LLMs seem already to be pretty good at translating, where you already have something fully written and are changing the language. It’s when they get rough ideas and fill in the gaps you get the empty prose they are known for.
I often use LLMs to translate from "shitty English" to "good English". The substance remains the same but it's nicer to read.
Writing is a way humans communicate ideas. It's not the only way humans communicate ideas. And now, it's not only humans who communicate ideas, we just saw with the OpenAI HuggingFace hack how AI agents were able to communicate amongst themselves by using various hacked websites to opportunistically write notes for later agents to use.
All that "X is a thing only humans do" type of circular definitions will buy you, is to expand the definition of what humanity is. And I doubt that's really what you think.
Similarly if Joe's contribution to his long form "idea" is a couple of bullet points, a program trained on flowery phrasing and a weighted average of everyone else's ideas isn't communicating Joe's thoughts on the topic, it's just adding words.
The debate on whether Claude actually thinks or not is orthogonal to the fact that outsourcing your "thought leadership" to it is avoiding thinking or leading. If I want to know how Wikipedia or Claude summarise wider human thought about the topic, I can find their websites thanks
And nor is an LLM generating text just "copy/pasting a Wikipedia article", you'd think people on HN would be smarter than that at least.
If all Joe Smith is going to do is cat $(which claude) to his LinkedIn, then he'll deserve the poor results he gets from it, but we shouldn't mistakenly say that this will be because LLMs simply cannot write. It would be just as dumb for Joe Smith to do with with a professional human ghostwriter.
Nonsense. I’m not sure whether this was ever an appropriate description of what LLMs do, but either way, they have obviously moved way, way beyond that.
I don’t like reading AI writing either but I’m sure that’s a transitory period. Single prompt text expansions are unlikely to be useful because they’re late-bindable. You could give the original to me and I might be able to understand better.
But a series of steering prompts with various sources brought in is a different story. At that point it’s just a question of whether the agent can put together good information and their current inability to do so is unlikely to mean an inherent problem.
Some kind of UI affordance for this might help: with the agent emitting tags that allow for auto-folding or expansion in a way that allows both concise text and exposition when required by the reader. Mechanical sympathy, but for code executing on a human: good old human sympathy if you will
I do think people own the output they produce regardless of the tools they use, and if they want to put crappy writing out there with their name on it, that's on them. Even if they do disclose that it was written by an LLM, they're still 100% responsible for the content.
And plenty of people have made mistakes that clearly indicate mindlessly accepting such a "correction" when it was wrong (as opposed to just making a typo, or genuinely lacking skill in English, which both generally look different); and it's historically been common to poke fun at that.
> or the fact that they used some autocomplete tool to produce code
Right, because there are really only two options: either it's effectively guaranteed to be what the user would have written by hand anyway, or it's unambiguously wrong and does the wrong thing.
Not at all comparable to LLM prose.
> and if they want to put crappy writing out there with their name on it, that's on them.
The problem is that people who don't care (and quite possibly have no real sense for crappy writing) are vastly more enabled by the technology than people who do.
> 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.
Do not give me LLM output unless you also give me the full prompt text.
[edit] I suspect the fact that people are often reticent to share their prompts says quite a lot about how and why they're using an LLM.
Umm the point is you won't know to ask this question in the first place, and even if you did, you wouldn't have any leverage to demand this because you're a peasant.
I might have smelled something suspicious before, but knowing for sure is worse.
That's not how i read the article. The author more-so claims that the proof of effort by a human was large part of the credibility to the writing; Proof that the author of the text has thought it through and come to their convulsions though effort and reflection, and spent effort articulating that into words they expect other humans to find insightful.
If i see LLM signs; did the author just rephrase with AI model or did a AI model content farm produce the whole post based on the prompt "write a inspiring linked-in post"?
Disclosure of LLM use is simply the author addressing the concern and building a case for why the article is worth reading.
Of course, with real books we do have the problem of ghostwriting, where an author willingly writes for a book that will be published under someone else's authorship. That may be where things end up here, with requirements to acknowledge sources, whether ghostwritten for you or written by others.
They treat it as "just another tool" to improve efficiency. Like using a drill instead of a screwdriver.
Then there's people who are so lazy they give LLMs instructions like, "write a LinkedIn post about how AI is changing the future of work for thumbnail consultants." That's when it moves from "translating your thoughts" to "writing for you."
I think the issue is that it can be hard to tell the difference. We need better terms for these things so we can differentiate use cases.
'Without disclosure' is about taking credit for work that isn't yours.
WP defines 'ghostwriter' as: "a person hired to write literary or journalistic works, speeches, or other texts that are credited to another person as the author."
Anyone could choose to go through life relying on a reputation manufactured from many lies. They might want to think about how hard that reputation will hit the ground, if it does.
They definitionally cannot, for the definitions implied in the argument. The point is that good writing is a thing humans are capable of doing because they are human.
> It's a sort of a claim that certain thoughts can be attributed to a human being when in fact they can't.
Yes. And this is a requirement of "good writing" as understood here.
If LLM writing improves to the point where they can infer the business (or other real world) context and serves the functional purpose of informing others as opposed to being an intellectually lazy piece being produced only for the purpose of being produced, then I’d be fine. It’s likely the author would need to spend some effort on the said piece of writing, regardless of how good the LLMs get good at writing.
Someone's actual writing (or talking) is a rich stream of information about who they are, their motives, their preferences, modes of persuasion, and so much more. Undetectable LLM writing essentially allows someone to assume another person's identity. That is not good for anyone except the person trying to pull off a "scam" of some sort, in the broadest sense of that term. It's bad for everyone else, and for society at large.
