inigyou
5 hours ago
LLMs are writing as well as humans for people who think writing words is the goal. Printing presses also write words better than humans. LLMs are solving the problem one layer higher than printing presses, but still several layers down from the top.
Note that LLMs aren't useless, since they have other strengths which can make them equal or better than humans in certain applications. For instance, they can tirelessly review code for silly mistakes, making them useful in cybersecurity.
bsenftner
4 hours ago
Finally, someone else understands that writing is not the goal, the entire point of all of this is our communications between one another and this market for narrative stories is a nice departure and it does convey important knowledge and moral lessons that larger society needs. But it is an indirection, an indirection to the mission of communicating solutions to how to live as a human and that is why we care, why the interest persists despite lifetimes of narrative dreck. We are adrift without instructions, and no religions are not the instructions.
docfort
14 minutes ago
I think the first goal of writing is to talk to yourself. Without an external, unchanging scratchpad, most people cannot keep their thoughts truly straight. It can feel otherwise, but trying to write something about any tricky topic even a few pages in length can take a long time to be self-consistent. Clarifying it takes even longer, especially when you intend to share it. Writing as thinking is definitely a thing. I believe it’s the trickiest part of understanding how such interesting things pop out of a language model trained to predict the next token and rewarded with pleasing sequences. Since it is not thinking, it proves that certain sentences (most?) can be generated thoughtlessly.
pibaker
35 minutes ago
I'd like to live in a world where people only make art to serve a higher purpose. But we don't live in that world and never did. Before we had slop we had pulp — formulaic, low effort writing full of cliches of romance, lust, crime and adventure broke college students could churn out en masse to make a living.
I'd also recommend having a look at the books published by this article's author. I will admit that I have never read nor heard of any of them. But come on, just look at the books published covers and the way the author introduced them and tell me that they are not industrial products engineered for mass commercial appeal.
bayindirh
3 hours ago
Many of us understood that, and tried to tell it over and over. My keyboard is worn, my mind is numb, my soul is weary from typing/telling that the output is not the aim, but the content it carries, the substance it holds.
Yet a very vocal group advocates integrating LLMs into every aspect of their lives, and the other group watch in dismay.
On the other hand, I used a sentence form used by LLMs in a comment during a morning-brain moment, and an angry mob tried to crucify me with torches and pitchforks.
Many people love to generate text with LLMs, but most of same crowd apparently hates to read LLM output. An interesting phenomenon.
inigyou
3 hours ago
It must be a distinction between engineer-type brains and leader-type brains. If you're focused on social status climbing, the fact that you produced a report, and the length of that report, is far more important than whether the contents of the report have any relation to reality beyond the surface level. This is true if you're trying to get VC funding as well. It's even in institutional academia, as seen by the Sokal affair.
Aurornis
2 hours ago
> is far more important than whether the contents of the report have any relation to reality beyond the surface level.
This only works in broken companies where leadership is already overrun with other status climbers.
If someone tries this trick at a functional company and is discovered, their reputation takes a huge hit that can take years to overcome, if ever.
At high performing companies reputation is everything. It can be a real problem to even get people to work on difficult or risky problems because they’re afraid of having a failure attached to their reputation.
Throwing unreviewed LLM slop around would be a reputation death sentence if your peers are good at what they do, because by now we all know that it’s easy to generate long reports with LLMs. The secret is out and anyone who follows technology knows it.
There are some companies where you can LLM report-slop your way to prestige. Those are not companies you want to stay at.
zbentley
31 minutes ago
> This only works in broken companies
The promotion of LLMs is, I believe, basically a referendum on how many companies are broken in that way. So far, the adoption statistics are looking like it’s most of them.
actionfromafar
2 hours ago
I thought for a second you were going the opposite way with the brain thing. Good leaders are very much concerned with accurate and timely communication.
It can be a very engineer thing to point at a vanilla Doxygen dump and call that thing "documentation".
skydhash
an hour ago
It is documentation. This week, I looked at the Laravel API docs[0], just as much as I looked at the framework guide[1]. It all depends on the question you have and the answer you need.
It's like the car manual (Do they still ship with one?) where every detail is laid out. It's not important for daily driving, but when you to fix an electrical problem, that's the reference you need.
bayindirh
3 hours ago
To be frank, I neither live/work in an environment or live for "climbing" anything, so fluffware is not something I produce or understand.
