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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)

#171

Post by AnimalMuppet »

bbor wrote: post #100
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…

They are powerful tools but they do not have any human understanding - that isn't their optimization target. Ofc the rest is all right on, but I'd quibble with this specific idea. LLMs are absolutely targeted at modeling human understanding, which is the same faculty that contains what we call perception (!= sensibility) and intuition (!= rationality). It would be nice to train them to be completely alien from the gr…

LLMs model the part of human understanding that is captured by the relationship between words in the training corpus. Anyone who thinks non-verbally, the shared understanding of "apple" that comes from having eaten them, understanding what someone is thinking or feeling by their body language - there's a lot of aspects of human understanding that LLMs don't model.

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

#172

Post by swatcoder »

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's just Claude working on the code, so the details matter less

If you're not billed for usage, anyway.

Otherwise, for the other 99% of folks, that attitude is of course a pit trap that captures code bases and makes them maintainable only through the providers -- presumably one or few -- with a rich enough model to keep up with the growing mess. Preserving a code base that's legible, organized, and fundamentally maintainable by both humans and trailing commodity models is of imminent concern for anybody who doesn't want their margin strangled by your employer once it's too late to have other options.

As frontier capabilities advance, the details don't matter less; they matter more.

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

#173

Post by user43928 »

swatcoder wrote: post #172
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…

> it's just Claude working on the code, so the details matter less If you're not billed for usage, anyway. Otherwise, for the other 99% of folks, that attitude is of course a pit trap that captures code bases and makes them maintainable only through the providers -- presumably one or few -- with a rich enough model to keep up with the growing mess. Preserving a code base that's legible, organized, and fundamentally m…

It does not concern me.

Prices are very competitive and today's SOTA is next to free in half a year.

Whether code is maintainable without AI becomes less and less important.

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

#174

Post by fgdfsdfslkdsflk »

kisper wrote: post #105
SecretDreams wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. LLMs for writing is like intellectual catfishing. You are presenting yourself one way in written form.. but that's not who you will ever be once someone has to actually have a conversation with you. And that's wrong.

I agree with the gist of your sentiment, but I struggle with how to reconcile it with my use of these tools. My use LLMs is precisely because I can never hope to express myself clearly. I have many fuzzy, disparate thoughts and it was a struggle to express them at all before this time in which I can do a long rambling voice transcription (absent of social pressures) and continue doing the same throughout the explorat…

> I can never hope to express myself clearly.

Really? I seriously believe that people that think this way underestimate their self, especially if they're going to be sharing something valuable.

> How do we make room for their use as a cognitive-prosthesis (if you will allow such framing) without losing humane-ness?

As many others have expressed, we'd love to read the prompt (and the model's chain of thought if you have it). This scenario is like talking through a person translating things to each other, except from the recipient's perspective, the translator is absent from the conversation entirely.

Additionally, disclosing LLM usage is low hanging fruit to differentiate yourself from the 100x other people who "do not review and vouch for things written on their behalf by LLMs". If the LLM converted something unreadable (whether due to a language barrier or incoherence) to text relevant to people on the other end, and THEN they disregard it anyway, the fault is not on you for them dismissing the writing too early.

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

#175

Post by hallole »

stronglikedan wrote: post #97
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 don't think anyone needs to disclose the tools they used to write something. Nobody ever disclosed Word's grammar suggestions or spelling corrections, or the fact that they used some autocomplete tool to produce code, so we should they now need to start disclosing this tool. Besides, in it's current state, it discloses itself to anyone paying attention. I do think people own the output they produce regardless of th…

Oh please, come on now. Grammar correction (which gets applied to text that you wrote) isn't comparable to LLM text generation. A tool assists a user in a task. LLMs don't assist you in writing: they do it all on their own. There's obviously a continuum here (at what point does a tool become so helpful that it ceases being a tool?), but I think I echo the general consensus.

> in it's current state, it discloses itself to anyone paying attention.

Well, unfortunately, I've still sunk a good bit of time into reading texts that I only realize to be AI-authored part way through. Plus, it's constantly being made harder to discern human-authorship.

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

#176

Post by vehemenz »

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…

> Writing is thinking.

This way of phrasing it is needlessly confusing. Writing is a kind of thinking--one of many--but it's not equivalent to thinking.

Dialectical thinking, for example, produces similar results.

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

#177

Post by trhaynes »

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…

Do your coworkers send emails and create written work product using LLMs? I'm curious what the standards and culture are within an AI org.

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

#178

Post by trhaynes »

prisonguard wrote: post #170
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…

You and the AI agree, but how about you and the team who will eventually read and do code review. Cognitive burden increases marginally with AI assisted coding. This is why we haven't seen big projects(think browsers and browser engines) spawning in the past year.

Indeed. I'm curious what the security team has to say about that approach, for example.

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

#179

Post by arctic-true »

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…

I suspect some amount of long form writing will go the way of code - long form writing for the purpose of consumption by other AIs. Writing as a means of exchanging qualitative information, with no regard for how the reader will feel about it (beyond understanding what the words mean). Not everything can be distilled into data, but this doesn’t mean it is beyond the reach of LLMs.

On the other hand, long form writing for human consumption seems like it may evade LLMs for much, much longer.

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

#180

Post by bcrosby95 »

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…

You claim writing is thinking, but imply writing code isn't thinking.

My opinion of LLM design review isn't that high - it seems to miss design tweaks that could vastly simplify corner cases. But if your code isn't written for human consumption maybe it doesn't matter. I'm still directly responsible for what I commit, so I can't just offload it to Claude.

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