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

That's what I am saying, zero thoughts is not possible unless you define what thoughts/thinking are you referring too.

Of course you cannot do anything without like basic thought otherwise you will not be able to do anything.

So I am not sure what you mean by non-contrived? It has to be contrived because we are talking specifics like I said.

If thinking = consiousness then yes you cannot write without being consious. But if thinking = having complex logical thoughts and writing about them then I would say yes it is possible to write without that.

My only claim is that just because you are writing something doesn't automatically mean you are having complex thoughts about what you are writing. So writing = thinking doesn't sit right. I can tell you i often just mindlessly write words on my journal sometimes but that is also a contrived example. Yet the existence of the example is the point. You cannot categorically claim something if exceptions (no matter how contrived) can be raised.

I'm having a little trouble understanding what you mean.

    > I agree that there can be a tendency to conflate the two things: how advanced the technology is, and how aesthetically pleasing what it produces is. It's also important to remember that we're not obligated to like something just because it's "pretty" or has high aesthetic value in some abstract sense.

You're right that my problem is people conflating two things, but I have no issue with how people interpret the "aesthetic outputs" as you put it. The part I'm having trouble with is the obligation you imply, that we have to "like something just because it's 'pretty' or has high aesthetic value in some abstract sense."

I for one, think that LLM art looks terrible--the output is something I often dislike aesthetically. This is a matter of taste, and similar to the question of "do I like it and want to engage with it", you're free to make your own judgements here. There is no "right" or "wrong" answer with aesthetics.

However, with the questions of "do I like the technology" and "has the technology advanced", whereas one is similarly a matter of taste, the question of "has the technology advanced" is one that can be answered objectively. Of course it matters what your trying to measure, but take realism for example--something that AI image labs often try to perfect. The fact that the AI labs have gotten drastically better at generating realistic content is undeniable. While it's up to you if this matters, whether realism has advanced can objectively answered yes or no, without bringing taste into things.

I am making no claims here concerning the "high aesthetic value in some abstract sense". I don't think such an objective value of aesthetics exists. Does this clear things up?

> That was always garbage, but to an LLM those posts look like success

Well, no; they looked like success to the people doing the RLHF.

I did a double take when I saw the account name :)

I think the outcome will be very obvious when the the time comes to settle the bet, but I agree that it's not easy to write those terms today.

But speaking of Stack Overflow, that's a good point to examine more closely. Simply looking at Stack Overflow's usage trend [1] should have been a strong clue that a seismic shift was under way. A couple of things could be responsible for it, though:

1) Stack Overflow's movers and shakers have finally assholed themselves into irrelevance. That's possible, and it could potentially explain the secular decline that began around 2015. But it doesn't explain the rate of descent since 2023, given that the core rules haven't changed for years. It also doesn't explain the meteoric rise between 2008-2014. What they were doing clearly worked, right up until it didn't.

2) AI is now answering questions that would previously have been posted to SO. That's the conventional argument. Hard to dispute it. And it leads to...

3) Stack Overflow has not failed its mission, but fulfilled it: most of the code that will ever need to be written already has been. That's an argument I've never seen anyone else propose, likely because it's a really stupid argument that's been made many times before. I think it's true this time, though, at least until genuinely-new hardware paradigms come along. I think it's a big reason why AI will be doing our jobs for us going forward. Programming is a robot's job now.

3a) As a corollary not related to the SO question, I think the math community is starting to wake up to a similar realization: we have all the math we need. Or, rather, we have all the math we can comprehend. The low-hanging fruit is all gone. Mochizuki's work, which requires a large part of multiple peoples' careers to prove or refute, is an example of that phenomenon. Leading mathematicians are coming to recognize that their best shot at contributing to progress in math is to work on AI.

The groundwork has been laid, and now we need to find better ways to reuse and recycle what we have. That's how AI will help us reach the next level. It's just crazy to think that our industry will be recognizable in 3-5 more years.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1viz...