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We're losing our voice to LLMs

tonyalicea.dev

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Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#211

Post by bethekidyouwant »

mentalgear wrote: post #128
IMTDb wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> should be heavily regulated. By who, exactly? It’s easy to call for regulation when you assume the regulator will conveniently share your worldview. Try the opposite: imagine the person in charge is someone whose opinions make your skin crawl. If you still think regulation beats the status quo, then the call for regulation is warranted, but be ready to face the consequences. But if picturing that guy running the sh…

It's really not that complicated: - Ban algorithmic optimization that feeds on and proliferates polarisation. - To heal society: Implement discussion (commenting) features that allow (atomic) structured discussions to build bridges across cohorts and help find consensus (vs 1000s of comments screaming the same none-sense). - Force the SM Companies to make their analytics truly transparent and open to the public and r…

It’s always a question of who decides. Apparently, it’s this guy.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#212

Post by fortran77 »

Aurornis wrote: post #96
ricardo81 wrote: post #6

I deleted my Facebook account a couple of years ago and my Twitter one yesterday. It's not just LLMs, it's how the algorithms promote engagement. i.e. rage bait, videos with obvious inaccuracies etc. Who gets rewarded, the content creators and the platform. Engaging with it just seems to accentuate the problem. There needs to be algorithms that promote cohorts and individuals preferences. Just because I said to someo…

> Just because I said to someone 'Brexit was dumb', I don't expect to get fed 1000 accounts talking about it 24/7. It's tedious and unproductive. I’m not the biggest Twitter user but I didn’t find it that difficult to get what I wanted out of it. You already discovered the secret: You get more of what you engage with. If you don’t want to hear a lot of Brexit talk, don’t engage with Brexit content. Unfollow people wh…

I use X. I have an enormouse blocklist and I block keywords. I found that I can also block emoji. This keeps my feed focused on what I want to see (no politics. Just technology, classical and jazz music, etc.)

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#213

Post by BoredomIsFun »

The posts sounds beige and AI-generated ironically.

In any case, as someone who experimented with AI for creative writing, LLM _do not destroy_ your voice; it does flatten your voice, but with minimal effort you can make it sound the way you find reflects you thought best.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#214

Post by logsr »

In my view LLMs are simply a different method of communication. Instead of relying on "your voice" to engage the reader and persuade them of your point of view, writing with LLMs for analysis and exploration through LLMs, is about creating an idea space that a reader can interact with and explore from their own perspective, and develop their own understanding of, which is much more powerful.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#215

Post by hyghjiyhu »

chemotaxis wrote: post #62
CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #13

In a lot of ways, I'm thankful that LLMs are letting us hear the thoughts of people who usually wouldn't share them. There are skilled writers. Very skilled, unique writers. And I'm both exceedingly impressed by them as well as keenly aware that they are a rare breed. But there's so many people with interesting ideas locked in their heads that aren't skilled writers. I have a deep suspicion that many great ideas have…

> In a lot of ways, I'm thankful that LLMs are letting us hear the thoughts of people who usually wouldn't share them. I could agree with you in theory, but do you see the technology used that way? Because I definitely don't. The thought process behind the vast majority of LLM-generated content is "how do I get more clicks with less effort", not "here's a unique, personal perspective of mine, let's use a chatbot to e…

We might get twice as many original ideas but hundred times as much filler. Neither of those aspects erases the other. Both the absolute number of ideas and the ratio matter.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#216

Post by ryandrake »

actualwitch wrote: post #145
vanviegen wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On HN everybody sees the same ordering. Therefore you get to read opinions that are not specifically selected to make you feel just the perfect amount of outrage/self-righteousness. Some of that you may experience as 'dubious political stuff' and 'patently incorrect takes'. Edit, just to be clear: I'm not saying HN should be unmoderated.

Only when certain people don't decide to band together and hide posts from everyone's feed by abusing "flag" function. Coincidentally those posts often fit neatly in the categories you outlined.

Abuse of the flagging system is probably one of the worst problems currently facing HN. It looks like mods might be trying to do something about it, as I've occasionally seen improperly-flagged posts get resuscitated, but it appears to take manual action by moderators, and by the time they get to it, the damage is done: The article was censored off the front page.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#217

Post by mtlynch »

randycupertino wrote: post #207
mtlynch wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> her answer is VERBATIM reading off the ChatGPT language word for word How could it be verbatim the same response you got? Even if you both typed the exact same prompt, you wouldn't get the exact same answer.[0, 1] [0] https://kagi.com/assistant/8f4cb048-3688-40f0-88b3-931286f8a... [1] https://kagi.com/assistant/4e16664b-43d6-4b84-a256-c038b1534...

We have a work enterprise GPT account across the company.

How does that explain what you observed?

The only way I can understand that as an explanation is if your entire company can see each other's chats, and so she clicked yours and read the response you got. Is that what you're saying?

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#218

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #198
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far my experience is that unless you subscribe to the general narrative of the platform, the discover algorithm punishes you with directing the mob your way. I had two of my Bluesky posts on AI being attacked by all kinds of random people which in turn has also lead to some of those folks sending me emails and dragging some of my lobster and hackernews comments into online discourse. A not particularly enjoyable e…

I saw that, and I'm sorry it happened. I thought both the response to your original post and the resulting backlash to both you and everyone who engaged with you sincerely were absurd. I think that because of atproto you have the flexibility to create a social media experience where that sort of thing cannot happen, but I also understand why you in particular would be put off from the whole thing.

I don’t think this is a technical problem but a social problem. I think the audience defines itself by being the antithesis to Twitter instead of being a well balanced one.

I was pretty optimistic in the beginning but Bluesky doesn’t have organic growth and those who hang out there, are the core audience that wants to be there because of what the platform represents. But that also means rejection of a lot of things such AI.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#219

Post by BoredomIsFun »

ashton314 wrote: post #146
bachittle wrote: post #135

If you give an LLM enough context, it writes in your voice. But it requires using an intelligent model, and very thoughtful context development. Most people don't do this because it requires effort, and one could argue maybe even more effort than just writing the damn thing yourself. It's like trying to teach a human, or anyone, how to talk like you: very hard because it requires at worst your entire life story.

* it writes in an imitation of your voice.

Why does this even matter? If it can say something more eloquently, in less stilted way something what I wanted to say, adding some interesting nuance on the way, while still sounding close to me - why not? I meanwhile, can learn one-two rhetorical tricks from LLMs reading the result.

Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs

#220

Post by jeromegv »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #29
ricardo81 wrote: post #6

I deleted my Facebook account a couple of years ago and my Twitter one yesterday. It's not just LLMs, it's how the algorithms promote engagement. i.e. rage bait, videos with obvious inaccuracies etc. Who gets rewarded, the content creators and the platform. Engaging with it just seems to accentuate the problem. There needs to be algorithms that promote cohorts and individuals preferences. Just because I said to someo…

I know that some folks dislike it, but Bluesky and atproto in particular have provided the perfect tools to achieve this. There are some people, largely those who migrated from Twitter, who mostly treat Bluesky like a all-liberal version of Twitter, which results in a predictably toxic experience, like bizarro-world Twitter. But the future of a less toxic social media is in there, if we want it. I've created my own f…

I enjoy Mastodon a lot. Ad-free, algo-free. I choose what goes in my feed, I do get exposed to external viewpoints by people boosts (aka re-tweets) and i follow hashtags (to get content from people I do not know). But it's extremely peaceful, spam and bots are rare and get flagged quickly. There's a good ecosystem of mobile apps. I can follow a few Bluesky people through a bridge between platforms and they can follow me too.

That's truly all I need.

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