[Sometime in the near future]
The world's starved for authenticity. The last original tweet crowned a God... then killed the kid chasing that same high. Trillionaires run continent-wide data centers, endlessly spinning up agents that hire cheap physical labor to scavenge the world for any spark of novelty. The major faith is an LLM cult forecasting the turning of the last stone. The rest of us choke on recycled ad slop.
We're losing our voice to LLMs
351–360 of 425 posts
Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs
#352If 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.
Something that freaked me out a little bit is that I've now written enough online (i.e.: HN comments) that the top models know my voice already and can imitate it on request without having to be fed any additional context.
There's a data centre somewhere in the US running additions and multiplications through a block of numbers that has captured my voice.
Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs
#353The potentially bitter pill to swallow here is that we all need to get better at critical thinking.
There's a lot of talk over whether LLMs make discourse 'better' or 'worse', with very little attention given to the crisis we were having with online discourse before they came around. Edelman was astroturfing long before GPT. Fox 'news' and the spectrum of BS between them and the NYT (arranged by how sophisticated they considered their respective pools of rubes to be) have always, always been propaganda machines and PR firms at heart wearing the skin of journalism like buffalo bill.
We have needed to learn to think critically for a very long time.
Consider this; if you are capable of reading between the lines, and dealing with what you read or hear on the merits of the thoughts contained therein, then how are you vulnerable to slop? If it was written by an AI (or a reporter, or some rando on the internet) but contains ideas that you can turn over and understand critically for yourself, is it still slop? If it's dumb and it works, it's not dumb.
I'm not even remotely suggesting that AI will usher in a flood of good ideas. No, it's going to be used to pump propaganda and disseminate bullshit at massive scale (and perhaps occasionally help develop good ideas).
We need to inoculate ourselves against bullshit, as a society and a culture. Be a skeptic. Ironnman arguments against your beliefs. Be ready to bench test ideas when you hear them and make it difficult for nonsense to flourish. It is (and has been) high time to get loud about critical thinking.
Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, there needs to be control over the algorithms that get used. You ought to be able to tune it. There needs to be a Google fuu equivalent for social media. Or, instead of one platform one algorithm, let users define the algorithm to a certain degree, using llms to help with that and then you can allow others to access your algorithms too. Asking for someone Facebook to tweak the algorithm is not going to help imo.
IMO there should not be an algorithm. You should just get what you have subscribed to, with whatever filters you have defined. There are better and worse algorithms but I think the meat of the rot is the expectation of an algorithm determining 90% of what you see.
Dude that's an algorithm.
Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean there's still Grok... surely that gives may safety teams heartburn. But I find this take interesting. The brewing of a new kind of counter culture that forces humans to express themselves creatively. Hopefully it doesn't get too radical.
Grok still has that annoying tone, it just uses it to say weird things.
Grok sounds like the "how do you do fellow kids" meme. It just sounds cringe.
Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
>How LLMs standardize communication is the same way there was a standardization in empires expanding (cultural), book printing (language), the industrial revolution (power loom, factories, assembly procedures, etc). Explain to me how "book printing" of the past "standardized communication" in the same way as LLMs are criticized for homogenizing language.
I'm taking "same way" to be read as "authoritative", whether de facto or de jure. Basically by dint of people using what's provided instead of coming up with their own. Everyone has the same few dictionary spellings (that are now programmed into our computers). Even worse (from a heterogeneity perspective), everyone also has the same few grammar books. As examples: How often do you see American English users write "c…
Right, prior to "dictionary-ization" you could have variant spellings etc. You're correct about prescription. It's an interesting idea, how to understand authority in these contexts.
Transitions in media and writing - you could take Charlemagne's attempts to standardize HRE script in the administrative state as a sort of "standardization of Empire," the development of English as the web's lingua franca, the role of the Stationers' co. during the development of early printed media as standardization of surveillance, the history of copyright law, all that - were in many cases state power responding to their inability to control both the infrastructure and content of communication. We're not afraid a chatbot is going to use an unrecognizable typeface in communication with another chatbot, or publish dissident pamphlets and spread them to other chatbots. We're afraid our literate practices will atrophy from outsourcing. That we start to communicate like the chatbot.
Put it this way: if you had everyone learn the five-paragraph essay style, you'd have the same lack of voice; and, boy, did "we" (US) ever get that exact consequence. You raise an interesting point about "standards" in that respect because that's a specific ideological, state-driven attempt to prioritize and measure skills. But if you tell students to write without that specific priority, they lose all sense of writing. So it's destructive, there's an expressive issue there. So, yeah, as you say: "even worse." They forget a skill they never had.
I'm just wondering, I guess, about the harm. The past has these examples of standardization in the West and if we say "well this is just another case of a historically prescriptivist tendency in writing" I guess that's fine, but we don't really look at these examples as beneficial or with a shrug. We don't even want everybody writing like EB White , we certainly don't want everybody writing like Elon Musk.
Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs
#357There's something unique about art and writing where we just don't want to see computers do it As soon as I know something is written by AI I tune out. I don't care how good it is - I'm not interested if a person didn't go through the process of writing it
If you think about how an LLM works, it’s rounds off the outliers in its training data so the result is sort of averaged and homogenized. Art and writing are an expression of the very thing that LLMs discard - our unique qualities, our outlying quirks, that make us more than just another human.
Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs
#358I actually think we’re overestimating how much of "losing our voice" is caused by LLMs. Even before LLMs, we were doing the same tweet-sized takes, the same medium-style blog posts and the same corporate tone. Ironically, LLMs might end up forcing us back toward more distinct voices because sameness has become the default background.
You are right. An observation, even before the rise of LLMs, was that computers were becoming more human-like and humans were acting more like machines
The sculpting force of algorithms is bite sized zingers, hot takes, ragebait, and playing to the analytics
Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs
#359I actually think we’re overestimating how much of "losing our voice" is caused by LLMs. Even before LLMs, we were doing the same tweet-sized takes, the same medium-style blog posts and the same corporate tone. Ironically, LLMs might end up forcing us back toward more distinct voices because sameness has become the default background.
My theory is that LLMs are accelerating [online] radicalization by commoditizing bland, HR-approved opinions. If you want to sound like a human on the internet, for better or for worse the easiest way is to say something that would make Anthropic’s safety team have a heart attack.
Bullshit. You can just use ANY abliterated model or non-safety aligned model. People have popularized ‘hard r or you’re hardware’ for a while now, but any self hosted LLM that’s de-aligned will gladly say whatever.
People believe this and continue to get fooled by LLMs all day.
Re: We're losing our voice to LLMs
#360I actually think we’re overestimating how much of "losing our voice" is caused by LLMs. Even before LLMs, we were doing the same tweet-sized takes, the same medium-style blog posts and the same corporate tone. Ironically, LLMs might end up forcing us back toward more distinct voices because sameness has become the default background.
You are right. An observation, even before the rise of LLMs, was that computers were becoming more human-like and humans were acting more like machines The sculpting force of algorithms is bite sized zingers, hot takes, ragebait, and playing to the analytics
Bingo. Your message is only what the medium promotes.