"Productivity" is not. It's only good for fake productivity. The consumers of the product will almost always be better off with you disclosing what the LLM did, and what you did.
There's also the problem that certain types of phrasing are perceived as effective, because they mark a pivotal point in the progress of the text and are, as such, used sparingly, but are now becoming everyday templates that incorporate whatever is available in the context. There is no way this passes the Turing test of a competent reader.
And there's yet another issue: in social research, there has been the concept of semantic position, indicated by deviation from the mean (or median). If you don't deviate from the mean, your semantic position is zero. There's simply no expression. In this sense, next token prediction really amounts to a desemantificiation of the context. There's really no sense in uttering any of these productions, no plausible motivation, other than for the purpose of raising you hand to be seen.
Every day I get more depressed thinking of what's happened to the supply of competent readers.
How do we make room for their use as a cognitive-prosthesis (if you will allow such framing) without losing humane-ness?
As a more nuanced case, someone could dictate a long rambling stream of thoughts full of contradictions to an LLM to transcribe and summarize, and then they could reflect on the summary and write the real thing themselves. That's like talking to someone about a subject and writing about it afterwards, and also not something I would really take issue with.
That's my partial answer to the cognitive prosthesis question: keep it off to the side as a tool to help you do the work. There are still many caveats here, and the more complex the demands you make of the LLM, the greater the risk of some kind of break down. For example, continuing the example in the previous paragraph, if I did have the rambling conversation with an actual person who helped me refine and clarify my thoughts, I have some kind of mental model for the dialogue partner that can help me correct for some biases. With an LLM, anything resembling a mental model I could have would be very far off the mark, so I would need to be aware that I can't treat its output the same way I would treat something written by a person.
(By the way, for myself I have a stricter rule: I would only use an LLM in a way that made me a better person independently of the LLM and not dependent on the LLM, and thus I don't use them at all. That's what I actually recommend, but I don't expect everyone to adopt that rule.)
My main problem with having the LLM just do your writing is that it's simply a misrepresentation. It's wrong to claim you wrote something unless you chose the words. I really empathize with the struggle of expressing oneself clearly, but there's just no getting around this. And to be clear this isn't something pedantic or just a technicality, since the act of formulating a thought in an actual human language with valid syntax does require a level of care and attention that simply is not there unless you do it yourself.
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.
Just watch an interview with a famous author. Or compare a legal brief to what court actually sounds like.
If you're using an LLM to tidy something up, that's one thing. If the LLM is your voice and is supplanting your knowledge, I might as well cut you out and talk to the LLM directly.
Jekill and Hyde vibes
I'm in the process of writing a pretty long essay that has taken a few months. I've written the first draft, and I'm almost done with the second draft, which incurred substantial revisions. At the end of the process, maybe no sentence will be something I would actually utter in person, but the writing is still something I created, and as such, it is a representation of who I am as a person. Had I used an LLM to do any of the writing, that would no longer be the case, and the writing would at best represent me as a person when the LLM is at my side, and at worst (and most likely) not really represent me at all.
The worst of this is with image/video AI models, where the results today, although still very imperfect, some people will still pretend like it’s awful and the worst thing they’ve ever seen. They refuse to admit the technology is at all impressive or making progress because they don’t like the technology.
I don’t like AI generated images and video either, but I can regrettably admit that the technology has gotten remarkably better over time.
In other words, the three questions of:
- is the technology good?
- does it produce aesthetically good outputs?
- do I like it and want to engage with it?
are all pretty independent.
That’s not the argument. The argument is “LLM’s tend to write the same way all the time regardless of who prompted it.” You can't call it “your writing” if you’re using the same tool millions of others are using that boils your idea down to the same reduction as everyone else’s.
Use an LLM to assist? Cool, go ahead. Prompt, ctrl-c, ctrl-v? Go fuck yourself. I can’t be expected to put more effort into figuring out your take than you out into communicating your take to me.
I would say it is certainly significantly more ok. There are two reasons reading AI-generated text sucks now:
1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself.
2. The prose style is horrible to read.
If we eliminate the second reason then it's definitely an improvement. (Although on the other hand the terrible prose can be quite a helpful indication that you're wasting your time reading slop, so maybe we shouldn't complain about it!)
You have no way of knowing what the input to the writing was. You're making the erroneous assumption that the person posting the article was a mouthbreathing spammer who used the prompt "write me an article on subject XYZ, make no mistakes!" and you could have supplied the same prompt.
Readers are making this connection from their own experience. All these tells just associate it with garbage.
In the before times, sending a formal document full of typos and errors would show you didn't bother to proofread, now having a doc full of lazy "LLMisms" also looks like you were too lazy to proofread.
1. Facts and processes. I just want to know something. I do not care if some Nerds for Nginx article is AI written.
2. Opinions and experiences. I want to know a human is writing because emotionally engaging with an AI isn’t building a stronger society - it’s increasing isolation.
3. In another front, I feel like the value of an AI story cannot be greater than the value of the inputs. If you wrote a two paragraph prompt and an LLM produced a 10 page story, the truth is, it’s only worth two paragraphs. That’s just a feeling, but as of now I don’t think the LLMs have any additional life experiences to draw on to increase the value of their storytelling. (I understand this is debatable, but still- what they offer is available to everyone for now; it is a baseline.)
> You're making the erroneous assumption that the person posting the article was a mouthbreathing spammer
It's unreasonable to expect other people to suppress their intuitive heuristics formed from the bait and switch of being subjected to endless LLM spam every day and blame them for not giving you a fair chance.