On the other hand, I have friends who play that game, and I don't talk with most of them, because their life views and mental states continually drift to a state which makes no sense whatsoever for me, so we grow apart.
b112
2 hours ago
Eventually, enough engineers will breed with enough engineers, that we'll be a different species, incapable of communicating with weirdo humanity.
bsenftner
2 hours ago
You are describing the bifurcation of society that is the moral lesson of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. The Morlocks are the scientific and engineering "gender" (so to speak) of the human race while the Eloki are the child-like humans kept around because they are the food the Morlocks consume to survive in that future.
anon373839
2 hours ago
> but the content it carries, the substance it holds.
It's even more than that, I think. It's the intent to reach out and transfer to others something that you experience internally. It's a sense of purpose motivating that content and substance to be packaged up and communicated in the first place.
Sometimes LLMs will slip up and say things like, "I see this working with people all the time." And it REALLY breaks the illusion that the text they extrude means anything. Because obviously there is no "I" and no, the LLM does not have this autobiographical memory the text is simulating.
Xirdus
an hour ago
My wife uses ChatGPT a lot for advice on child development and parenting in general. Every so often, it says things like "in my experience, what I've noticed works best is..."
boogieknite
an hour ago
my coworker presented a 93 page pdf for a project plan entirely created by $230 of Claude's deep learning. i hope i wasnt too mean while asking him variations of "what now? what do i do with this?" the answer is obvious: read it. but so much of it covers problems which are already solved and my coworker clearly hasnt considered at all
point is: maybe llm output is best not shared. maybe, like a dream, the only audience who can appreciate the content of the writing is the first party
bee_rider
an hour ago
Having made the mistake of writing a couple of them, I’m pretty sure the only uses of non-fiction documents longer than ~30 pages is
* As a reference; people can look look up just the algorithm they want
* As a token that says “I’ve thought about this problem”
(The former is somewhat a subset of the latter. All of the stuff that they didn’t read when they use the work as reference is there to provide them confidence that the algorithm the plucked out of the thing had some thought behind it).
owl57
3 hours ago
> Many people love to generate text with LLMs, but most of same crowd apparently hates to read LLM output. An interesting phenomenon.
Are you sure it's the same people? I feel the opposite: it's the same people who happily read tons of LLM output themselves and send some of it to others.
Earw0rm
2 hours ago
Most people love to drive, but hate to be stuck in traffic. Or for the countryside to be all freeways and the city to be all parking lots.
It's not the exact same asymmetry, but there are parallels.
Tarq0n
3 hours ago
Sometimes the medium is the message though. Especially in literature, prose matters. It's not just about what is said but also how.
This applies even in "low" art. AI generated imagery from mainstream models tends to be so ugly it detracts from effectively communicating what the prompter intended.
bayindirh
2 hours ago
I don't we disagree a little bit, I think. Content and substance also contains "how" alongside "what". At least that was my intention.
I stopped sharing my photos publicly to stop supplying training data for image generation models. I don't want to feed that machine.
cgio
2 hours ago
No one likes generating content. Many like generating income or status. It is a new era. The era of curation. I would predict shorter and weirder stories and meme style communication patterns outside normal syntax. Poetry e.g. is replicable but not redoable. I am ambitious we are to see the best writing ever soon.
bayindirh
2 hours ago
> No one likes generating content.
Oh no. I see the contrary.
One of my friends recently stated (paraphrased):
- Since I can generate code, writing it feels mundane now. I don't write code anymore.
And they continued how they replace almost everything they do with LLMs.I have seen people who never think but spend all their days querying LLMs for everything. Docs, help, howtos, system administration, coding...
What I see is an incentive for less work, less effort. Not income or status. They don't spend their "saved" time, if there's any, for personal activities or self-improvement either. They just do things with less effort, and just live as they lived before.
It's brain numbing.
> I would predict shorter and weirder stories and meme style communication patterns outside normal syntax.
I don't share the same sentiment, yet I don't have idea what to expect. It has to get darker to get brighter again.
We're just starting.
tempest_
3 hours ago
It is very weird. 6 months ago I generated some documentation for a service that was largely undocumented. When it was done my only thought was "who is this for?" Is any one going to actually read this or are they just going to ask the LLM? If someone didnt write it, why would I read it? It just becomes something to pipe into the context for the next person. It seems though a lot of people don't have this experience, its like they think they are the only ones with access to this technology.
