Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 419 posts

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#311

Post by plopilop »

imchillyb wrote: post #299
numbsafari wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are the same people that insist we arm elementary school teachers and expect those teachers to someday pull the trigger on a child instead of having proper gun laws. There is no irony.

When have gun laws ever stopped a shooting? When have criminals EVER followed law, code, rules, or even a suggestion from their fellow citizens? Believing laws deter criminals is almost criminally insane and beggars all logic. After all of the accumulated evidence against your belief, you still believe laws deter criminality. The death penalty doesn’t deter criminals. How could words possibly have an effect?

> When have gun laws ever stopped a shooting?

Have you heard of Australia? https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2018/03/13/gun-l...

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#312

Post by necovek »

Ekaros wrote: post #184
0x1062 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is a tool, and tool use is not lazy.

For learning it can very well be. And also it really depends on the tool and task. Calculator is fine tool. But symbolic solver might be a few steps too far. If you don't already understand the process. And possibly the start and end points. Problem with AI is that it is often black box tool. And not even deterministic one.

AI as applied today is pretty deterministic. It does get retrained and tuned often in most common applications like ChatGPT, but without any changes, you should expect a deterministic answer.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#313

Post by hollowturtle »

pinoy420 wrote: post #104
hollowturtle wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…

You sound like the sort of person of old who “Why would you use the internet. Look in an encyclopaedia. ‘Google it’ is just lazy” This trope is unbecoming of anyone sensible.

That's not what my comment implies. I'm just saying that relying solely on LLMs makes you lazy, like relying just on google/stackoverflow whatever, it doesn't shift you from a resource that can be layed off to a resource that can't. You must know your art, and use the tools wisely

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#315

Post by robertlagrant »

latexr wrote: post #166
radu_floricica wrote: post #115

I'll be the contrarian and say that I don't find anything wrong with this, and if I were a candidate I'd simply take this as useful information for the application process. They do encourage use of AI, but they're asking nicely to write my own texts for the application - that's a reasonable request, and I'd have nothing against complying. sshine reply above is coming from a very conflictual mindset. "Can I still use…

> I don't find anything wrong with this It’s not about being wrong, it’s about being ironic. We have LLMs shoved down our throats as this new way to communicate—we are encouraged to ask them to make our writing “friendlier” or “more professional”—and then one of the companies creating such a tool asks the very people most interested in it to not use it for the exact purpose we’ve been told it’s good at. They are aski…

> We have LLMs shoved down our throats as this new way to communicate

I don't think that's true at all.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#317

Post by myfonj »

einsteinx2 wrote: post #264
myfonj wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that this quote really contains "sender" where "recipient" was intended, but it had absolutely no impact on any reader. (I even asked Claude and ChatGPT if they noticed anything strange in the sentence, and both needed additional prompting to spot that mistake.) https://x.com/sama/status/1631394688384270336 Thanks for this heads-up, by the way, I've missed this particular tweet, but eventually got into ex…

Wow I completely didn’t notice that until I read your comment. My brain must have automatically filled in the correct word. I had to go back and re-read it to confirm.

Well English is not my first language, so I probably tend to go through text more slowly and/or scan the text differently, so I have higher chance stumbling upon these oddities. (I can confirm that sometimes I see unexpected amount of misspelt homophones or usage of strangely related words.) Seeing two distinct LLM chats gloss over this particular nuance in almost identical way was really interesting.

Grok, on the other hand, has absolutely no problem with concept of sender both expanding and compressing the message, and with absence of recipient. Even after super-painstaking discussion, where Grok identified the strange absence of the "recipient", when I asked him to correct the sentence, he simply changed the word "sender" to the word "themselves":

> something very strange about people writing bullet points, having ChatGPT expand it to a polite email, sending it, and *themselves* using ChatGPT to condense it into the key bullet points

https://x.com/i/grok/share/mwFR2jQ9MS6uVemgiHokJKiBd (cringe/pain warning)

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#319

Post by robertlagrant »

blagie wrote: post #260
wepple wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huge miss on the gun analogy. The likes of NRA are pushing for 50-state constitutional carry. Everyone has a gun on their person with no licensing requirements. Yet at the NRA conference they ban guns. There’s probably actually some other hidden factor though, like the venue not allowing it. Edit: FWIW those late night TV shows are nothing but rage bait low brow “comedy” that divides the country. But the above remain…

> Everyone has a gun on their person with no licensing requirements. Yet at the NRA conference they ban guns. That's not what the NRA is pushing for, any more than there are Democrats pushing for mandatory sex changes for all kids (yes, this is cited on similar right-wing comedy shows, and individuals on the right believe it). Pushing for a right doesn't mean 100% of the population will exercise that right. And yes,…

> yes, this is cited on similar right-wing comedy shows, and individuals on the right believe it

Can you give an example? Of course you can find 2 people in the US who believe it, and they held 2 comedy shows where it was said, and it's technically true, but I don't think I've ever seen anything like this said.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#320

Post by robertlagrant »

plopilop wrote: post #311
imchillyb wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When have gun laws ever stopped a shooting? When have criminals EVER followed law, code, rules, or even a suggestion from their fellow citizens? Believing laws deter criminals is almost criminally insane and beggars all logic. After all of the accumulated evidence against your belief, you still believe laws deter criminality. The death penalty doesn’t deter criminals. How could words possibly have an effect?

> When have gun laws ever stopped a shooting? Have you heard of Australia? https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2018/03/13/gun-l...

Australia has no land borders. It's one of the easiest places to secure, and thus it makes sense to do so.
Post reply on HN