

"So connecting with them was an error"

Which I think you understand, but are choosing to be facetious.

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

#438

Post by whstl »

selcuka wrote: post #350
whstl wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A lot of corporate documentation exists solely to measure if people are working or not. That's already available today. We don't have to perfect LLM writing.

True, but you underestimate the laziness of a lot of people! Those are the ones benefiting (and depending) the most from LLM advancements.

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

#439

Post by 27183 »

MichaelNolan wrote: post #363
CamperBob2 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm game. Say $1000, donated to a charity of the winner's choice? How do you want to set the bet up, and how do you think it should be decided? To be precise: I will bet that high-level programming languages won't be any less popular as a whole, but the vast majority of code will be written by AI rather than humans, working from specs written in natural language or something very close to it. What we call "source cod…

Seems like a case for https://longbets.org/ You and the other poster just need to find some agreeable benchmark so you can decide who won.

> You and the other poster just need to find some agreeable benchmark so you can decide who won.

That is the hard part. I'm not sure the usage numbers we'd need to decide the outcome are public now, and I can't predict ~4yr out whether any currently available metric will continue to be available. Stack Overflow's popular language thing has been going for a while, that will probably still exist (if SO does) but do we have any reliable metrics to tell us what fraction of code is AI generated?

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

#440

Post by 27183 »

WD-42 wrote: post #400
CamperBob2 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm game. Say $1000, donated to a charity of the winner's choice? How do you want to set the bet up, and how do you think it should be decided? To be precise: I will bet that high-level programming languages won't be any less popular as a whole, but the vast majority of code will be written by AI rather than humans, working from specs written in natural language or something very close to it. What we call "source cod…

These arguments are so silly. Other person probably doesn’t like the idea that LLMs will replace hard earned skills. On the flip side, I bet you’ve seen your skills atrophy at an alarming rate and are trying to justify it. Both sides come from fear. Just relax and take things as they come. Whatever happens happens.

> Both sides come from fear.

Maybe. I'll have to think about that one. It doesn't feel like fear to me, but that could be some kind of coping mechanism. From where I sit, I don't believe I fear this AI stuff because I don't really see what all the fuss is about. I don't think I'll be replaced by Claude anytime soon, because fundamentally language models cannot do the things necessary to compete with me. They can generate large amounts of relatively mediocre code quickly, but that's not really what anyone expects of me in the workplace.

Instead, what I do is I think deeply and understand things. And I refine my understanding of those things. And eventually, I have some insight that proves extremely valuable to my employer. Or sometimes not! But on balance it tends to work out swimmingly in their favor. This may sometimes involve writing lots of code, sometimes it involves writing very tiny amounts of code. Sometimes it involves simply deleting code. But the code part of that job is really minimal. It's all the other things--developing understanding, having insights, thinking really hard, making connections, communicating--that are valuable. Banging out code was never a big deal. I'm good at writing clear, correct code and I believe I can do it better than an LLM, if not faster. But that never mattered very much, what actually matters is learning and adapting. I'll be scared when someone makes an "AI" that can do that competitively, but I'm not worried this will happen anytime soon.

So the premises of this "LLM crisis" seem deluded to me. The people saying "everyone will be using an LLM all day every day for their job" seem to have no idea what jobs are like or what LLMs are (in)capable of. The people talking about AI paperclip apocalypses seem like they're having a really bad drug trip. The stock market bros and VCs throwing money as hard as they can after whimsical sci-fi fantasies seem like they've gone completely batshit insane. Meanwhile managers are forcing workers to use LLMs for everything, for no clear reason, and push them into products where it does nothing good. So therefore every little spineless corporate toady is clambering on top of the other little spineless corporate toadies to show big mr manager what a good AI boy they are. It seems like y'all have lost your entire minds because the computer does words now.

It's not fear. It's disgust. I'm disgusted by all of this.

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