I avoid using LLMs as a publisher and writer

What you're missing in the discussion is that you've got an unexamined assumption that other folks -haven't- used these tools based on your conclusion that they are simply useful; you have assumed that if folks haven't found them useful then folks haven't "really" used them.

But that's simply not true.

Not only have I used these tools and found them to be unhelpful to me, I have good reasons why I don't think they are helpful. I can even give two modalities in which I find them actively unhelpful:

- for creative work, they don't allow me to chew over the details which I find important to struggle with as I express my thoughts and how to communicate them

- for rote lookup or facts, I either understand the underlying material such that my code completion or templating tools are faster and clearer for me or I probably need to struggle with the underlying complexities until I can generalize the problem myself.

You simply assume that I'm not, like, a 47 year old with an annoying theory of mind and learning and who has conceptual models for how I learn things based on almost 3 decades of teaching hundreds of students, coaching dozens of my cohort, and learning many skills across several domains.

Which is fine. I am old enough that "you're holding it wrong" is something I've seen several times in my life.

But at the end of the day, all you have is the usual "you're holding it wrong" objection that most folks have to technology that doesn't actually fit well.

I will give you some free advice, totally worth what you're paying for it.

It is indeed entirely possible that humans are quite often "deluded about positives [sic] usefulness" of different tools. That delusion can often be a difficult or painful lesson. I've got a lot of tendon issues from rock climbing and bad scalar patterns in my clarinet playing to prove that well enough for myself.

I suggest that if you really believe that anything which helps you in some short term kind of way won't hamper you in your future endeavors, you might want to question that belief.

If you can't think of any examples (cocaine being one easy example) then I suggest that you don't know enough about the world to be conjecturing about it as you have been doing here.

In any case, good luck. Clearly all the people disagreeing with you here are wrong.

>In any case, good luck. Clearly all the people disagreeing with you here are wrong.

Doesn't prove your case. Plenty of instances where everyone is wrong and one person is right. Lead for example was once thought by everyone to be healthy. Very few people considered it toxic.

>I will give you some free advice, totally worth what you're paying for it.

Could be completely useless advice and totally worthless. You declaring it worth it does not suddenly make the advice valuable. In fact I'm anticipating negative value.

>It is indeed entirely possible that humans are quite often "deluded about positives [sic] usefulness" of different tools. That delusion can often be a difficult or painful lesson. I've got a lot of tendon issues from rock climbing and bad scalar patterns in my clarinet playing to prove that well enough for myself.

Of course it's possible. It's just more rare. I put values into a calculator. The calculator does a calculation faster than me. Was that delusion? There clear example. Can you give me a clear example of the alternative? Where you use a tool it only feels useful but isn't. Your rock climbing examples feel like a bit of a stretch. In fact they feel like counter examples, you eventually noted that they aren't useful.

>If you can't think of any examples (cocaine being one easy example) then I suggest that you don't know enough about the world to be conjecturing about it as you have been doing here.

I suggest that you actually don't know enough about the world compared to me given my 60+ years being alive. Your attitude is rude and condescending. But you know I often wonder what would trigger someone to be like this? Like why can't you be impartial and just give counter evidence? Why did you have to approach this whole thing with this attitude of "Let me give you a fucking tip".. Is it because I hit a nerve? Because one aspect of what I'm talking about is right and it's hard to face the truth? I don't know. I can only speculate.

Cocaine was at one point in time not known to be addictive. You could be right here with that analogy. But we can't fully prove it can we? The answers given by an LLM are too varied to form a definitive answer. Cocaine EVENTUALLY outputs a definitive symptom of addiction and other bad outcomes that are statistically significant. So even though at one point in time we didn't know... over time cocaine yielded definitive answers. but LLMs used for programming? What are we even measuring? We don't even know. So it's hard to see some definitive answer revealing itself over time. All I see are endless debates where I'm right, and I can't convince a kid like you that you're wrong.

You attacked.

> You just made that up... I mean as much as we complain about LLMs hallucinating, here's an example of a human making shit up out of thin air

You called me a liar, delusional, and accused me of making up shit.

As you appear to ignore all things contrary to your current opinion - as the article you linked points out it effects everyone; and have acted like a dick, this conversation is now over.

I am. People say I look like I'm in my mid forties so that may be a factor.

Good point! Thanks.

I like the perspective of "choices" during creation. It is an essential principle of the real art that it is a result of thousands/millions of deliberate choices. This is what we admire on the art. If you use mostly machine (or other kind of ways that decide instead and for you) for creation, you as an creator simply do less choices.

In this case, you delegate many of your experienced/crazy/hard decisions to the model (which is based on such decision made already by other artists but combines them in a random way). It is like decompressing JPG – some things are just hallucinated by machine.

From the perspective of pure human creativity, the result is thin, diluted. Even it seems like deliberate. In my opinion art lovers will seek for the dense art made by human, maybe asking even more for some kind of "proof" of the human-based process. What do you think?