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I think you're missing the context, which isn't musing on what it is to be human and can machines think, but the purpose of Joe Smith's LinkedIn account expressing that he has ideas about X is to convey the message that Joe Smith is interested enough in X to venture an opinion on it, and Joe Smith has actually just set up an automated process to generate content without thinking about X, that perverts the purpose of communicating that Joe Smith is interested enough in X to propose the following ideas he been thinking about...

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

by mpyne9 hours ago|

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I get the context, but then the comment I'd replied to would have said that humans get better at communicating their ideas by writing their ideas on their own, rather than that writing is some kind of human-only mode of exposition. It's not.

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.