Additionally I am so, so ,so sick of reading claudes overly wordy technical writing ish bullshit. Its exhausting trying to find the fuck ups or hidden assumptions in the pages of text it produces for everything.
Every time I try and search for ways to make it stop I just find people trying to save tokens which I don't give a shit about. I just want it to communicate things to me without having to constantly read 4 paragraphs, dump the context or fork it or start a new session so it "remembers" or re-weights that is was told to be concise and terse in like 7 different places. Maybe I am using it wrong.
bayindirh
2 hours ago
In the rare occasion I use LLMs, I always add at least one of the following:
- Do not include opinions, just official documentation.
- Add all references you have used as a bibliography section at the end.
Then I skim the result, and jump to the references it has given. I don't have time for other way.zbentley
29 minutes ago
You have reinvented the search engine.
That’s not meant to be glib; Google and friends are pretty trash now.
projektfu
3 hours ago
For my medical notes assistant I had to set a global "write in a telegraphic, minimal style" because it was fluffing up every aspect of the notes. Nobody wants to read that BS and it's impossible to find information in a series of walls of text.
dgfl
2 hours ago
It can also go the other way. It outputs a paragraph so full of telegraphic technobabble that it’s just unreadable, inventing new jargon every other sentence, using terminology invented in its thinking stream and never explained. And when it combines the two issues and it outputs 4 pages of technobabble, it gets just exhausting to read. Paradoxically, given that 2 years ago everyone was using LLMs to summarize web pages, their ability to condense text (including their own thought stream) is still lackluster. I dream of some post-processing diffusion optimizer just condensing all of their slop away. Until then, I just tell it to _avoid_ telegraphic and newspaper-title speech and to output one or two paragraphs of prose only.
b112
2 hours ago
I wonder if reading cooking recipe sites in training contributed to this.
9 pages about how it felt to be a kid eating the dish, for 7 ingredients and a one line recipe.
ryandrake
an hour ago
To be fair, LLMs didn't really change this that much: Throughout my career, I've been generating docs that nobody is going to read, only because some process somewhere says "In order to get engineering approval to commence work, an Engineering Risks Document (ERD) must be produced." Everyone knows that nobody reads these, but someone with a rubber stamp checks to see that the doc exists and it looks sufficiently long, and then he stamps the stamp. LLMs just make producing this shit faster.
jtbayly
4 hours ago
And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.
smalltorch
3 hours ago
Im curious what you mean by this
inigyou
2 hours ago
In the beginning were the Words, and the Words made the world. I am the Words—the Words are everything. Where the Words end, the world ends. You cannot go forward in the absence of space. Repeat.
harimau777
3 hours ago
They are quoting John 1:14. At the beginning of his book, John describes Jesus as being the personified word of God. That was likely an early example of the influence of Neo Platonism on Christianity.
smalltorch
3 hours ago
Yes but curious GP's thoughts on comparing LLM writing to the reference and how it relates to the topic
xorcist
3 hours ago
Right. LLMs are text production machines.
You can also view them as data expansion tools. They expand an input to an arbitrary long text. That text contains roughly the same amount of information as was contained in the input to begin with.
This is not very useful unless your work is content production. More useful is when the output length is shorter than the input. Then it is a (lossy) data compression tool. These are, as we all know, very useful for images and sound but now we have them for text too.
sparsesignal
3 hours ago
This assumes one-shot generation. I don't use it that way, and I don't think many people who find it useful do.
I use it as a colleague I'm drafting with. I'll ask how a sentence lands, tell it to make a paragraph more friendly or more dramatic, have it argue against a point I'm making. The piece comes together over many turns, and the information arriving in each turn is mine — it's not expanding one prompt, it's helping me converge on something.
The information-content framing also proves too much: a copy editor adds no information either. Neither does a translator, or a ghostwriter. What they add is form, and form is most of what makes writing good or bad.
skybrian
3 hours ago
I agree that the output is more likely to be valuable when it’s shorter than the input. And when they use tools to do research and try things, it can be a lot of input that comes from all sorts of places.
DarkUranium
3 hours ago
I really hate the whole thing about companies promoting using LLMs to change one-liner emails into this long multi-paragraph thing that ends up saying almost nothing ... just wasting everyone's time in reading them (with an extra sprinkling of hallucinations).
xorcist
3 hours ago
I believe you are supposed to use an LLM on the receiving side to compress them again.
This is supposed to help our economic growth during the coming decade.
Xirdus
an hour ago
In webcomic form: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
aklemm
2 hours ago
/s I hope
inigyou
2 hours ago
What part of it do you think was sarcastic? Economic growth is measured by the resources humanity wastes.
ReptileMan
2 hours ago
>Right. LLMs are text production machines.
I use them as text consumption machines. They read and watch a lot of the books and movies i have no time to. And from the TLDR I decide whether the full thing is worth watching.
b112
2 hours ago
That is what humans are for!! Ask people!
There is no way a summary of these things fron an LLM has the correct context.
(not really frustrated at you, as much as where society is going)
ReptileMan
2 hours ago
That is not how it works because of how bloated everything is. There is rarely a movie, book or series lately that are not 2 times longer than needed. So you are forced to go for aggressive recaps.
Most of the non pulp books published - contain at least two times as many pages as needed for the story or narrative.
The information density in the modern world is absurdly low.
b112
21 minutes ago
Yes, I agree on modern trends for that. There are some modern authors not too bad in that respect, but it may be why I find older sci-fi books more appealing.
danaris
6 minutes ago
> LLMs are writing as well as humans for people who think writing words is the goal.
Only if what you mean by this is "for people who think padding a word count is the goal".
LLMs absolutely do not write well, by human standards.
senordevnyc
3 hours ago
He talks about this in TFA:
Yo, this blog post could’ve been a freakin’ prompt. I have years and years of blogging for an AI to learn from, and over 20 novels, and tons of short stories. One prompt, and all this spills out. And if your goal is a blog post, you’re gonna love this era. If your goal is the joy of thinking in words, nothing has changed. So this is the real part, right here: Doing a thing for the love of the thing is no different than it ever was. The problem is, there aren’t many people for whom this applies.
enraged_camel
an hour ago
Yep. I love it when someone doesn't read the whole article, posts a takedown and it gets voted to the top of the discussion.
MichaelZuo
4 hours ago
Huh that is an interesting metaphor. A next higher layer printing press?
mwigdahl
4 hours ago
I don't buy it, although I agree with GP's larger point about other strengths.
Printing presses are about exact duplication of writing. The internet is a higher layer printing press. LLMs substitute for (some of) the human effort of producing the text that a printing press or the internet can then replicate.
estimator7292
4 hours ago
Allow me to offer a minor reframing: printing presses aren't about duplicating writing. The printing press exists to mass produce text regardless of how or where the content of the text was produced.
LLMs likewise are text production machines. They don't produce writing, they produce text. Text without writing is what we call slop in the modern parlance.
LLMs are literally throwing random dice into a printing press and making a thousand copies that you then try to huck on the street as if it were a real newspaper.
inigyou
4 hours ago
You are shadowbanned and have been writing mostly into the void for the last three months.
DarkUranium
3 hours ago
I'm confused, how can I see it, for example?
marcosdumay
3 hours ago
Looks to me that the ban was reversed at some point. The GP's comments are quite reachable.
inigyou
3 hours ago
Enable showdead and scroll through their history
marcosdumay
27 minutes ago
They have a lot of dead comments, and their recent comments are all non-dead.
Either people are vouching for those again and again, or the ban was lifted at some point. I don't really know how this works here, but the first option seems unlikely to me.
shmeeed
3 hours ago
Strangely, I'm still seeing the comment. How does that work?
inigyou
3 hours ago
A user with enough reputation and who has enabled the option to view censored comments can vouch for a censored comment, restoring it.
rootusrootus
38 minutes ago
I wonder how that algorithm works. At the risk of discussing a bit of a taboo topic (are there rules against this? there might be...), I've never vouched for a comment and had it come alive. I have many times been the final nail in a comment where my flag caused it to die, but I have never seen the opposite with vouch.
mathisfun123
4 hours ago
> Printing presses are about exact duplication of writing.
maybe LLMs are seen to write as well as humans because most humans have poor reading comprehension skills? to wit: OP is using an analogy to make their point, where the components don't need to be an exact fit to make the point (ever heard the phrase "the map is not the territory"?)
palmotea
4 hours ago
> Huh that is an interesting metaphor. A next higher layer printing press?
A printing press that does the thinking for you.
dev0p
4 hours ago
A thinking press?
palmotea
4 hours ago
> A thinking press?
Soon you won't be doing anything. At best you'll just be a bag of meat attached to automated processes you don't understand in order to take legal liability for it.
Literally a scapegoat, except of a different species.
nntwozz
4 hours ago
WALL-E captured this sentiment.
inigyou
4 hours ago
What was the scapegoating in WALL-E?
skinfaxi
4 hours ago
That would be an interesting legal case. I would expect it to lead to negligence on the part of the employer for lack of training, etc rather than attach to the employee pressing the button.
TeMPOraL
3 hours ago
You get paid for having liability attach to you. Soon it may be the only thing you could be paid for.
skinfaxi
2 hours ago
Are employees usually liable for process-related issues? Like individual employees weren't liable for dispensing too-hot coffee but McDonalds was liable. Or how cops aren't liable in their individual capacity if it was a failure of training, etc.
inigyou
3 hours ago
Your job description won't say scapegoat - that would be too obvious. It'll be more like how Amazon drivers are forced to piss in jugs while driving.
nathias
4 hours ago
a great point, and I think a very rare one
p-e-w
4 hours ago
I’d be interested to know what you think the “several layers” above a system that solves open mathematical problems in an afternoon, and writes entire operating systems from scratch, are.
armchairhacker
4 hours ago
Figuring out what problems to solve or what features to include in the OS.
jvanderbot
4 hours ago
Go ask an LLM to "do something with 1M tokens".
rationalist
4 hours ago
I think that is a bad argument.
You could ask a human to "do something with 1M dollars" and get garbage too.
jvanderbot
4 hours ago
The point is that the deciding is the "higher layer." It's not that LLMs cannot, but LLMs as designed do not. They are not designed for free-ranging days off, they are designed to help us do things, and that makes them somewhere between us and published works.
It's no different than an editor standing between the author and a book, or a publisher, or a printing press. It's part of the process of idea realization, so it's just on that spectrum somewhere between book sale and author idea. (even though in another flipflop, that editor might be an author and now elevated to the premier deciding role). It's about how the tool fits, not what the tool is ultimately capable of.
So the analogy holds, just fine.
YurgenJurgensen
4 hours ago
This terrible argument comes up in relation to AI over and over again. I don’t care if you built a brain surgery robot that outperforms the average person at brain surgery, I care if you built a brain surgery robot that outperforms the average brain surgeon. Outperforming “a human” at a specialist task is still essentially worthless.
wolvesechoes
3 hours ago
> You could ask a human to "do something with 1M dollars" and get garbage too
At least the human's brain requires about 20 Watts to operate.
Cheap garbage is better than garbage requiring whole power plants nad billions of capital investment.
recursive
2 hours ago
And the human is human.
The idea that we'd have to justify the existence of humans relative to LLMs based on objective metrics sounds like it's leading in a bad direction. If the LLM gets their power budget down to nineteen watts, what does that mean for humans?
nancyminusone
an hour ago
Non sequitur. Neither most mathematicians nor Terry A. Davis are particularly well known for their literature abilities.
noah_buddy
4 hours ago
I think that the point he’s getting at is the human experience.
scronkfinkle
4 hours ago
> and writes entire operating systems from scratch
ehhhh, we're not really there. Not saying it's impossible to reach in the future but large tasks like this are still out of scope for LLM's beyond demoing toy applications. Impressive nonetheless, but I can't tell an LLM to reproduce microsoft word and have it give me a useful enough tool that doesn't contain an immense amount of bugs and require a human in the loop to replace it.
greengemz
3 hours ago
I would go as far as to say the LLM part has peaked.
To 1-shot MS Word will be possible only within some workspace designed for creating that kind of software. It will probably be saas style where you pay to export binaries or maybe some will take 30% if they become destinations for finding such software.
But I would bet other platforms are used for game dev, or for filmmaking.
Such that we still won’t have some super “model” that just does everything. The harnessing becomes architecture becomes software becomes user experience and expertise.
applfanboysbgon
4 hours ago
> writes entire operating systems from scratch
Yeah, yeah. Remind me how many people are using those operating systems? The ability of LLMs to produce dogshit software that nobody will ever use is truly unparalleled, but not especially world-changing.